Lou Henry Hoover

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Lou Henry Hoover (1874-1944)

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Lou Henry Hoover (March 29, 1874 – January 7, 1944) was the wife of President Herbert Hoover and First Lady of the United States.

Admirably equipped to preside at the White House, Lou Henry Hoover brought to it long experience as wife of a man eminent in public affairs at home and abroad. She had shared his interests since they met in a geology lab at Stanford University. She was a freshman, he a senior, and he was fascinated, as he declared later, "by her whimsical mind, her blue eyes and a broad grinnish smile."

She was born in Waterloo, Iowa. She grew up in Iowa until she was 10 years old, when her father, Charles D. Henry, decided that the climate of southern California would favor the health of his wife, Florence. The family moved to Whittier, California, later the childhood home of President Richard Nixon.

Charles Henry took his daughter on camping trips in the hills—her greatest pleasures in her early teens. Lou became a fine horsewoman; she hunted, and preserved specimens with the skill of a taxidermist; she developed an enthusiasm for rocks, minerals, and mining. After studying at two normal schools in California, first at the Los Angeles Normal School (now University of California, Los Angeles), then transferring to and graduating with a teaching certificate from the San Jose Normal School (now San José State University), she entered Stanford in 1894—"slim and supple as a reed," a classmate recalled, with a "wealth of brown hair"—and completed her course (becoming the first woman in Stanford's geology department) before marrying Herbert Hoover. They were married in a civil ceremony at her parents home in Monterey on February 10, 1899. A Catholic priest and friend of the family, Father Mestres, performed the ceremony because there was no Protestant minister in town.

The newlyweds left at once for China, where he won quick recognition as a mining engineer. His career took them about the globe—Ceylon, Burma, Siberia, Australia, Egypt, Japan, and Europe—while her talent for homemaking eased their time in a dozen foreign lands. Lou and her husband collaborated on a translation from the Latin of a classic 16th-century treatise on mining, Georgius Agricola's De Re Metallica. Two sons, Herbert Charles (August 4, 1903 - July 9, 1969) and Allan Henry(July 17, 1907 - November 4, 1993), were born during her life.

During World War I, while Hoover earned world fame administering emergency relief programs, she was often with him but spent some time with the boys in California. In 1919 she saw construction begin for a long-planned home in Palo Alto, California, which she had helped design. In 1921, however, Hoover's appointment as United States Secretary of Commerce took the family to Washington. There she spent eight years busy with the social duties of a Cabinet wife and an active participation in the Girl Scout movement, including service as its president.

The Hoovers moved into the White House in 1929, and the First Lady of the United States welcomed visitors with poise and dignity throughout the administration. However, when the first day of 1933 dawned, Mr. and Mrs. Hoover were away on holiday. Their absence ended the New Year's Day tradition of the public being greeted personally by the President at a reception in the Executive Mansion.

Mrs. Hoover paid with her own money the cost of reproducing furniture owned by James Monroe for a period sitting room in the White House. She also restored Abraham Lincoln's study for her husband's use. She dressed handsomely; she "never fitted more perfectly into the White House picture than in her formal evening gown" remarked one secretary.

In 1933 they retired to Palo Alto, but maintained an apartment in New York. Mr. Hoover learned the full lavishness of his wife's charities only after her death there on January 7, 1944, at 69 (almost 3 months before her 70th birthday); she had helped the education, he said, "of a multitude of boys and girls." In retrospect he stated her ideal for the position she had held: "a symbol of everything wholesome in American life."

The Lou Henry and Herbert Hoover House in Palo Alto's foothills is now the official residence of the President of Stanford University. It stands not terribly far from the campus's Hoover Tower, home of the Hoover Institution, and is designated a National Historic Landmark. Lou Henry Hoover Elementary School in Whittier (built in 1938) was named in her honor. In 2005, Lou Henry Elementary School was opened in her honor in Waterloo.

Lou Henry Hoover was originally buried in Palo Alto, California, after her death from a heart attack, but upon her husband's death in 1964, she was re-interred in West Branch, Iowa. Her statue marks the approximate spot where her childhood home in Waterloo was located, at the corner of 4th and Washington Streets.