Buried: Herbert Hoover Library and Birthplace, West Branch, Iowa
Thirty-first President - 1929-1933
Born: August 10, 1874, in West Branch, Iowa
Died: October 20, 1964, in New York, New York
Age at death: 90
Cause of death: Bleeding from upper gastrointestinal tract;
strained vascular system
Final words: Unknown
Admission to Herbert Hoover Library and
Museum: $6.00
Though many associate his name with the bread lines of the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover was also responsible for feeding millions in Europe as part of the relief efforts during World War I. Hoover gained worldwide attention for his management of American aid programs that led to his appointment as Warren Harding’s secretary of commerce in 1921. He was groomed unsuccessfully for the Republican vice presidential nomination in 1924, only to capture the top spot four years later.
In 1894 while studying geology at Stanford University, Hoover fell in love with Lou Henry, the only female student in the geology department. The two married on California’s Pacific Coast on February 10, 1899. He earned his millions as a mining engineer before entering politics. The couple entertained lavishly during their years in the White House but did it all with their own funds. Hoover never accepted a salary for his service as president.
The stock market crashed in the first year of Hoover’s administration. Unemployment continued to rise. Americans looking for a change elected Franklin Roosevelt to the presidency in 1932. Herbert Hoover attended Roosevelt’s inauguration and retreated to his home in California. He later settled in New York City where he became a vocal critic of his successor’s administration.
When war raged in Europe, Hoover returned to his earlier role as a relief organizer. During the Truman administration, he served as chairman of a commission that studied the effectiveness of the executive branch.
Entering his tenth decade, Hoover’s rapidly declining health left him nearly deaf and blind. He spent his last days in a suite on the thirty-first floor of the Waldorf Towers in New York City. On October 19, 1964, Hoover slipped into a coma. He died the next morning of massive internal bleeding at age ninety.
The former president’s closed coffin lay on public view for two days at Saint Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in New York City. There was also a brief private memorial service. Both of the candidates in that year’s presidential race, Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, paid their respects. Former presidents Truman and Eisenhower were ill and unable to attend.
Herbert Hoover’s boyhood home. His grave lies across the lawn to the left.
Hoover’s body was taken to Washington by train where it lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda. President Johnson placed a wreath of red and white carnations before the funeral bier. The formal state occasion included a military guard and twenty-one-gun salute. Hoover’s casket rested on the same catafalque used for John F. Kennedy’s funeral the year before. The Senate chaplain, Frederick Brown Harris, remembered that “we bear the worn bodily tenement of the oldest chief executive to this highest pedestal of honor where so recently lay the martyred form of the youngest.” He had it slightly wrong: Herbert Hoover was then our second-oldest former president. John Adams was 176 days older when he died. (And Gerald Ford passed them both, living to be 93 years, 165 days old.)
This museum display shows Hoover fly fishing, a favorite pastime
Hoover was buried in West Branch, Iowa according to his Quaker tradition. He had chosen the site himself, on a hill overlooking the two-room cottage where he was born. The simple graveside service was attended by seventy-five thousand mourners, some of whom had flown from Washington. Fifteen limousines carried the official delegation some thirty-three miles from the airport in Cedar Rapids. As the sun shone, Hoover’s coffin was lowered into the ground to the sounds of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” At the family’s request, there was no gun salute.
Lou Hoover, who preceded her husband in death by twenty years, had been buried at their alma mater. Her body was re-interred with her husband’s one month after his death.
The Hoover Library and Museum is located near his birthplace in West Branch, Iowa
Touring the Tomb at the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site
The Herbert Hoover National Historic Site is located in West Branch, Iowa, ten miles east of Iowa City and offers guided tours for the summer season. It is open daily from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. Admission to the historic site, including the birthplace and gravesite, is free. Admission to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum is $6.00 for adults and $3.00 for senior citizens. Children sixteen and under are admitted free.
From the east or west: Take I-80 to exit 254. Travel 0.4 miles north to the Visitors Center. Maps to the gravesite are available at the Visitors Center.
To reach the gravesite from the Hoover National Historic Site on Main Street, turn south on Parkside Drive. Follow Parkside Drive until reaching Library Road. Turn right on Library Road heading west. Follow the signs to President Hoover’s gravesite. Public parking is available near the gravesite.
To reach the grave on foot from the Historic Site, take the walkway from the Visitors Center to the Library Museum. Then follow signs to President Hoover’s gravesite.
For additional information
Herbert Hoover National Historic Site
110 Parkside Drive
P.O. Box 607
West Branch, IA 52358
Phone: (319) 643-2541
Fax: (319) 643-7864
www.nps.gov/heho
“‘I outlived the bastards,’ [Hoover] said.”
—Richard Norton Smith
The white marble gravestones of Herbert and Lou Hoover
Asked in the twilight of life how he managed to survive the long years of ostracism coinciding with the New Deal, Hoover gave a characteristically pungent response. “I outlived the bastards,” he said.
But not even Hoover could outrace the rigors of old age. In October 1964, he learned of a domestic accident involving one of his closest, if most unlikely, friends. “Bathtubs are a menace to ex-presidents,” he informed Harry Truman. “For as you may recall, a bathtub rose up and fractured my vertebrae when I was in Venezuela on your world famine mission in 1946.” It was the last communication sent from Hoover’s Waldorf Towers suite.
His death six days later at age 90 evoked twinges of guilt as well as grief. While he might be remembered by many as “the Great Objector,” columnist Walter Lippmann wrote, “that was the tragic result of having been run over by the Great Depression.” Such negativism was not in harmony with Hoover’s “generous, liberal and magnanimous nature.” In common with the crowds who assembled in New York, Washington, and Iowa to bid farewell to the nation’s thirty-first president, Lippmann preferred to remember Hoover as “a bold and brilliant philanthropist who binds up wounds and avoids inflicting them.”
—RNS