Hoover reconsidered

The Boston Globe: "AMID THIS season of hurricane devastation comes reconstruction of a battered image: Herbert Hoover's. The government's mishandling of Hurricane Katrina has focused the public eye not only on the losses in the Gulf states but on a vigorous prepresidential Hoover, whose management of the relief effort for victims of the Mississippi flood of 1927 made him a national hero and catapulted him to the White House.

He was secretary of commerce then, with no hint of the widely vilified leader he would become for his handling of the Great Depression. In the flood recovery he was ''a kind of one-man FEMA," said Lynn Smith, archivist at the Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa. The institution is enjoying increased public attention as America conducts its post-Katrina analysis.

Author John Barry is also hot on the media circuit for his 1997 book ''Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America." Barry was a catalyst for the Hoover resurgence, though the writer is no fan of the 31st president and considers him more of an opportunist than a hero.

Still, Barry gives Hoover his due for wading in, literally, where President Calvin Coolidge refused to tread and for setting up tent cities for 600,000 people displaced by the rampaging Mississippi. The flood swept through six states, swamping 20,000 square miles, most acutely in Mississippi and Arkansas.

Hoover went on the radio and raised $15 million for the American Red Cross. He coordinated the efforts of eight different government agencies, arranged for 600 ships to transport supplies, and exhorted business people in 91 communities to help fund the evacuation and cleanup.

Hoover handled the flood relief in much the same way, as a private citizen, he had taken charge of evacuating American tourists from Europe at the start of World War I. The same can-do zeal made him a star citizen administrator of the Commission for the Relief of Belgium in the war. He directed the program gratis, bringing food and supplies through the British blockade to the German-occupied country, and is credited with saving 10 million people from starvation.

''He had to go to the leaders of two warring armies and talk his way though the lines," said Smith. ''Who could do that today? Jimmy Carter, maybe, or Nelson Mandela."

Hoover's legacy has been primarily one of failure because he didn't pull America out of the Depression. His powers of motivation, which had worked so well on individuals in flood and war zones, were no match for the stock market and the economy.

It took a 2005 hurricane to refocus the historical lens and to serve as a reminder that human beings are far more complex than their labels. "