IN CHINA
When Chang Yen Mow, the new head of the new Department of Mines of the
new Chinese Government, began to look about for the foreigner who should
know much about mines and be honest, and who would therefore be a fit
man to occupy the new post of Director-General of Mines, he bethought
himself of an English group of mining men with whom he had once had some
business relations. The principal expert advisor of this group had been
the man who was now the head of the great London mining firm for which
Herbert Hoover was working, and working very successfully, in West
Australia. Chang applied to this group for a recommendation of a
suitable man for him. And this group in turn applied to the head of
Hoover's firm. Or, perhaps, Chang applied directly to the great London
mining man. The exact procedure, which is not very important, anyway, by
which the head of Hoover's firm came to have the opportunity of making
the recommendation, is a little obscure today. The important points in
the whole matter, however, which are not at all uncertain, are that he
did have it, and that he recommended Herbert Hoover, and that Chang Yen
Mow, acting on the recommendation, offered the place, through him, to
the youthful Quaker engineer, and, finally, that the competent and
confident boy of twenty-four, always ready for the newer, bigger thing,
promptly accepted it.
In two weeks after the cable offer and answer, a feverish fortnight
devoted to a rapid clearing up of things in Australia, Hoover was on his
way to London, to report personally to his employers about their own
affairs as well as to get some information about the new undertaking. He
wanted to find out before he got to China, if he could, something of
what would be expected of a Director-General of Mines of the Chinese
Empire. Perhaps he had in mind the possible necessity of "getting up" a
little special knowledge about Chinese mines and mining ways before he
tackled his new job, just as he had got up enough physiology in
thirty-six hours to help get him into Stanford University, and enough
typewriting in a week-end to fit him for entrance into Louis Janin's
office in San Francisco.
However, after two weeks in the metropolis, eight or nine days on the
Atlantic, two or three in New York, and five on the transcontinental
trains, he found himself again in California and ready to make from
there his second start to the far-away lands from which his loudest
calls seemed to come--ready, that is, except for one thing. He was now,
let us remember, at this beginning of the year 1899, not yet twenty-five
years old, not that by half a year, indeed, and a half year could mean,
as we have already seen, a great deal in his life. And he was a boy-man
with a record already behind him of achievement and a position already
in his hands of much responsibility and large salary. So he declared
that the time had now come for the carrying out of the decision he had
made in his college days of four years before. It was the little
matter, you will promptly guess, and guess correctly, of marrying the
girl of the geology department. He arrived in San Francisco the first of
February, 1899. He spent the next few days in Monterey, "the old Pacific
capital" of Stevenson's charming sketch, but of chief interest to Hoover
as the place where Lou Henry--that was her name--lived. And here they
were married at noon of Friday, February 10. At two o'clock they left
for San Francisco, and at noon the next day sailed for the empire of
China.
Into the sleepy, half Mexican, historic town on the curving sands of the
shores of the blue Bay of Monterey this swift, breathlessly swift, boy
engineer had come from distant Australia, by way of Marseilles and
London, had clutched up the beautiful daughter of the respected town
banker, and was now carrying her off to distant China, where she was to
live in all the state becoming the wife of the Director-General of Mines
of the Celestial Empire. It was a bit too much for the old Pacific
capital, which did not know--for it was not told--that the sudden
appearance of the meteor bridegroom had been preceded by many
astronomical warnings in the way of electric messages that came to the
prospective bride from Australia and London and New York. Anyway, it
wasn't quite fair to the town, which tries to maintain old Mexican
traditions, that go back to Spain, of a full assortment of festivities
incident to any proper marrying. But Monterey has long been reconciled
to this missed opportunity, and now reveals a just pride as the home
town of the woman who has played such an active role in the career of
her distinguished husband.
The hurrying couple, at least, had time for breath-taking--and
honeymoon--when once on board ship. For it is a month's voyaging from
San Francisco to China--or, at least, was then. They had for seat-mates
at table Frederick Palmer, the war correspondent, and wife, which was
the beginning of a friendship that still endures. And there were for
other interesting companions a secretary of our legation at Peking and
his wife, and a missionary pair who may or may not have survived the
Boxer massacres.
The work in China was at first rather simple. Mines, of course, there
were and had been for uncounted centuries. But what was needed by the
new Department was some sort of survey of the mineral resources and
mining possibilities of the Empire, and a tentative framing of a code of
mining laws, so that the new development of the mines of the country
which Chang hoped to initiate could be carried on to best advantage, and
in such a way that private enterprise could participate in it. For
centuries the mines had been Crown property and the ruler had simply let
them out directly, or through the viceroys, for either a stipulated
annual rental or for as much "squeeze" as could be wrung from the
lessees in any of several various ways. And there had to be some rental
or "squeeze" for each of the many officials that could get within arm's
length of the mining business. The tenure of the use of the mines by the
lessees was usually simply the period of the continued satisfaction of
the lessor.
