LONDON AND THE REST OF THE WORLD
In 1902, now twenty-eight years old, Herbert Hoover returned to London
as a junior partner in the great English firm with which he had been
earlier associated as its star field man in West Australia. But, though
with an actual headquarters office in London, he was mostly anywhere
else in the world but there. He was still the firm's chief engineer and
principal field expert and upon him fell much of the responsibility of
the firm's actual mining operations in the field as distinguished from
its financial operations in the "city." He probably spent little more
than a tenth of his time in London, and this was also true in his later
career when he had given up his connection with the firm and was wholly
"on his own" as independent consulting engineer and mine-organizer. And
this explains what has often puzzled many of the people who came to know
him and his household in London. He and it were so little "English."
His home in London seemed always to be a bit of transplanted America,
and, in particular, a bit of transplanted California. As a matter of
fact, in all his years of London connections there was hardly one that
did not see him and his family in America including an inevitable stay
in California. He maintained offices in New York and San Francisco and
had no slightest temptation, much less desire, ever to become an
expatriate.
But this is getting ahead of the story. There is one outstanding
happening in his London experience that insistently demands telling. It
is the happening that meant for him the greatest setback in his
otherwise almost monotonously successful career. And yet, although this
happening meant temporary financial ruin for him, it was, in its way,
only another success, a success of revealing significance to those who
would like to know the real man that Herbert Hoover is.
After one of his returns to London, and in the absence of the head of
the firm in China, he discovered a defalcation of staggering
proportions. A man connected with the firm had lost in speculation over
a million dollars obtained from friends and clients of the firm, by the
issuance and sale of false stock. Technically the operations of the
defaulter were of such a character that the firm could not be held
legally liable. But the junior partner swept the technicalities aside
with a single gesture. He announced that they would make good all of the
obligations incurred by the defaulter. This meant the immediate loss of
his own personal fortune, and it meant a serious difference of opinion
with the absent head of the firm, whose frantic cables came, however,
too late to overrule the decision of the junior partner.
There ensued a long bitter struggle, most of it falling on the junior
partner with the Quaker conscience, to make good the losses without
actually putting the firm out of business. For going on with the
business was essential to the making good. It was a gruelling four
years' struggle, but with success at the end of it. And then the
American engineer, now grown forever out of youth to the man who had
experienced the down as well as the up in life, gave up his connection
with the firm and launched on that career of independent and
self-responsible activity which has been his ever since. This was in
1908. Hoover was now thirty-four years old and probably the leading
consulting mining engineer in the world.
His work soon took him back to Australia, the land of his first notable
success, but this time into South Australia instead of West Australia.
Here he took personal charge of a large constructive undertaking in
connection with the rehabilitation of the famous Broken Hill Mines.
These mines were in the inhospitable wastes of the Great Stony Desert,
four or five hundred miles north of Adelaide, the port city. The living
and working conditions in the desert were a little worse than awful, but
by his technical and organizing ability he brought to life the two or
three abandoned mines which constituted the Broken Hills properties,
and, adding to them some adjoining lower grade mines, converted the
whole group from a state of great but unrealized possibilities into one
of highly profitable actualities. An important factor in this
achievement was his origination and successful development of a process
for extracting the zinc from ores that had already been treated for the
other metals and then cast aside as worthless residues. There were
fourteen million tons of these residues on the Broken Hills dumps and
from them he derived large returns for the company that he had organized
to purchase the property.
He also introduced new metallurgical processes for the profitable
handling of the low-grade sulphide ores that constituted most of the
mineral body of the mines. Indeed, this work in South Australia did much
to help prove to him what has long been one of his cardinal beliefs,
namely, that the safe backbone of mining lies in the handling of large
bodies of low-grade ores. When such great ore-bodies are given the
benefit of proper metallurgical processes and large organizing and
intelligent building up of exterior plants, mining leaves the realms of
speculation and becomes a certain and stable business operation.
All this successful work in South Australia occupied but seven months.
Back in London again he gathered about him a remarkable staff of skilled
young mining engineers, mostly Americans. There were thirty-five or
forty of them, indeed, not on salary or fixed appointment, but men eager
to attach themselves to him for the sake of working with him or for him
in connection with the ever-increasing number of his large enterprises
in the way of reorganization and rehabilitation of mines scattered all
over the world. He became the managing director or chief consulting
engineer of a score of mining companies, and the simple association of
his name with a mining enterprise gave investors and other engineers a
perfect confidence in its success and its honest handling.
