The First Ladies: Lou Hoover
What a power couple the Hoovers must have been: brainiac meets brainiac, they fall in love, the world is they oyster. Oh and the places they went and the things they did. If only that Presidency gig had worked out a little better for poor Herbert. Regardless, it sounds like he was very lucky to have her in his corner.
Her name was simply Lou Henry (and later she became Lou Henry Hoover). She was born on March 29, 1874 in Waterloo, Iowa. Her father was Charles Delano Henry, a woolen mill operator, bank clerk, and miner. Her mother was Florence Ida Weed. Although both of Lou Hoover’s parents were born in Wooster, Ohio, they both migrated, separately, with their families to Iowa, where they married. Lou was the eldest of two girls. Her sister was Jean Henry. The family was Episcopalian, but Lou attended Quaker services with her husband, the faith in which he was raised. She was 5'8" with blue eyes and light brown hair that had turned white by the time she was First Lady.
Lou was very well educated. She earned her teaching certificate at San Jose School, intending to make it a profession as her mother had. But she attended Stanford University from 1894 to 1898, graduating with a B.A. in geology. Lou Henry was the first woman in America to have earned a degree in geology from Stanford. Her study had begun when, after attending a lecture by Stanford professor of geology J. C. Branner, she asked it he would accept a woman student. He, as well as her parents, encouraged her to pursue the field of study. Her parents encouraged her love of physical exercise and sports. She played baseball in the street, basketball, and enjoyed archery, boating, sledding, roller-skating and ice-skating. She enjoyed being her father’s companion in the outdoors, hiking, fishing, and camping.
She also had a talent with languages. She learned Latin at Stanford and, when going to live in China, learned Mandarin Chinese by training with a tutor. During the White House years, she was known to communicate with the President in a few words of Chinese (he did not speak it as fluently as she) when they wished to keep their conversation private. In time, she was to be fluent in five languages, including Spanish, Italian, and French.
She married Herbert Clark Hoover on 10 February 1899 at the Monterey, California home of her parents. During her first year at Stanford, Lou Henry was introduced to Herbert Hoover by Professor Branner, to his assistant. They not only shared an Iowa origin but a love of geology and fishing. After graduating, Hoover went to Australia as a gold miner for a British mining company. Beginning with that position, Hoover earned increasingly larger salaries, becoming a millionaire at a young age. It was from Australian that he sent Lou Henry a telegram asking her to marry him, an offer which she accepted. With neither a Quaker nor Episcopalian minister available to perform their marriage, the Hoovers were married in a civil ceremony by Roman Catholic priest, Father Ramon Mestres, of the San Carlos Borromeo Mission. They had two sons: Herbert and Allan.
Following her graduation, Hoover accepted an offer from the young Chinese Emperor to be Director General of the Department of Mines of the Chinese Government. Later in the day, they took the train to San Francisco. The following day, 11 February 1899, they sailed for China. Following her arrival in China, Lou Hoover began an intensive study of Chinese culture, its regional differences, and its history. They lived in Tientsin, but visited Peking and some interior regions. She spoke the language more easily than her husband and often translated materials for him. One year into their residency in Tientsin, in June of 1900, the Boxer Rebellion broke out. This was a famously violent series of attacks by native Chinese on foreigners in a portion of the port city where the Hoovers resided. Throughout the crisis, Lou Hoover displayed considerable bravery, helping to build up protective barricades, caring for those who were wounded by gunshots, and even assuming management of a small local herd of cows to provide fresh dairy products to children. Eventually troops from the U.S., England, France and Russia arrived and patrolled the foreign-resident region. Lou Hoover worked guard duty. She got around by bicycle, and learned to use a pistol as a means of protection. She began to write a book on their experiences in China, but never completed it.
In August of 1900, the Hoovers moved to London, England, where Herbert worked for the international mining outfit, Bewick, Moreing and Company. He worked for them until 1908, when he founded his own firm. Although she would move around the globe (giving birth and raising her two sons in the process), following “Bert” on assignments in European nations, India, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Siberia, Ceylon, Burma, and Japan, London was their base until 1914. For five years during this period she began a collaborative writing project with her husband, the translation from Latin to English of a 1565 guide to mining and metallurgy, called De Re Metallica by the German mineralogist George Agricola. Published in 1912, the still-relevant work earned the couple the Mining & Metallurgical Society of America’s gold medal. After occupancy in a Hyde Park apartment, they bought an expansive house they called “Red Roof,” and it became a central gathering place for many Americans and other foreigners based in London.