All this had not made for any extensive new opening up of the country's
mineral resources, or for the scientific development of the mines
already long known. One could not afford to put much capital into
prospecting or into modernizing the mining methods when each improvement
simply meant either more rent or "squeeze," or the giving up of the
mine. So the ores were mined and the metals extracted from them by the
miners according to the methods of their ancestors as far back as
history or tradition went, and it was all done under a set of mining
laws as primitive as the mining methods themselves. There were enormous
possibilities of improvement. It would have been hard for any mining
engineer to do anything at all to the situation without improving it.
For Hoover, with his technical education in metallurgical processes, his
experience in handling various and difficult mining situations, and his
genius for organizing and systematizing, the opportunity was simply
unique. He plunged into the work of examining and planning and codifying
with the zest of a naturalist in an unexplored jungle. In the day time
he made his examination; at nights he studied the mining laws of all
time and all the world.
He built up a staff as rapidly as it could be put together and
correlated with the tasks before it. He had sent in advance for two or
three men he had worked with in America and for some of his most able
and dependable associates in West Australia, including Agnew, a mill
expert, and Newbery, a metallurgist, son of a famous geologist, both of
them devoted to "the Chief." That was Hoover's _sobriquet_ among his
early mining associates; just as it was later among the members of his
successive great war-time organizations. He has just naturally--not
artificially--always been "the Chief" among his co-workers and
associates.
His Caucasian staff of perhaps a dozen was greatly overshadowed in
number by his Chinese staff, composed chiefly of semitechnical
assistants, draftsmen, surveyors' assistants, interpreters, etc. A few
of the Chinese helpers had had foreign training; there was one from
Yale, for example, and another from Rose Polytechnic; the latter so
devoted to American baseball that he was greatly disappointed in the new
Director of Mines when he found he was not a baseball player. But he
thought better of him when he learned that he had at least managed his
college team. The staff had its headquarters in Tientsin, where were
also the principal laboratories for the mineralogists, assayers, and
chemists. Some of the men gave their time to the technical work, and
others were engaged in collecting and correlating everything that had
been published in the foreign languages about the geology and mines' of
China, while Chinese scholars hunted down and translated into English
all that had been printed in Chinese literature. But the Director and
most of his immediate experienced assistants were chiefly occupied with
the exploring expeditions into the interior and the examination of the
old mines and new prospects. Especially did some immediate attention
have to be given to the mines already being actually worked, for the
Minister let it be known that he expected the new Director to pay the
way of the Department as soon as possible from the increased proceeds of
the mines which were to arise from the magic touch of the foreign
experts.
These expeditions were elaborate affairs, contrasting strangely with
Hoover's earlier experiences in America and Australia. The Chinese
major-domo in charge insisted that the make-up and appearance of the
outfit should reflect the high estate of the Director of Mines, so that
every movement involved the organization of a veritable caravan of
ponies, mules, carts, men on foot, and sedan chairs carried by coolies.
These chairs were for the Director and his wife, who, however, would not
use them, preferring saddle horses. But the proud manager of the
expedition insisted that they be carried along, empty, to show the
admiring populace that even if the strange foreign potentates amazingly
preferred to ride in a rather common way on horseback they could at
least afford to have sedan chairs. Imagine a prospecting outfit in the
California Sierra or the West Australian bush with sedan chairs! And
there were cooks and valets and cot beds and folding chairs and mosquito
bed curtains and charcoal stoves and an array of pans and pots like
Oscar's in the Waldorf kitchens, and often a cavalry guard of
twenty-five or fifty men, superfluous but insistent and always hungry.
Whether the expedition found any mines or not it was at least an
impressive object lesson to the Celestial myriads that the new Imperial
Department of Mines knew how to hunt for them in proper style. When Mrs.
Hoover once remonstrated with one of the interpreters of the cavalcade
about such an unnecessary outfit, the answer was: "Mr. Hoover is such
expensive man to my country we cannot afford to let him die for want of
small things."