Two of his largest undertakings were in Russia, one at Kyshtim, in the
Urals, the other at Irtish on the Siberian plains near Manchuria. The
Kyshtim property was a great but run-down historic establishment, on an
estate of an area almost equal to that of all Belgium. One hundred and
seventy thousand people lived on the estate, all dependent on the
mining establishment for their support. The ores were of iron and
copper, but the mines were so far from anywhere that not only did these
ores have to be smelted at the mine mouths, but factories had to be
erected to manufacture the metal into products capable of compact
transportation. When Hoover took over the bankrupt properties he found
himself not only with mining and manufacturing problems to solve, but
with what was practically a relief problem to face. For the underpaid
workmen and their unfortunate families were in a state of great misery.
He succeeded not only in modernizing and rehabilitating the material
part of the great establishment, but at the same time in rescuing and
revivifying a suffering laboring population of helpless Russians.
The Irtish properties were near the Manchurian border, a thousand miles
up the Irtish River from Omsk, a mere remote bleak spot on the wild,
bare Siberian steppes. But at this spot lay extensive deposits of zinc,
iron, lead, copper and coal, all together. He had first of all to build
350 miles of railroad to make the spot at all accessible. And the actual
"mining" operations included everything from digging out and smelting
the ores to manufacturing all sorts of things from metal door-knobs to
steel rails and even steamboats to ply on the Irtish River. He put a
large sum of English, Canadian and American money--including much of his
own--into the work of building up a great establishment which was just
on a paying basis when the war broke out. It is all now in the hands of
the Bolsheviki, with a most dubious outlook for the recovery of any of
the money put into it.
Other large operations under his direction were in Colorado, Mexico,
Korea, the Malay Straits Settlement, South Africa, and India (Burma).
The Burma undertaking has been, in its outcome at least, and, indeed, in
many other respects, Hoover's greatest victory in mining engineering and
organization. It is today the greatest silver-lead mine in the world,
although it started from as near to nothing as a mine could be and yet
be called a mine. It took him and his associates five years to
transform some deserted works in the heart of a jungle into the foremost
producer of its kind in all the world. This mine is far away in the
north of Burma, almost on the Chinese border. They had first to build
eighty miles of railroad through the jungle and over two ranges of
mountains, a sufficient feat of engineering in itself, and then to
create and organize at the end of this line everything pertaining to a
great mining plant. Thirty thousand men were employed in establishing
the mine.
Altogether Hoover and his associates had in their employment, in the
various mining undertakings under way in 1914, about 175,000 men, and
the annual mineral output of the mines being handled by them was worth
as much as the total annual output of all the mines in California. And
practically all of these successful mines had been made out of
unsuccessful ones. For Hoover really developed a new profession in
connection with mining; a profession of making good mines out of bad
ones, of making bankrupt mining concerns solvent, not by manipulation on
the stock exchange but by work in the earth, in the mills, in the mine
offices. He works with materials, not pieces of paper. It takes him from
three to five years to bring a dead mine to life; the mine must have
mineral in it, to be sure, to start with, but he does all the rest. That
little matter of having mineral in it is the whole thing, you may think.
But if you do, you must think again. The history of mining is more a
history of how mines with mineral in them have not succeeded in becoming
mines where the mineral could be profitably got out of them, than of how
such mines have succeeded. A successful mine is infinitely more than a
hole in the ground with mineral at its bottom. It is railroads and
steamers, mills, housing for men, men themselves, organization, system,
skill, brains, all-around human capacity. Herbert Hoover is a great
miner because he is--I say it bluntly and not from any blind
hero-worship--a great man.
If he is, he can do more than mine greatly; he can do other things
greatly. Well, he can, and he has done them. We come to that part of his
story now, the part that begins when the World War began, when the
world saw with amazement that grew into ever greater amazement an
unknown miner, that is, unknown except to other miners, calmly do things
that only great men can do. But we who know now the story of the boy and
the man of the years before the war are not so much amazed. We know that
he is the kind of man, who had had the kind of experience, the kind of
world education, who with opportunity can do things the world calls
great and be the great man. But just for a few minutes before we begin
with August, 1914, the time when Herbert Hoover began a new chapter in
his work because the world had begun a new epoch in its history, let us
have a glimpse of this man outside of his mines and his offices. Let us
see him in his home, with his family, with his books if he has any, and
with his friends of whom he has many.