When World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, Lou Hoover helped to create and chair the American Women's War Relief Fund and Hospital, an organization to help raise immediate funds and support for the suffering. She also became a leader in the Society of American Women in London, helping to find housing, food, some financial aid and serving as a informational clearing-house to those unable to get home. With hundreds of thousands of Europeans displaced and facing starvation, Hoover was asked by the American Ambassador to organize a mobilization of immediate aid from neutral countries. Lou Hoover worked with him, raising money and facilitating transportation of the first boatload of food to those in need. Travelling between the U.S. and London, she concurrently became an organizer of the American Red Cross' Canteen Escort Service, which arranged the trans-Atlantic transportation home of wounded servicemen, create a hospital center and established a fleet of ambulances. King Albert I of Belgium decorated her in appreciation for her substantive work, in 1919.
In 1917, when America entered the war, Herbert Hoover was appointed chief of the U.S. Food Administration. This brought the Hoovers to live in Washington. Lou Hoover gave speeches on how Americans could practically conserve food that was needed for American forces and ongoing refugee relief efforts. The encouraging of Americans to go one day a week without wheat, and another day a week without meat, and using as little sugar as possible, came to be known as “Hoovering” and Lou Hoover offered recipes, and urged citizens to plant and grow their own produce.Lou Hoover worked with the Girl Scouts as a National Commissioner (1917-1918).
Lou Hoover played a substantive and important role at the national level in the founding years of the Girl Scouts. During the Harding and Coolidge Administrations, Lou Hoover was first Vice President (1921), then promoted to President of the organization (1922-1925), then returned to being Vice President (1925-1929). She also served as Chairman of the Girl Scouts National Board of Directors for part of this time (1925-1928). She even assisted her sister Jean Large, a professional writer, in drafting Nancy Goes Scouting, a book for young adults in the late 1920’s.
Lou Hoover visited the territory of Alaska in July of 1923, joining her husband as part of President Warren Harding’s presidential junket there by ship. With the Hardings in San Francisco at the time of the President’s sudden death, she interacted with the press as a buffer for Florence Harding.
Lou Hoover headed a national Women’s Conference on Law Enforcement, through the General Federation of Women’s Clubs on 11 April 1924. A month later, in St. Paul, Minnesota, she addressed the National Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teachers Association. That autumn, she was host to women of some thirty-nine nations, representatives to the International Council of Women’s Peace Conference. In May of 1927, in a speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution, she voiced her support for the freer, more revealing, clothing of young women of the era, considering the style to be “sensible.” With her snowy-white hair, she annually accepted the role of “Mrs. Claus” at the Washington’s Children Hospital.
In 1922 she was named as the only woman on the board as a vice president of the National Amateur Athletic Association. Lou Hoover had joined the association board, with the intention of expanding to women its message of the physical and mental value of athletics. She helped for found and served as President of its Women’s Division (1923-1940). Among the issues she sought to address were the arguments against women joining in sporting competitions such as the Olympics, and the need for more sports facilities, trainers and coaches for women.
Lou Hoover assumed no formal role in her husband’s presidential campaigns. She joined him in a pre-inauguration goodwill trip to Honduras, San Salvador, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Latin America. Immediately preceding the 1929 swearing-in ceremony of her husband as President in the U.S. Capitol Building, Lou Hoover and the outgoing First Lady Grace Coolidge were not escorted and lost their way in the labyrinth of hallways that led to the West Front, where the ceremonies were to take place/ This delayed the ceremony.
Lou Hoover decided to restrict the degree of her activism once she assumed what she believed to a be a public duty which required a more subdued traditionalism. But she continued to deliver speeches in auditoriums and over the radio. Just over a month after becoming First Lady, her speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution was carried on the radio. Others soon followed. With a great interest in the popular films of her era, Lou Hoover had equipment placed in the oval room of the family quarters to screen sound motion pictures for her guests. The equipment and its installation was donated by a Hollywood studio. She also used her own silent movie camera in her private life. During the 1932 kidnapping of aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby son, Lou Hoover kept in close touch with the child’s mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a personal friend.