A similar state had to be lived up to in the Director's home in
Tientsin. The house was a large, four-square, wide-veranded affair, in
which a dozen to fifteen servants, carefully distinguished as "No. 1
Boy," "No. 2 Boy" and so on down the line, waited, according to their
own immemorial traditions, on the Director and his wife. These servants
had curious ways, and a curious language in the odd pidgin English that
enabled the door boy to announce that "the number one topside foreign
devil joss man have makee come," when the English Bishop called, and the
table boy to announce a dish of duckling as "one piecee duck pups," or
of chicken as "one piecee looster." The social scale among the few
foreign residents was very precisely defined, and the social life of the
foreign colony highly conventionalized, so that the unassuming,
practical-minded young engineer of the high title and social position
who was terribly bored--as he is today--by social rigmarole, and who was
thought rather queer by the conventional-minded small diplomats and
miscellaneous foreign residents because, as one of them put it, "he
always seems to be _thinking_," was glad to be out of all this as much
as possible and on the road, even if it had to be with the ludicrous
caravan of state. Sometimes even all the attempted comfort and
superfluous luxury of the caravan did not prevent the expedition from
having serious hardships and running into real danger. An expedition
across the great Gobi desert that lasted for thirty-nine days was
successfully accomplished only after hard battling with heat, hunger and
thirst, and even with hostile natives.
Some of the results expected from this imported miner were rather
startling. For instance, age-long rumor had it that the Emperor's
hunting park at Jehol overlay immensely valuable gold deposits. The
Minister intimated to the Director that he would like to know the real
facts about this as soon as possible. As the park lay in a
little-explored region of southern Manchuria and was a place of much
historical as well as geological interest, the Director decided to make
a personal examination of it. After the expedition had been out several
days, he was told that on the next they would come in sight of the Great
Royal Park. Accordingly on the next day the guide of the caravan took
him, with one or two of the Caucasian members of his staff and an
interpreter, off from the road the grand retinue was following, and by
winding paths up to a hill top which commanded a superb prospect.
"There," said the interpreter, with a wave of his hand toward the
stretching prospect of beautiful valleys, low broad hills and mountain
side, "there is the Hunting Park of Jehol." Then, turning complacently
to the Director of Mines, he asked, simply: "Is there gold beneath it?"
And interpreter and guide, and later, even more important officials,
were stupefied to learn that the wonderful imported man who knew all
about gold could not say offhand, from his vantage point, miles away,
whether there was gold under the Park or not. And, more disturbing
still, that he probably could not say anything about it at all without
actually tramping over the sacred soil and perhaps sacrilegiously
digging into it.
Such occasionally necessary confessions of incompetence made a little
trouble, but only a little. However much the under men lacked knowledge
about minerals and mines and how to find out about them, the head of the
Department, Chang, knew enough to know that if his young Director
confessed inability to meet certain demands it was because there was
more wrong with the demands than with the engineer. But the real fly in
the ointment soon began to make itself visible. It was not a
disillusionment on the part of the Chinese officials in connection with
their foreign expert, but a disillusionment on his part in regard to his
real position and opportunities for accomplishing something for China.
He began more and more clearly to realize that he could investigate and
advise as much as he liked but that he could really do, in his
understanding of doing, comparatively little. The modern West cannot
make over the immemorial East in a day or even a year.
Gradually the young engineer came to realize that while his examinations
and reports were all very welcome, and whatever he could suggest for
improvement in technical detail, resulting in immediate greater output
of the mines already working, was gladly accepted, there was no
willingness to accept advice leading to changes in administrative and
general organization matters. And to the modern engineer efficiency in
these matters is as much a part of successful mining as skilled digging
and good metallurgy. Suggestions looking toward getting more work out of
the men, or cutting down the payrolls by removing the thirty per cent of
the names on them that seemed to have no bodily attachments, were
frowned on. These things interfered with "squeeze," and "squeeze" was a
traditional part of Chinese mining. Foreign advisors and helpers were
all very well when they found gold, but not so well when they found
graft. A crisis was visible in the offing. But this particular crisis
did not arrive, for another larger and more serious one came more
swiftly on and arrived almost unheralded. It was the Boxer Uprising.
The outbreak found Hoover at Tientsin having but recently returned from
Pekin with Mrs. Hoover, and both just recovering from severe attacks of
influenza. If opportunity for thorough organizing of the mines of China
had failed him he now had full scope for organizing a military defense
of his home and wife and his many employees, foreign and native, for
Tientsin, for a month, was the scene of hot fighting. It was a besieged
household in a beleaguered city. Hoover could have gotten out with his
wife and few Caucasian assistants at the beginning of the trouble, but
he would not desert his few hundred Chinese helpers and their
families--and his wife would not desert him. So they staid on together
through all the rifle and shell fire and conflagrations of the Tientsin
siege, building and defending barricades of rice and sugar sacks,
organizing food and water supplies, and cheerfully "carrying on" in the
face of certain death, and worse, if the outnumbering fanatic Boxers
happened to win.
