NFF Gold Medal Recipients
Biography
Herbert Hoover credited himself with being the first student at Stanford, being the first student of the first class to sleep in the dormitory. Hoover formed and managed Stanford’s first football team. He helped organize the first “Big Game” between Stanford and California in 1892. He graduated with a degree in geology, and went to Western Australia in 1897 as an employee of Bewick, Moreing & Co., a London-based gold mining company. He was promoted to general manager for the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company and forced to relocate to China.
Hoover, born to a Quaker family, was a professional mining engineer. He served as head of the U.S. Food Administration during World War I and as the United States Secretary of Commerce in the 1920s under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. He promoted partnerships between government and business with his concept of economic modernization. Hoover easily won the republican nomination for the 1928 election, despite having no elected office experience. Hoover won the election in a landslide over Al Smith, becoming the most recent cabinet secretary to be elected president and only the second since Taft to be elected with no electoral experience or high military rank.
When the stock market crashed eight months into his term, Hoover attempted to combat the Great Depression with government enforced efforts, public works projects such as the Hoover Dam, tariffs and increases in corporate taxes. Although they did not stop the Great Depression, they served as groundwork for some of the New Deal policies implemented by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hoover passed away on Oct. 20, 1964, at the age of 90.