Lou Hoover furnished the private West Sitting Hall of the second floor of the White House, the large central area of the family quarters, in what was called a “California style,” with palm trees and other tropical plants, birds singing in hanging cages and outdoor grass carpeting. For her three small grandchildren, who lived with the Hoovers in the White House for several months in 1929 and 1930, she had a fireproof playroom furnished. She also took an avid interest in the historical character of the old mansion. She and the President gathered furniture known to have existed or been used by Abraham Lincoln in a guest room that was used as a “Lincoln Study.” She sought items used by President James Monroe and his wife and also commissioned exact replicas of other items they had used, gathering them into another upstairs room and thus christened the shorter-lived “Monroe Room” (to be known in the late 20th century as the “Treaty Room” and then the “President’s Study”).
In August 1929, Herbert and Lou Hoover discovered that there was a community of impoverished Appalachian families in nearby Virginia, with no tax base to provide a school for their children. The couple decided to establish a school for the local mountain children, as well as a small residence for the teacher they hired to instruct them. It opened on February 24, 1930, known as “The President’s Community School.”
As First Lady, Lou Hoover continued her belief in the equality of women and men. In her 1929 remarks to the 4-H Club broadcast on NBC, for example, she emphasized that housework was for men too, and that boys should learn to clean the house and wash the dishes along with the girls. Lou Hoover paid entirely for the higher education of a number of women. She received a number of honorary degrees as First Lady – far more than any of her predecessors: Swathmore College (1929), Elmira College (1930), Goucher College (1931), Tufts College (1932), Wooster College (1932). She had also received honorary degrees before and after her tenure as First Lady: Mills College (1923), Whittier College (1928), and Stanford University (1941). In addition, several schools were named for her, ranging from Lou Henry Hoover Elementary School in Whittier, California (1938) to Lou Henry Elementary School, in Waterloo, Iowa (2005).
Lou Hoover would drive herself in her own car around Washington, and could often be seen walking along the area of monuments to the south of the White House and along the streets of the city. She worked in the flower gardens of the mansion, and walked her Elkhound and German shepherd dogs on the property. She enjoyed riding her horse in nearby Rock Creek Park.
Although she did not publicly speak out against racism, Lou Hoover's actions displayed contempt for the notion. In 1921, when she had finalized the purchase of their Washington home, Lou Hoover refused to sign a legal agreement that would forbid the Hoovers from later selling the property to African-Americans or Jews. With her encouragement, her husband welcomed the African-American president of the Tuskegee Institute to lunch in the White House. Lou Hoover also indicated an interest in Native Americans. She invited the Yakima tribe’s Chief Yowlache to perform at a post-dinner concert that also included a traditional opera singer and harpist. Appearing in the colorful full tribal costume of his tribe, Yowlache demonstrated Zuni Indian tribal chants – as well as Italian operatic arias. In her post-White House years, Lou Hoover also voiced her strong desire to enlist more Native-Americans in the Girl Scouts.
As the great depression worsened, Lou Hoover began to receive hundreds and then thousands of letters from citizens appealing for particular types of help – money, food, employment, clothing – she took it upon herself to respond personally. She would refer the request for support to a wealthy friend or organization such as the Red Cross, Community Chest, Salvation Army and American Friends Service Committee, and would often send a personal “loan” to the stranger. Her greatest effort in response to the Great Depression was organizing and inspiring a volunteer network among the Girl Scouts. She sought to inspire Girl Scouts to go into their communities and discover which families were struggling and then offer help.
Lou Hoover unwittingly contributed to the growing public perception of her husband as failing to grasp the needs of the masses who suffered during the Depression. At many state dinner and other functions where food was offered to guests, Lou Hoover often served expensive produce that was out-of-season or imported, at a time when many families were having difficulty buying enough food to survive.
