If posterity has been unsparing (and bipartisan) in its critique of Hoover, it's still mild compared to the open hostility he faced in his own time. Hoover's reelection campaign launched in the darkest days of the crisis: Unemployment hovered at roughly 25%; over 5,000 banks were under water; a drought ripped through the heartland. The campaign was over before it started. Heckled mercilessly, pelted with rotten produce, Hoover wasn't even safe on his campaign train. In Wisconsin, a man was caught pulling up railroad spikes ahead of the Hoover express, and in Nevada, two more men were discovered attempting to sabotage the tracks with dynamite. "A walking corpse" by the end, Hoover slouched through Election Day, the loser in 42 out of 48 states.

It was his first and final elected position, and the defeat must have stung all the worse for the contrast with his glittering, pre-presidential triumphs. For Hoover, the presidency was the culmination of a storybook career that had taken an orphan boy to the pinnacle of business success, then into international humanitarian work, and only then into politics. Hoover, it can be said, came to the White House fully formed--and already wildly famous around the world.

The man who left office a national pariah was, only a decade and a half before he entered politics, a genuine international hero. His early career gave rise to present-day crisis response and helped form America's modern approach to conflict--although that legacy remains buried by economic wreckage.

Two weeks shy of Hoover's 40th birthday in 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated, the Austro-Hungarian Empire invaded Serbia, and Europe erupted into war. A week later, Germany invaded neutral Belgium in an effort to cut through to France. Though the Belgians resisted, the Germans outmatched and overpowered them. Britain, meanwhile, blockaded Belgium's ports in an effort to squeeze the Germans into submission.

At the war's outset, the Belgians imported three-quarters of their food, but between an occupying army and a blockading navy, supplies began to run dangerously low. Whatever stocks of food Belgium had in reserve were either destroyed or commandeered by the German army, and that year's harvest was ruined. Before long, it was clear that Belgium was descending into a starvation crisis--and that neither the British nor the Germans were going to offer succor.

For Hoover, the crisis couldn't have come at a better time. A self-made, prosperous mining engineer with almost 100,000 people in his employ, he was living in London, helping Americans abroad return home, and growing increasingly antsy about how to spend his days. He had achieved private success but ached for public significance. "Just making money isn't enough," he sighed to a friend. He was desperate to find some way onto what he later called "the slippery road of public life." The Belgian crisis, he could see, was tailor-made for him.