David Burner (1937–2010)

One of the challenges in writing a biography of Herbert Hoover is coming to terms with the sheer length and scope of his life and career. Over the course of his many years Hoover was a mining engineer, an author, a humanitarian, a wartime administrator, a cabinet secretary, and a president of the United States, all during one of the momentous periods in American and world history. Recounting it all poses a formidable challenge for any author; [a:George H. Nash|3849|George H. show more Nash|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/m_50x66-82093808bca726cb3249a493fbd3bd0f.png], who was commissioned by the Hoover Library to write a multi-volume biography, took three volumes just to chronicle the first forty-four years of Hoover’s life, leaving it to three other historians to write another three volumes addressing the rest of it.

By this standard David Burner’s achievement in summarizing Hoover’s life within the covers of a single book is a commendable one. Doing so requires him to trade detail for accessibility, yet it also allows him to more easily delineate themes running through the course of Hoover’s life. Burner sees Hoover as a far more activist and progressive figure than is often remembered, one who pursued a number of significant reforms as both Secretary of Commerce and as president. When faced with the successive economic crises of the Great Depression, he moved quickly and aggressively to provide solutions, many of which served as the foundation for the later New Deal. But his response to Depression was ultimately hampered by his commitment to a philosophy of voluntary cooperation that proved inadequate to the magnitude of the crisis, by his poor relations with Congress, and by his technocratic public persona.

That Burner succeeds in making Hoover a sympathetic figure is a testament to the quality of his analysis. Considerable space is devoted to explaining his views, and Hoover’s consistency to them is one of the themes that emerges. Yet ultimately this is a choice that involves some sacrifice, which is reflected in chapters on Hoover’s tenure as Secretary of Commerce and (especially) his post-presidential career that feel rushed and lacking in sufficient detail. Such compromises are forgivable, though, given the result: a book which is still the best single volume on Herbert Hoover’s life and career, one that should be read by anyone seeking to understand his impact on American history. show less

What justification do we give ourselves for studying history? "Historical study benefits us less as a guide to politics than as a goad to imagination." [xii] With our gaze ranging more widely through time and space, we develop a sense of possibilities. We free ourselves "from being enslaved by our era". This solid textbook about a "great" America, is intended to activate our vision, enabling each of us to tell the narrative of hope which has always driven the enlivened life.

Bottom line: The show more documents and personalities annihilate the Randian and Dixiecratic narratives which are now blistered across the privatized school system of America. show less

Making Peace With the 60's by David. Burner, Princeton (1996)

"The rights movement sought, in effect, to bring black Americans under the Declaration of Independence. It stood for one of the truest beliefs of the American experiment: that it should be an aim of a good society to eliminate, as far as possible, the arbitrary and vicious barriers that background and surroundings erect against the full achievement of personal identity. That principal will never, can never, become fully realized, show more but it is an imperative toward American politics should strive. Nonviolence was fitting for a movement demanding liberation from arbitrary constraints, for that conduct fosters self-discovery and self-making. But another aspirant to the liberation of black Americans had been long present, and in the middle and late 1960s this alternative vision gained prominence once again. This was the concept of race as the nearly exclusive foundation of the identity of African-Americans. As beguiling as nationalism, that corrupter of recent Western and world history, as seductive to American blacks as white racism has been to whites, that embrace of blackness came close to negating the civil rights movement" (p. 49).

"As to the more aggressive assertiveness that accompanied black power: some of this found its rationale in a selective reading of a subtle and insightful book, The Wretched of the Earth, by the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, born in Martinique and a resident of Algeria at the time of his death in 1961. Though he wrote not of the United States but of the Third World, Fanon had wide renown, and black power leaders, among them Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver, were drawn to his work. Fanon's thesis is that only through active resistance to their oppressors can oppressed people achieve inner as well as outer freedom, and an authentic collective identity" (p. 52).

The radical black power movement excluded those not black enough for its liking. "In 1967, the year that SNCC officially excluded whites from membership, CORE did the same" (p. 68).

"Though the civil rights movement won formal and in many ways informal equality and brought sizable numbers of blacks into the middle class, it failed to cut the Gordian knots, the most enduring social problems that came out of the country's racial past. Since the great days of the rights demonstrations, black Americans have been prey, more than the rest of the country, to forces corrosive of social order. Especially visible is a black under class, trapped in a world of drugs, crime, illiteracy, and shattered families. The instabilities of black families, a growing number of them headed by women and mired in welfare dependency, were at the core of black social malaise. So argued the sociologist and politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan in a controversial position paper published in the mid-sixties. Today far more blacks die annually, victims of other blacks, than were killed in all the lynchings in American history. Others are living victims not of the Ku Klux Klan but of street drugs supplied by their black brothers. Drugs, disintegrating families, street violence--these are the ills that threaten black communities, and no vocabulary of black rage will begin effectively to address them" (p. 82)."

This is truly a stellar example of scholarship about the 1960s. show less

4137 Herbert Hoover A Public Life, by David Burner (read 5 Mar 2006) This was read in pursuance of my aim to read a biography of every U.S. president, a goal which I have come pretty close to reaching. This work on Hoover, published in 1979, is fair but not adulatory (I would not be appreciative of such an overly-favorable biography of Hoover, growing up as I did in the Depression when box elder bugs were called Hoover bugs--it was years before I knew they were properly called box elder show more bugs--and old cars converted to being pulled by horses were called Hoover carts. The account of the 1932 campaign is a joy to read and the entire book was fun to read, tho the account of his years (1921-1928) as Secretary of Commerce was a bit dry. Hoover was quite sound on foreign policy, and many of the New Deal programs were considered in Hoover's time. In fact, Hoover told Tom Dewey that he, Hoover, probably would have signed many of the laws which FDR did if they had been put before him when he was president--despite what Hoover said during the New Deal days of what FDR did. show less