In the autumn of 1932, Lou Hoover accompanied the President for six weeks of his whistlestop re-election campaign, along some 12,000 miles through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and Pennsylvania. Occasionally she made impromptu remarks to crowds from the back of the train. The unrelenting attacks on her husband for the Depression and his failed re-election in 1932 left Lou Hoover uncharacteristically bitter. Her husband would later write that “she was oversensitive, and the stabs of political life which, no doubt, were deserved by me, hurt her greatly.”
In the spring of 1933, the Hoovers returned to their Palo Alto home. Lou Hoover became active in her community. She made her large home available to the Stanford University community for various functions. She worked closely with Dr. Helen Pryor, Stanford’s Women’s Student Health Services director in the effort to provide better training for physical education teachers for women and proper facilities for them. In November of 1934, with the influx of poor migrant families into urban California areas from those states where crops were devastated by the Dust Bowl, Lou Hoover assumed a fundraising role for the Community Chest Drives of Los Angeles and San Francisco. She also resumed her work on the local level with the Girl Scouts. In her second period as National President of the Girl Scouts, she was instrumental in forging one of the group’s most successful fundraising tools that would soon come to be a symbol of the organization itself – the Girl Scout cookie.
Lou Hoover did not accompany her husband on his trips to Europe in 1937 and 1938. When the war in Europe first broke out in 1939, Hoover resumed his legendary relief work for European refugees. Finding it easier to conduct this work from the East Coast, he relocated to a suite at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel’s residential building known as “The Towers,” in New York City. Lou Hoover joined him there. American entry into World War II in 1941 had Lou Hoover leading a volunteer drive for refugee relief, this time as the Western Women’s Committee chair, as part of the Salvation Army’s effort to provide clothing. On the American homefront, it was through the Girl Scouts, that she implored the young members to do their part by collecting the scrap metal that could be used in munitions production, growing produce for themselves, their families and communities in Victory Gardens, and also selling defense bonds door-to-door much as they were now selling cookies.
Without warning, after attending a concert in New York City, Lou Hoover suffered an acute heart attack and died suddenly on January 7, 1944 at the age of 69. It was only after her death that her husband, by clearing out her files and drawers, discovered the extent to which she had provided financial help to those hundreds of anonymous Americans who had asked for some sort of help during the Great Depression. Sher was buried at Alta Mesa Cemetery, Palo Alto, California and re-interred in 1964 at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa.
Her name was simply Lou Henry (and later she became Lou Henry Hoover). She was born on March 29, 1874 in Waterloo, Iowa. Her father was Charles Delano Henry, a woolen mill operator, bank clerk, and miner. Her mother was Florence Ida Weed. Although both of Lou Hoover’s parents were born in Wooster, Ohio, they both migrated, separately, with their families to Iowa, where they married. Lou was the eldest of two girls. Her sister was Jean Henry. The family was Episcopalian, but Lou attended Quaker services with her husband, the faith in which he was raised. She was 5'8" with blue eyes and light brown hair that had turned white by the time she was First Lady.
Lou was very well educated. She earned her teaching certificate at San Jose School, intending to make it a profession as her mother had. But she attended Stanford University from 1894 to 1898, graduating with a B.A. in geology. Lou Henry was the first woman in America to have earned a degree in geology from Stanford. Her study had begun when, after attending a lecture by Stanford professor of geology J. C. Branner, she asked it he would accept a woman student. He, as well as her parents, encouraged her to pursue the field of study. Her parents encouraged her love of physical exercise and sports. She played baseball in the street, basketball, and enjoyed archery, boating, sledding, roller-skating and ice-skating. She enjoyed being her father’s companion in the outdoors, hiking, fishing, and camping.
She also had a talent with languages. She learned Latin at Stanford and, when going to live in China, learned Mandarin Chinese by training with a tutor. During the White House years, she was known to communicate with the President in a few words of Chinese (he did not speak it as fluently as she) when they wished to keep their conversation private. In time, she was to be fluent in five languages, including Spanish, Italian, and French.