But there were occasional lighter incidents amid the many grave ones of
the fighting weeks. Mrs. Hoover tells one, her favorite story of those
days, in something like the following words. "We had a cow, famous and
influential in the community, which cow was the mother of a promising
calf. One day the cow was stolen and Mr. Hoover set out to find her.
With three or four friends and half a dozen attendant Chinese boys he
took out the tiny calf one night and by the light of a lantern led the
little orphan, bleating for its mother, about the streets of the town.
Finally, as they passed in front of the barracks of the German
contingent of the international defending army, there came, from within,
an answering moo, and Mr. Hoover, addressing the sentry, demanded his
cow. The sentry made no move to comply, but, summoning all his
_Woerterbuch_ English, countered with the inquiry: 'Is that the calf of
the cow inside?' Upon receiving an affirmative reply to his Ollendorff
question, he calmly declared, 'Also, then, calf outside must join itself
to cow inside.' And thereupon by aid of a suggestive manipulation of his
bayonet, he confiscated the calf, and sent Mr. Hoover home
empty-handed."
As one of the precursors of the Boxer affair Chang Yen Mow got into the
bad graces of the government, gave up his position and was forced to
flee from Pekin and take refuge in Tientsin. Even here he was dragged
out of his palace and stood up before a firing squad, and escaped with
his life only through vigorous interference by his Director of Mines.
Because he thought that he might save from probable confiscation a
valuable coal mining property at Tongshan about eighty miles from
Tientsin, he desired to transfer this property outright to Hoover's name
for the protection of the foreign title. Hoover refused this, but did
undertake to go to Europe on a contract with Chang to enlist the aid of
the Belgian and British bondholders of the Company to protect the
property. These men rescued and reorganized the Company, dispatched
their own financial agents to China, and appointed Hoover chief engineer
to superintend the real development of the great property.
The wily old Celestial finding, after all, that China was not to be
partitioned by the powers that had defended it against the Boxers, and
that private property was not to be confiscated, now proposed to break
his contract so eagerly made. And there seemed to be no hope that the
curious course of Chinese law would ever compel him to recognize his
previous agreements. But there was something in the persistent,
indomitable pressure of the quiet but firm young Belgian agent, named de
Wouters, who had come back with Hoover, and of the young American, which
did finally compel the old Chinaman, after much trouble and delay, to
live up to his contract.
Years later the situation, with kaleidoscopic picturesqueness, took on
another hue, and Hoover found himself defending Chang's interests from
the overzealous attempts of some of the foreign owners to get more out
of the mines than was their fair share. In making the original
contracts it had been agreed to have a Chinese board with a Chinese
chairman, as well as a foreign board. This led to much difficulty and
some of the Europeans declared that the young American had been much at
fault in consenting to an arrangement which left so much share in the
control to the Chinese, and they repudiated this arrangement. Hoover and
de Wouters had a long hard struggle in getting justice for old Chang,
but just as their persistence had earlier held Chang up to his
agreements for the sake of the European owners of the undertaking, so
now, directed in the opposite direction, it succeeded in getting justice
for Chang and his Chinese group.
The affair brought him into business relations with another Belgian
named Emile Francqui, of keen mind and great personal force, who, with
de Wouters, were, strangely enough, later to be chief and first
assistant executives, respectively, of the Great Belgian Comite National
during the long hard days of the German Occupation. It was with these
men among all the Belgians that Hoover was to have most to do in
connection with his work as initiator and director of the Commission for
Relief in Belgium.
But we are now, in the story of Herbert Hoover, only in the year 1900,
and the Belgian Relief did not begin until 1914. And Hoover was still to
have many experiences as engineer and man of affairs, before he was to
meet his Belgian acquaintances again under the dramatic conditions
produced by the World War.
He had now his opportunity really to do something in China in line with
his own ideas of doing things in connection with mines, and not with
those of Chinese mining tradition. As consulting engineer, and later
general manager of the "Chinese Engineering and Mining Company" he
attacked the job of making Chang's great Tongshan coal properties a
going concern. This job involved building railways, handling a fleet of
ocean-going steamers, developing large cement works, and superintending
altogether the work of about 20,000 employees. A special one among the
undertakings of the twelve months or more given to this enterprise was
the building of Ching Wang Tow harbor to give his coal a proper sea
outlet. Altogether it was a "mining" job of all the variety and hugeness
of extent that the twenty-seven-year-old miner and organizer found most
to his liking. And despite obstacles and complications due both to his
Chinese and Caucasian company associates he did it successfully, enjoyed
it immensely, and got from it much education and experience. But he was
ready after about a year of it to turn his attention to the rest of the
world.