Herbert Hoover and Gold

     I was appointed to Stanford in 1941. Herbert Hoover, once the nation's great idealist, was now its most hated man. The faculty were loud in their attacks. Hoover, traumatized by events, has become an embittered, grumpy old man, which only made things worse. (Moral: Don't become a grumpy old man). The March/April 2000 issue of Stanford has an article by William J. Coughlin on "Hoover down under", the title of which is "Into the outback: How the Young Herbert Hoover Made His Name--and Fortune--in Australia."
     It describes the gold fields in the central area of Western Australia, north of Kalgourlie, as hellishly hot as the Klondike was cold. It literally drove workers to drink. Hoover was ruthlessly efficient, and this made his fortune. It was the period when "Taylorism", technically planned production, was the aim of business, regardless of the feelings of the workers, a system satirized in Charlie Chaplinīs "Modern Times." The paradox is that Hoover was at heart a deeply humane person, who even wrote love poetry.
     It was also the time of the sacred gold standard, when gold was viewed as the Gibraltar of the economic system. Gold has the nasty habit of turning up in inhospitable places or at absurd depths, as in South Africa and Brazil. The work inevitably breeds discontent and even revolution.
     As the computer age takes us into the era of paperless transactions, this world of ruthless efficiency in the search for gold seems like the distant past. Workers must be treated with a mixture of firmness and understanding. The strike which has nearly crippled Boeing was the result of the appointment of a new boss, who was a paragon of Taylorism. It doesn't work.

Ronald Hilton - 3/24/00