She married Herbert Clark Hoover on 10 February 1899 at the Monterey, California home of her parents. During her first year at Stanford, Lou Henry was introduced to Herbert Hoover by Professor Branner, to his assistant. They not only shared an Iowa origin but a love of geology and fishing. After graduating, Hoover went to Australia as a gold miner for a British mining company. Beginning with that position, Hoover earned increasingly larger salaries, becoming a millionaire at a young age. It was from Australian that he sent Lou Henry a telegram asking her to marry him, an offer which she accepted. With neither a Quaker nor Episcopalian minister available to perform their marriage, the Hoovers were married in a civil ceremony by Roman Catholic priest, Father Ramon Mestres, of the San Carlos Borromeo Mission. They had two sons: Herbert and Allan.
Following her graduation, Hoover accepted an offer from the young Chinese Emperor to be Director General of the Department of Mines of the Chinese Government. Later in the day, they took the train to San Francisco. The following day, 11 February 1899, they sailed for China. Following her arrival in China, Lou Hoover began an intensive study of Chinese culture, its regional differences, and its history. They lived in Tientsin, but visited Peking and some interior regions. She spoke the language more easily than her husband and often translated materials for him. One year into their residency in Tientsin, in June of 1900, the Boxer Rebellion broke out. This was a famously violent series of attacks by native Chinese on foreigners in a portion of the port city where the Hoovers resided. Throughout the crisis, Lou Hoover displayed considerable bravery, helping to build up protective barricades, caring for those who were wounded by gunshots, and even assuming management of a small local herd of cows to provide fresh dairy products to children. Eventually troops from the U.S., England, France and Russia arrived and patrolled the foreign-resident region. Lou Hoover worked guard duty. She got around by bicycle, and learned to use a pistol as a means of protection. She began to write a book on their experiences in China, but never completed it.
In August of 1900, the Hoovers moved to London, England, where Herbert worked for the international mining outfit, Bewick, Moreing and Company. He worked for them until 1908, when he founded his own firm. Although she would move around the globe (giving birth and raising her two sons in the process), following “Bert” on assignments in European nations, India, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Siberia, Ceylon, Burma, and Japan, London was their base until 1914. For five years during this period she began a collaborative writing project with her husband, the translation from Latin to English of a 1565 guide to mining and metallurgy, called De Re Metallica by the German mineralogist George Agricola. Published in 1912, the still-relevant work earned the couple the Mining & Metallurgical Society of America’s gold medal. After occupancy in a Hyde Park apartment, they bought an expansive house they called “Red Roof,” and it became a central gathering place for many Americans and other foreigners based in London.
When World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, Lou Hoover helped to create and chair the American Women's War Relief Fund and Hospital, an organization to help raise immediate funds and support for the suffering. She also became a leader in the Society of American Women in London, helping to find housing, food, some financial aid and serving as a informational clearing-house to those unable to get home. With hundreds of thousands of Europeans displaced and facing starvation, Hoover was asked by the American Ambassador to organize a mobilization of immediate aid from neutral countries. Lou Hoover worked with him, raising money and facilitating transportation of the first boatload of food to those in need. Travelling between the U.S. and London, she concurrently became an organizer of the American Red Cross' Canteen Escort Service, which arranged the trans-Atlantic transportation home of wounded servicemen, create a hospital center and established a fleet of ambulances. King Albert I of Belgium decorated her in appreciation for her substantive work, in 1919.
In 1917, when America entered the war, Herbert Hoover was appointed chief of the U.S. Food Administration. This brought the Hoovers to live in Washington. Lou Hoover gave speeches on how Americans could practically conserve food that was needed for American forces and ongoing refugee relief efforts. The encouraging of Americans to go one day a week without wheat, and another day a week without meat, and using as little sugar as possible, came to be known as “Hoovering” and Lou Hoover offered recipes, and urged citizens to plant and grow their own produce.Lou Hoover worked with the Girl Scouts as a National Commissioner (1917-1918).
Lou Hoover played a substantive and important role at the national level in the founding years of the Girl Scouts. During the Harding and Coolidge Administrations, Lou Hoover was first Vice President (1921), then promoted to President of the organization (1922-1925), then returned to being Vice President (1925-1929). She also served as Chairman of the Girl Scouts National Board of Directors for part of this time (1925-1928). She even assisted her sister Jean Large, a professional writer, in drafting Nancy Goes Scouting, a book for young adults in the late 1920’s.
