Hoover was the sort of wizard of logistical efficiency prized by the new era. Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn

Last year, the economist Robert Gordon published a book titled “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” which set out to debunk the notion that we live in a great age of innovation. The celebrated inventions of the past half century, like the personal computer and the Internet, Gordon argues, have increased productivity and transformed people’s lives far less than did the leading inventions of the half century between 1870 and 1920, like household electricity, indoor plumbing, and the automobile. “Most aspects of life in 1870 (except for the rich) were dark, dangerous, and involved backbreaking work,” he wrote in a paper that appeared a few years before the book. People’s homes were dark and poorly heated, and smoky from candles and oil lamps. “But the biggest inconvenience was the lack of running water,” Gordon noted. “Every drop of water for laundry, cooking, and indoor chamber pots had to be hauled in by the housewife, and wastewater hauled out.”

It was into the lower end of such circumstances that Herbert Hoover, the thirty-first President of the United States, was born, in 1874. Hoover was the son of devout Quakers who lived in the frontier village of West Branch, Iowa. His father, a blacksmith, died when Herbert was six, and his mother died three years later. At the age of eleven, he was sent, by train, along a just completed rail line, to a small settlement in Oregon, to live with an uncle, who treated him coldly and loaded him down with chores. Quiet, awkward, and a poor student, Hoover somehow managed, by his young adulthood, to have made himself into an exemplar of his generation’s America, a technologically advanced world power. By early middle age, he was a celebrated international hero. The times demanded industrial-scale achievements, not limited to industry itself; Hoover was a public-service superman, a mega-bureaucrat. In 1910, the Kansas journalist William Allen White—who became one of Hoover’s closest friends and his leading publicist—proclaimed the dawn of a new age: “Just as the same hundred men or so are the directors of all our big banks, of all our great railroads, and of many of our public service corporations—directing the centripetal forces of American society—so another group of a hundred men, more or less, is found directing many of the societies, associations, conventions, assemblies, and leagues behind the benevolent movements—the centrifugal forces of American society.” Within a few years, Hoover had placed himself at the head of that second group.

Among the cruelties of popular political history is that almost everyone below the level of President winds up being forgotten, and one-term Presidents are usually remembered as failures. Nobody demonstrates this better than Hoover. He was elected in 1928 with four hundred and forty-four electoral votes, carrying all but eight states—and it was the first time he had run for political office. Four years later, he got fifty-nine electoral votes and carried just six states. What intervened between his two Presidential runs was the 1929 stock-market crash and the early years of the Great Depression. Hoover was doomed to be remembered as the man who was too rigidly conservative to react adeptly to the Depression, as the hapless foil to the great Franklin Roosevelt, and as the politician who managed to turn a Republican country into a Democratic one. (The Democratic majority in the House of Representatives that began during Hoover’s Presidency lasted for all but four of the next sixty-two years.) Even now, if you were a politician running for office, you would invoke Hoover only to compare your opponent to him.

“Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times” (Knopf), by Kenneth Whyte, the former editor of the Canadian newsmagazine Maclean’s, helpfully lays out a long and copious résumé that doesn’t fit on this stamp of dismissal. An inaugural graduate of Stanford, where he studied mechanical engineering and geology, Hoover became a mining engineer at a time when that was as glamorous and potentially profitable a career as launching a tech startup would be for a Stanford graduate now. His first job was as a two-dollar-a-day “mucker” in a California mine, but not much more than a year later he was supervising large gold-mining operations in Western Australia for a prominent London firm, at a sizable salary. Before he turned thirty, he was married and a father, running a large gold mine in Tientsin, China, and highly prosperous. Hoover seems to have been an almost brutally tough, obsessively hardworking manager; certainly charm was not the secret to his success. “It simply comes to this: men hate me more after they work for me than before,” Whyte quotes Hoover writing to his brother during his Australia period. He soon broke with his employers and struck out on his own, mainly as a financier of mining projects, rather than as a manager of them, and did very well for himself. The Hoovers moved to London and lived in a large town house. In his memoirs, Hoover remarked, “Pre-war England was the most comfortable place in which to live in the whole world. That is, if one had the means to take part in its upper life. The servants were the best trained and the most loyal of any nationality.”

The years of Hoover’s rise, the first two decades of the twentieth century, were a heyday for those innovations which, in ways Robert Gordon has emphasized, made America modern. It was also the period in which a good deal of the familiar institutional architecture of the United States was created: big corporations and universities, the first government regulatory agencies, structured and licensed professions, charitable foundations, think tanks. The project had a glamour that’s hard to conjure today. Liberal intellectuals like Walter Lippmann and Herbert Croly saw the establishment of a class of trained, technocratic experts as essential to the future of democracy. In business, efficiency experts like Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank Gilbreth systematized the operations of industrial mass production, down to the physical movements of workers on an assembly line. Psychologists like Lewis Terman invented tests that could be used to sort the population en masse. Hoover was a creature of the engineering division of this milieu. “It is a great profession,” he wrote in his memoirs. “There is the fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standard of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer’s high privilege.”

Biographers usually become well acquainted with their subjects not just as public figures but also as people who lead ordinary daily lives in the company of their co-workers, friends, and family. Unless the subject is a monster, all that intimacy typically turns the biographer into a personal partisan. This did not happen with Whyte and Hoover. Dour, phlegmatic, unreflective, and unrevealing, Hoover doesn’t come across as being much fun to spend time with, even if the time you’re spending is in his Presidential library, in Iowa. Biographers want psychological access, but Hoover, though the records he left behind are vast, has the quality of not being personally present in a life that, for a long while, produced one triumph after another. He was “largely a mystery to himself,” as Whyte puts it. At one point during his account of Hoover’s rise, we’re offered this character assessment: “He was determined to succeed by any means necessary, subordinating questions of right or wrong to the good of his career and driving himself crazy with his hunger for power and control, his hypersensitivity to perceived threats to his independence and stature, and his overarching need to measure up.”