Herbert Hoover: The Man and His Work

by Vernon L. Kellogg

Some of the results expected from this im

ported miner were rather startling. For instance, age-long rumor had it that the Emperor's hunting park at Jehol overlay immensely valuable gold deposits. The Minister intimated to the Director that he would like to know the real facts about this as soon as possible. As the park lay in a little-explored region of southern Manchuria and was a place of much historical as well as geological interest, the Director decided to make a personal examination of it. After the expedition had been out several days, he was told that on the next they would come in sight of the Great Royal Park. Accordingly on the next day the guide of the caravan took him, with one or two of the Caucasian members of his staff and an interpreter, off from the road the grand retinue was following, and by winding paths up to a hill top which commanded a superb prospect.

"There," said the interpreter, with a wave of his hand toward the stretching prospect of beautiful valleys, low broad hills and mountain side, "there is the Hunting Park of Jehol." Then, turning complacently to the Director of Mines, he asked, simply: "Is there gold be

neath it?" And interpreter and guide, and later, even more important officials, were stupefied to learn that the wonderful imported man who knew all about gold could not say offhand, from his vantage point, miles away, whether there was gold under the Park or not. And, more disturbing still, that he probably could not say anything about it at all without actually tramping over the sacred soil and perhaps sacrilegiously digging into it.

Such occasionally necessary confessions of incompetence made a little trouble, but only a little. However much the under men lacked knowledge about minerals and mines and how to find out about them, the head of the Department, Chang, knew enough to know that if his young Director confessed inability to meet certain demands it was because there was more wrong with the demands than with the engineer. But the real fly in the ointment soon began to make itself visible. It was not a disillusionment on the part of the Chinese officials in connection with their foreign expert, but a disillusionment on his part in regard to his real position and opportunities for accomplishing

something for China. He began more and more clearly to realize that he could investigate and advise as much as he liked but that he could really do, in his understanding of doing, comparatively little. The modern West cannot make over the immemorial East in a day or even a year.

Gradually the young engineer came to realize that while his examinations and reports were all very welcome, and whatever he could suggest for improvement in technical detail, resulting in immediate greater output of the mines already working, was gladly accepted, there was no willingness to accept advice leading to changes in administrative and general organization matters. And to the modern engineer efficiency in these matters is as much a part of successful mining as skilled digging and good metallurgy. Suggestions looking toward getting more work out of the men, or cutting down the payrolls by removing the thirty per cent of the names on them that seemed to have no bodily attachments, were frowned on. These things interfered with "squeeze," and "squeeze" was a traditional part of Chinese

mining. Foreign advisors and helpers were all very well when they found gold, but not so well when they found graft. A crisis was visible in the offing. But this particular crisis did not arrive, for another larger and more serious one came more swiftly on and arrived almost unheralded. It was the Boxer Uprising.

The outbreak found Hoover at Tientsin having but recently returned from Pekin with Mrs. Hoover, and both just recovering from severe attacks of influenza. If opportunity for thorough organizing of the mines of China had failed him he now had full scope for organizing a military defense of his home and wife and his many employees, foreign and native, for Tientsin, for a month, was the scene of hot fighting. It was a besieged household in a beleaguered city. Hoover could have gotten out with his wife and few Caucasian assistants at the beginning of the trouble, but he would not desert his few hundred Chinese helpers and their families—and his wife would not desert him. So they staid on together through all the rifle and shell fire and conflagrations

of the Tientsin siege, building and defending barricades of rice and sugar sacks, organizing food and water supplies, and cheerfully "carrying on" in the face of certain death, and worse, if the outnumbering fanatic Boxers happened to win.