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Public perception of Herbert Hoover’s legacy as engineer-humanitarian-president remains a debated topic amongst historians and presidential scholars. Less explored is how biographers promoted Hoover’s life story during the 1920 and 1928 presidential elections. Themes of failure and negativity pervade Hoover’s legacy, but before his presidency he was the subject of campaign biographies that crafted him as a promising presidential character in the American story. Hoover’s foreign career became controversial in isolationist America, making biography a reactionary platform to prove his “Americanism.” Drawing from Hoover scholarship and literary theory of biography and serialization, my thesis examines three early campaign biographies: Rose Wilder Lane’s The Making of Herbert Hoover (1920); Vernon Kellogg’s Herbert Hoover: The Man and His Work (1920); and Will Irwin’s Herbert Hoover: A Reminiscent Biography (1928).
I argue that campaign biographies of Herbert Hoover were driven by two aims: one, to clarify concerns about claims of Hoover’s un-Americanness voiced through media outlets; and, two, to establish “American character” as the driving force behind his life story. Campaign biography was one textual space where presidential evaluation took place. While Hoover appeared in many publications, campaign biography allowed readers to follow his life story over several hours, days, or months, forming a literary connection between themselves and the candidate. Hoover was not just a real-life individual; he was an American character the public could read about, evaluate, and “know” on the printed page. Voters acted in favor or against their textual interpretation of his life story at the polls. Biography, a physical life selectively arranged textually, is an understudied but critical form of presidential evaluation.
Through tracing textual history and close reading analysis, I blend historical methods of inquiry with literary textual analysis to shape the understanding of how biography as a genre crafts historical actors as characters who are products of their political, cultural, and social climate. The first chapter examines the debate surrounding Hoover’s Americanism, then each biography receives its own chapter informed by archival research at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library & Museum, the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, and more.