National Archives and Records Administration
	Life After the White House
	The Hoovers went back to live in the house they had built at Stanford. Hoover became chairman of the board of Boys' Clubs of America. He always had special concern for the children of the world, and he took special interest in the boys of the city streets. Hoover gave over 25 years of service to the Boys' Clubs. When war broke out in Europe as Hitler invaded Poland, Hoover as a private citizen, established the Polish Relief Commission. For two years the commission fed 300,000 children in the German occupied territory of Poland until the war stopped the private effort. After the United States entered the war in December 1941, Hoover and his relief committee were forced by the Allies to suspend operations. The Hoover Tower was dedicated at Stanford in 1941. It housed the Institution on War, Revolution and Peace which Hoover had founded in 1919. The tower held the largest collection in the world of documents on the Communist, Fascist, Nazi and Socialist revolutions. In January, 1944, Lou Hoover died from a heart attack. The Hoovers had been living in the Waldorf Astoria in New York City at this time. It was 1946 and postwar famine threatened Europe again. The President, Harry Truman, asked Herbert Hoover to head the Famine Emergency Commission. He would study the world's crisis and prepare a program to deal with it. Hoover traveled 35,000 miles through 38 countries in 57 days. Hoover organized the food of the world to sustain several hundred million people until the next harvest. He was once again working at a task on which he was the expert. In the spring of 1947, Congress asked Hoover to undertake a study of the reorganization of the executive branch of the federal government: to improve economy and efficiency of federal agencies, to get rid of overlapping bureaus and services, and to define the executive functions, services, and activities. The Hoover Commission spent 15 months in research and then presented a clearer picture of how the Federal Government should operate. It offered 280 detailed individual recommendations for change, many of which were implemented. President Eisenhower had Herbert Hoover undertake a second Hoover Commission. This time it considered the policies and functions of the Federal Government, what the government should and should not do. He spent the next years writing articles and books. On his 88th birthday the Hoover Presidential Library was dedicated in West Branch, Iowa. Herbert Hoover died on October 20, 1964. He had given 50 years of his life to service for humankind. "Being a politician is a poor profession. Being a public servant is a noble one." Quoted from Herbert Hoover On Growing Up: Letters from and to American Children; ed. by Timothy Walch, William Morrow &Co., 1990.
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National Archives and Records Administration hoover.webmaster@nara.gov Last updated: June 20, 2001