His two children, Herbert and Allan, were born in 1903 and 1907
respectively. Living first in apartments, the Hoovers felt that they and
the boys and the dog Rags needed more room, or perhaps, better,
different kind of room, room for an energetic family of Americans to
grow up in Western American fashion, as far as this could be compassed
in London. And so they found, farther west, in a short street just off
Kensington High Street and close to Kensington Gardens, a roomy old
house with a garden with real trees in it and some grass and
flower-beds. It had been built long before by somebody who liked room,
and then rebuilt, or at least made over and added to, by Montin Conway,
the Alpinist and author. For generations it had been called "The Red
House," a name that became in the succeeding years more and more widely
known to Americans living in, coming to, or passing through London, for
it became a well-known house of American foregathering.
I knew it first in 1912 when I was doing some work in the British Museum
Library. The bedroom to which my wife and I were shown was inhabited
already by a happy and very vocal family of little Javanese seed birds
and green parrakeets, a part of the boys' menagerie which had to find
refuge from the other animals already housed in their adjoining rooms.
Out in the garden there were pigeons fluttering in and out of a cote,
and hens solemnly inspecting the newly-seeded flower-beds. A big silver
Persian cat, and a smaller yellow Siamese one regularly attended
breakfasts, and Rags irregularly attended everything. The cats were Mr.
Hoover's favorites. He liked to have one on his lap as he talked.
There were bookshelves in all of the rooms, and I noted that the owner,
however many the guests had been, or long the evening, never went up to
bed without a book in his hand. I came later to know how fixed this
night-reading habit had become, for in the Belgian relief years when we
had frequently to cross the perilous North Sea together on our way from
Thames-mouth to Holland or back in one of the little Dutch boats which
used to run across twice a week until most of the boats had been blown
up by floating mines, Hoover used always to fix an electric pocket lamp
or a stub of a candle to the edge of his bunk and read for a while after
turning in. He has had little time for reading in daytime, but yet he
has read enormously. It is this night-reading that explains it.
The shelves in "The Red House" contained many books about geology and
mining and metallurgy. But they contained many others as well.
Especially were they burdened with books on economics and political
science. And they bore lighter loads of stories. Sherlock Holmes was
there _in extenso_. The books on civics and economics and theories of
finance were well thumbed and some of them margined with roughly
penciled notes. I should say they had been studied. A frequent evening
visitor, who came by preference when there had been no guests at dinner,
was a well-known brilliant student of finance and economics, formerly
editor of the best-known English financial weekly and now editor of a
very liberal, not to say radical, weekly of his own. He and Hoover held
long disquisition together, each having clear-cut ideas of his own and
glad to try them out on the keen intelligence of the other. As a mere
biologist, whose little knowledge was more of the domestic economy of
the four and six-footed inhabitants of earth than of the social science
and politics of the bipedal lords of creation, my role was chiefly that
of fascinated listener.
Although he likes books and even likes writing, Hoover makes no claims
to authorship himself. Nevertheless he has found time to put something
of his knowledge, based on firsthand experience of the fundamentals and
details of mining geology, and mining methods and organization, into a
book which, under the title of _Principles of Mining_, has been a
well-known text for students of mining engineering since its appearance
in 1909. The book is a condensation of a course of lectures given by the
author partly in Stanford and partly in Columbia University. Although it
contains an unusual amount of original matter and old knowledge
originally treated for the kind of book it professes to be, namely a
compact manual of approved mining practice, the author's preface is a
model of modest appraisement of his work. One of its paragraphs simply
demands quotation:
"The bulk of the material presented [in this book] is the common
heritage of the profession, and if any may think there is
insufficient reference to previous writers, let him endeavor to
find to whom the origin of our methods should be credited. The
science has grown by small contributions of experience since, or
before, those unnamed Egyptian engineers, whose works prove their
knowledge of many fundamentals of mine engineering six thousand
eight hundred years ago. If I have contributed one sentence to the
accumulated knowledge of a thousand generations of engineers or
have thrown one new ray of light on the work, I shall have done my
share."
In the latter chapters of the book Hoover, having devoted the earlier
chapters to technical methods, treats of the administrative and
financial phases of mining. The last chapter is devoted to the
"character, training, and obligations of the mining engineering
profession" in which he sets up a standard of professional ethics for
the engineer of the very highest degree and reveals clearly his own
genuinely philanthropic attitude toward his fellow men. In the
discussion of mining administration there is a concise but illuminating
treatment of the subject of labor unions. After discussing contract work
and bonus systems he says:
"There is another phase of the labor question which must be
considered, and that is the general relations of employer and
employed. As corporations have grown, so likewise have the labor
unions. In general, they are normal and proper antidotes for
unlimited capitalistic organization.
