#31: Herbert Hoover: Savior To Scapegoat 🇺🇸 #historyshorts #history #presidenthistory

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]Herbert Hoover almost died as a toddler [music] in Iowa, declared dead during a bout of croup until his uncle revived him. A relative reportedly said, "God has a great work for that boy to do." He would need it. Orphaned by [music] age 9, Hoover worked his way into Stanford's first class, became a globe-trotting mining engineer, and built a massive fortune across four continents. Then, World War I hit and Hoover pivoted. He organized the evacuation [music] of over 100,000 Americans from Europe, then led a relief effort that fed more than 9 million civilians in Belgium and France.

[00:00:31]At one point, he directed [music] a fleet of hundreds of ships delivering aid. After the war, he helped feed millions more across Europe and even famine-stricken [music] Russia, saying, "20 million people are starving. They must be fed." By the 1920s, [music] he was Secretary of Commerce and one of the most admired men in the world. In 1928, he was elected president in a landslide.

[00:00:50]Within months, the stock market crashed.

[00:00:53]As unemployment soared into the millions, the country turned on him.

[00:00:56]Shanty towns [music] were called Hoovervilles. Newspapers became Hoover blankets. Then came the Bonus Army in 1932, [music] when veterans demanding pay were driven out of Washington by troops and tanks. The optics were [music] catastrophic. He lost in a landslide to FDR. Ironically, one of the most iconic projects [music] tied to his presidency, the Hoover Dam, would later carry his name and power millions of homes in the American West. He died in 1964 after one of the longest post-presidencies in American history.

[00:01:25]And that's a file on Herbert Hoover in the POTUS files.