HERBERT HOOVER: PROGRESSIVE OR CONSERVATIVE? OR BOTH?

Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (New York: Knopf, 2017) ("Hoover's unexampled record of national service was more or less unanimously praised in hundreds of printed and spoken eulogies. [] Walter Lippmann claimed Hoover for the left, remembering him as a 'brilliant" and 'fascinating' progressive, and the natural heir of Woodrow Wilson [] 'It is impossible to catalogue the achievements of this extraordinary man,' wrote William F. Buckley, claiming Hoover for the right. [] The questioned where Hoover belongs in American political traditions remains a loaded one to this day. While he clearly played important roles in the development of both progressive and conservative traditions, neither side will embrace him for fear of contamination with the other. That one man can in one lifetime be a leader to opposed schools raises the inconvenient fact that they have more in common than not." Id. at 610. That is, most certainly, food for thought, especially in the second decade of the twenty-first century where America's civil war rages.).