Lou Hoover visited the territory of Alaska in July of 1923, joining her husband as part of President Warren Harding’s presidential junket there by ship. With the Hardings in San Francisco at the time of the President’s sudden death, she interacted with the press as a buffer for Florence Harding.
Lou Hoover headed a national Women’s Conference on Law Enforcement, through the General Federation of Women’s Clubs on 11 April 1924. A month later, in St. Paul, Minnesota, she addressed the National Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teachers Association. That autumn, she was host to women of some thirty-nine nations, representatives to the International Council of Women’s Peace Conference. In May of 1927, in a speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution, she voiced her support for the freer, more revealing, clothing of young women of the era, considering the style to be “sensible.” With her snowy-white hair, she annually accepted the role of “Mrs. Claus” at the Washington’s Children Hospital.
In 1922 she was named as the only woman on the board as a vice president of the National Amateur Athletic Association. Lou Hoover had joined the association board, with the intention of expanding to women its message of the physical and mental value of athletics. She helped for found and served as President of its Women’s Division (1923-1940). Among the issues she sought to address were the arguments against women joining in sporting competitions such as the Olympics, and the need for more sports facilities, trainers and coaches for women.
Lou Hoover assumed no formal role in her husband’s presidential campaigns. She joined him in a pre-inauguration goodwill trip to Honduras, San Salvador, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Latin America. Immediately preceding the 1929 swearing-in ceremony of her husband as President in the U.S. Capitol Building, Lou Hoover and the outgoing First Lady Grace Coolidge were not escorted and lost their way in the labyrinth of hallways that led to the West Front, where the ceremonies were to take place/ This delayed the ceremony.
Lou Hoover decided to restrict the degree of her activism once she assumed what she believed to a be a public duty which required a more subdued traditionalism. But she continued to deliver speeches in auditoriums and over the radio. Just over a month after becoming First Lady, her speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution was carried on the radio. Others soon followed. With a great interest in the popular films of her era, Lou Hoover had equipment placed in the oval room of the family quarters to screen sound motion pictures for her guests. The equipment and its installation was donated by a Hollywood studio. She also used her own silent movie camera in her private life. During the 1932 kidnapping of aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby son, Lou Hoover kept in close touch with the child’s mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a personal friend.
Lou Hoover furnished the private West Sitting Hall of the second floor of the White House, the large central area of the family quarters, in what was called a “California style,” with palm trees and other tropical plants, birds singing in hanging cages and outdoor grass carpeting. For her three small grandchildren, who lived with the Hoovers in the White House for several months in 1929 and 1930, she had a fireproof playroom furnished. She also took an avid interest in the historical character of the old mansion. She and the President gathered furniture known to have existed or been used by Abraham Lincoln in a guest room that was used as a “Lincoln Study.” She sought items used by President James Monroe and his wife and also commissioned exact replicas of other items they had used, gathering them into another upstairs room and thus christened the shorter-lived “Monroe Room” (to be known in the late 20th century as the “Treaty Room” and then the “President’s Study”).
In August 1929, Herbert and Lou Hoover discovered that there was a community of impoverished Appalachian families in nearby Virginia, with no tax base to provide a school for their children. The couple decided to establish a school for the local mountain children, as well as a small residence for the teacher they hired to instruct them. It opened on February 24, 1930, known as “The President’s Community School.”
As First Lady, Lou Hoover continued her belief in the equality of women and men. In her 1929 remarks to the 4-H Club broadcast on NBC, for example, she emphasized that housework was for men too, and that boys should learn to clean the house and wash the dishes along with the girls. Lou Hoover paid entirely for the higher education of a number of women. She received a number of honorary degrees as First Lady – far more than any of her predecessors: Swathmore College (1929), Elmira College (1930), Goucher College (1931), Tufts College (1932), Wooster College (1932). She had also received honorary degrees before and after her tenure as First Lady: Mills College (1923), Whittier College (1928), and Stanford University (1941). In addition, several schools were named for her, ranging from Lou Henry Hoover Elementary School in Whittier, California (1938) to Lou Henry Elementary School, in Waterloo, Iowa (2005).