"Labor unions usually pass through two phases. First, the inertia
of the unorganized labor is too often stirred only by demagogic
means. After organization through these and other agencies, the
lack of balance in the leaders often makes for injustice in
demands, and for violence to obtain them and disregard of
agreements entered upon. As time goes on, men become educated in
regard to the rights of their employers and to the reflection of
these rights in ultimate benefit to labor itself. Then the men, as
well as the intelligent employer, endeavor to safeguard both
interests. When this stage arrives, violence disappears in favor of
negotiation on economic principles, and the unions achieve their
greatest real gains. Given a union with leaders who can control the
members, and who are disposed to approach differences in a
business spirit, there are few sounder positions for the employer,
for agreements honorably carried out dismiss the constant
harassments of possible strikes. Such unions exist in dozens of
trades in this country, and they are entitled to greater
recognition. The time when the employer could ride roughshod over
his labor is disappearing with the doctrine of _laissez faire_ on
which it was founded. The sooner the fact is recognized, the better
for the employer. The sooner some miners' unions develop from the
first into the second stage, the more speedily will their
organizations secure general respect and influence.
"The crying need of labor unions, and of some employers as well, is
education on a fundamental of economics too long disregarded by all
classes and especially by the academic economist. When the latter
abandon the theory that wages are the result of supply and demand,
and recognize that in these days of international flow of labor,
commodities and capital, the real controlling factor in wages is
efficiency, then such an educational campaign may become possible.
Then will the employer and employee find a common ground on which
each can benefit. There lives no engineer who has not seen
insensate dispute as to wages where the real difficulty was
inefficiency. No administrator begrudges a division with his men
of the increased profit arising from increased efficiency. But
every administrator begrudges the wage level demanded by labor
unions whose policy is decreased efficiency in the false belief
that they are providing for more labor."
Three years before publishing the _Principles of Mining_ Hoover had
collaborated with a a group of authors in the production of a book
called _Economics of Mining_. And three years later, that is in 1912, he
privately published, in sumptuous form, with scrupulously exact
reproduction of all of its many curious old woodcuts, an English
translation of Agricola's "De Re Metallica," the first great treatise on
mining and metallurgy, originally published in Latin in 1556, only one
hundred years after Gutenberg had printed his first book. "De Re
Metallica" was the standard manual of mining and metallurgy for 180
years. Georgius Agricola, the author, was really one Georg Bauer, a
German of Saxony, who, following the custom of his time used for
pen-name the literal Latin equivalents of the words of his German name.
This translation, with its copious added notes of editorial commentary,
was the joint work of Hoover and his wife--it was Mrs. Hoover, indeed,
who began it--and occupied most of their spare time, especially their
evenings--and sometimes nights!--and Sundays, through nearly five years.
They had been for some time collecting and delving in old books on China
and the Far East and ancient treatises on early mining and metallurgical
processes, and had accumulated an unusual collection of such books,
ransacking the old bookshops of the world in their quest. In 1902, Mrs.
Hoover while looking up some geology in the British Museum Library,
stumbled again on Agricola, which she had forgotten since the days she
was in Dr. Branner's laboratory. By invoking the services of one of
their friends among the old book dealers the Hoovers soon owned a copy.
Caught especially by the many curious and only half understandable
pictures in it they began to translate bits from it here and there,
especially the explanations of the pictures, and in a little while they
were lost. Nothing would satisfy them short of making a complete
translation. It became an obsession; it was at first their recreation;
then because it went very slowly it seemed likely to become their life
avocation.
They found an early German translation, which, however, helped them
little. The translator had apparently known little of mining and not too
much of Latin. They went to Saxony, to the home of Agricola, hoping to
get clues to the difficult things in the book by seeing the region and
mines which had been under his eyes while writing it, and finding
traditions of the mining methods of his time. But it was as if a sponge
had been passed over Agricola and his days. Fire had swept over the
towns he had known and all the ancient records were gone. The towns,
rebuilt, and the mines of which he had written were there, but of him
and of the ancient methods he wrote about there was hardly record or
even tradition. They went to Freiberg, where has long existed the
greatest German school of mines, the greatest mining school in the
world, indeed, until the American schools were developed--probably the
Germans would not admit even this qualification--and there they found no
more to help them than in Agricola's own towns. In fact, the Freiberg
professors seemed rather irritated by the advent of these searchers for
ancient mining history, for, as the savants explained, the Freiberg
methods and machines were all the most modern in the world; there were
"no left-overs, no worn-out rubbish of those inefficient ages" around
Germany's great school of mines.
So the Hoovers were little rewarded by their pilgrimage to Germany for
help in their attempt to resuscitate the Saxon Agricola. But they kept
on mining in the big tome and finally, in the fifth year of their
devoted spare-time labors they had before them a completed translation.