From the left: Anton Fokker, Herbert Hoover, F. Trubee Davison and Edward Warner Those of a certain age have fond memories of Charles Schultz's Peanuts comic strip. Among the memorable characters that lived out his fantasies was Charlie Brown's dog Snoopy. A reoccurring fantasy was being a World War I fighter pilot in a Sopwith … Continue reading Hoover “Meets the Fokker”
One of the most sensational New York City murders of 1937 involved artist, Robert Irwin, who brutally murdered three people on Easter Sunday. Nicknamed the "mad sculptor" by the newspapers, Irwin briefly boarded with Mary Gedeon and her two daughters, Veronica and Ethel at their Beekman Place apartment. Veronica was a model who posed for … Continue reading Lou Henry Hoover and the “Mad Sculptor”
When people think of the home front during a world war, the rationing of food and gasoline immediately come to mind. But rationing was a feature of World War II, not World War I. Herbert Hoover as head of the United States Food Administration was able to get Americans to voluntarily reduce their consumption … Continue reading Practical War-Pig Plan
Lou Hoover encounters Stanford’s “Animal House” College is a time for both refining one’s education as well as gaining important life lessons. Often these lessons consist of doing things that seem like harmless fun until one realizes how incredibly stupid they were in retrospect. Such is the case with former First Lady Lou Henry … Continue reading Stanford’s “Animal House”
The main celebrity story of early 1932 was the kidnapping of the twenty-month old son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh. On March 1 sometime after 9 pm when the baby’s nanny put Charles Jr. to bed and 10 pm when the nanny did her usual check, someone abducted the baby. The state police were called … Continue reading CSI: Past and Present
– the 1928 Republican National Convention Herbert and Lou Hoover in the doorway of their home the morning after he was nominated for president in 1928. by Spencer Howard In June 1928, Republican Party held its quadrennial convention to nominate candidates for President and Vice President of the United States. Before the primaries and caucuses … Continue reading Nominating a Candidate
A stereotype frequently attributed to Herbert Hoover is that he was cold and aloof. He did not have an official White House photographer (that would come with his successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt) and refused to have his family and private life as fair game for media coverage. Unlike later Presidents that used the media to … Continue reading Hoover and the Teleprompter
The eminent Hoover biographer, George Nash, describes Charles Michelson as "the Democratic Party's chief publicist and spin-meister," who, during the Hoover Administration, "orchestrated an unremitting barrage of disparagement of Hoover's shortcomings: a foretaste of what later generations would call "the politics of personal destruction." Michelson's job was an unrelenting flow of criticism, often as ghostwritten … Continue reading The Politics of Personal Destruction
Author Charles Rappleye is an award-winning investigative journalist and editor. He has written extensively on media, law enforcement, and organized crime. The author of Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution; Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revolution; and his new book - Herbert Hoover in the White House: The … Continue reading Herbert Hoover in the White House
On August 10, 1962, Herbert Hoover celebrated his 88th birthday by attending the dedication and opening of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library -Museum in West Branch, Iowa. Accompanied by friend and former president Harry S. Truman, Hoover fondly reminisced about growing up in West Branch and celebrating the Fourth of July with firecrackers purchased by … Continue reading Herbert Hoover a Superhero?