Lou Hoover would drive herself in her own car around Washington, and could often be seen walking along the area of monuments to the south of the White House and along the streets of the city. She worked in the flower gardens of the mansion, and walked her Elkhound and German shepherd dogs on the property. She enjoyed riding her horse in nearby Rock Creek Park.
Although she did not publicly speak out against racism, Lou Hoover's actions displayed contempt for the notion. In 1921, when she had finalized the purchase of their Washington home, Lou Hoover refused to sign a legal agreement that would forbid the Hoovers from later selling the property to African-Americans or Jews. With her encouragement, her husband welcomed the African-American president of the Tuskegee Institute to lunch in the White House. Lou Hoover also indicated an interest in Native Americans. She invited the Yakima tribe’s Chief Yowlache to perform at a post-dinner concert that also included a traditional opera singer and harpist. Appearing in the colorful full tribal costume of his tribe, Yowlache demonstrated Zuni Indian tribal chants – as well as Italian operatic arias. In her post-White House years, Lou Hoover also voiced her strong desire to enlist more Native-Americans in the Girl Scouts.
As the great depression worsened, Lou Hoover began to receive hundreds and then thousands of letters from citizens appealing for particular types of help – money, food, employment, clothing – she took it upon herself to respond personally. She would refer the request for support to a wealthy friend or organization such as the Red Cross, Community Chest, Salvation Army and American Friends Service Committee, and would often send a personal “loan” to the stranger. Her greatest effort in response to the Great Depression was organizing and inspiring a volunteer network among the Girl Scouts. She sought to inspire Girl Scouts to go into their communities and discover which families were struggling and then offer help.
Lou Hoover unwittingly contributed to the growing public perception of her husband as failing to grasp the needs of the masses who suffered during the Depression. At many state dinner and other functions where food was offered to guests, Lou Hoover often served expensive produce that was out-of-season or imported, at a time when many families were having difficulty buying enough food to survive.
In the autumn of 1932, Lou Hoover accompanied the President for six weeks of his whistlestop re-election campaign, along some 12,000 miles through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and Pennsylvania. Occasionally she made impromptu remarks to crowds from the back of the train. The unrelenting attacks on her husband for the Depression and his failed re-election in 1932 left Lou Hoover uncharacteristically bitter. Her husband would later write that “she was oversensitive, and the stabs of political life which, no doubt, were deserved by me, hurt her greatly.”
In the spring of 1933, the Hoovers returned to their Palo Alto home. Lou Hoover became active in her community. She made her large home available to the Stanford University community for various functions. She worked closely with Dr. Helen Pryor, Stanford’s Women’s Student Health Services director in the effort to provide better training for physical education teachers for women and proper facilities for them. In November of 1934, with the influx of poor migrant families into urban California areas from those states where crops were devastated by the Dust Bowl, Lou Hoover assumed a fundraising role for the Community Chest Drives of Los Angeles and San Francisco. She also resumed her work on the local level with the Girl Scouts. In her second period as National President of the Girl Scouts, she was instrumental in forging one of the group’s most successful fundraising tools that would soon come to be a symbol of the organization itself – the Girl Scout cookie.
Lou Hoover did not accompany her husband on his trips to Europe in 1937 and 1938. When the war in Europe first broke out in 1939, Hoover resumed his legendary relief work for European refugees. Finding it easier to conduct this work from the East Coast, he relocated to a suite at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel’s residential building known as “The Towers,” in New York City. Lou Hoover joined him there. American entry into World War II in 1941 had Lou Hoover leading a volunteer drive for refugee relief, this time as the Western Women’s Committee chair, as part of the Salvation Army’s effort to provide clothing. On the American homefront, it was through the Girl Scouts, that she implored the young members to do their part by collecting the scrap metal that could be used in munitions production, growing produce for themselves, their families and communities in Victory Gardens, and also selling defense bonds door-to-door much as they were now selling cookies.
Without warning, after attending a concert in New York City, Lou Hoover suffered an acute heart attack and died suddenly on January 7, 1944 at the age of 69. It was only after her death that her husband, by clearing out her files and drawers, discovered the extent to which she had provided financial help to those hundreds of anonymous Americans who had asked for some sort of help during the Great Depression. Sher was buried at Alta Mesa Cemetery, Palo Alto, California and re-interred in 1964 at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa.