A Woman of Adventure: The Life and Times of First Lady Lou Henry Hoover
By Annette B. Dunlap
Potomac Books, 2022

America’s 31st President, Herbert Hoover, might be unlucky in posthumous repute, but he’s been extremely fortunate in his biographers, including three recent examples, Herbert Hoover: A Life by Glen Jeansonne, Herbert Hoover in the White House by Charles Rappleye, and especially Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times by Kenneth Whyte. 

A very prominent thread running through all three of those books is the presence of Herbert Hoover’s forceful, remarkable wife, Lou Henry Hoover, the subject of Annette Dunlap’s new biography, A Woman of Adventure: The Life and Times of First Lady Lou Henry Hoover. “Hers is a story of courage, fortitude, and optimism,” Dunlap writes. “She deserves to have it told.” 

And it’s been over 20 years since she’s had it told, back in Anne Beiser Allen’s An Independent Woman (a work Dunlap references only once in her End Notes and doesn’t reference at all in her Bibliography because she doesn’t provide one). Lou Henry Hoover’s predecessors in the White House have had great biographies, most notably Carl Sferrazza Anthony’s engrossing 1998 biography of Florence Harding and the excellent Grace Coolidge and Her Era by Ishbel Ross. And enough ink has been spilled on Hoover’s First Lady successor, Eleanor Roosevelt, to overflow the Hoover Dam. 

Given such surroundings, readers could want more from A Woman of Adventure. For instance, since the book is written with such zest and deals with such a colorful and eventful life, it’s legitimate to want it to be longer than a little over 200 pages. Lou Henry Herbert was a fascinating woman, born in Iowa, raised in California, world traveller, holder of a degree in geology (the only woman in her class), ardent linguist (she used to quip to her husband in Chinese to thwart eavesdroppers), and indefatigable helpmeet to her endlessly pragmatic, emotionally deaf husband. Dunlap quotes a great deal from her surviving correspondence, and she crafts a large amount of such primary sources and reporting into a wonderfully full portrait of this First Lady. But even that portrait begins to feel too short (perhaps necessitated by the comparative lack of material; Allen’s book was virtually the same length). 

One possible remedy only sparsely used by Dunlap is to spend large amounts of attention on her subject’s far more famous husband and his doomed term in the Oval Office. Both Herbert (disturbingly, in a move very much not to be imitated by future biographers, Dunlap throughout refers to him as “Bert”) and Lou spent years after he’d left office not only criticizing the New Deal policies of President Roosevelt but crying foul at the undeniable fact that popular opinion and the punditry class were already equating Hoover with the Great Depression. This was and remains a brutal but fair call: everything Hoover could have done to keep a bad recession from worsening into a generation-defining catastrophe, he steadfastly refused to do; he had the besetting sin of every champion problem-solver – he thought he could solve every problem (and that every problem could be solved). 

Dunlap is a resolutely (and refreshingly) non-political biographer - and a wonderfully partisan one, typically staying in her heroes’ corner even when it comes to the Great Depression:

Bert was a numbers man who valued objective data. By the end of 1930, however, objective data sent conflicting signals. Bert refused to buy into the pessimistic voices around him, reiterating his belief that the economy was fundamentally sound and merely experiencing a normal correction. He did not support calls for relief bills and bond sales to fund unemployment benefits, believing it would wreak long-term harm on the nation’s economy. As the clamor for federal aid grew, Lou observed to [a crony named Lucy Evelyn Wright] Allan: “No country has been able to take the weight of paid unemployment from Roman times, fore and aft.”  

This partisanship makes for a sympathetic, smiling reading experience, although it will leave some readers wondering what they’re not being told. “Persuasiveness. Cajoling. Friendly arm-twisting. These words are not typically associated with Lou Henry Hoover,” Dunlap writes. “Nevertheless, a careful look at her legacy reveals that she had honed these tools to a fine art.” But the arm-twisting was frequently attested while Mrs. Hoover was alive; the two Hoover White House memoirs that came out soon after the administration left office described a Presidential pair that could be brusque and myopic – and a First Lady who never shut up. Are there other such unflattering contemporaneous portraits? They don’t make much of an appearance in these pages. 

Dunlap relates Lou Henry Hoover’s tireless work on behalf of the Girl Scouts, her breaking of paths for female students at her beloved Stanford University, the energy and insight she lent to her husband as one administration after another called on him to do what (ironically, considering his reputation) he did best: solve problems – whether it was visionary engineering or organizing hunger relief. At every turn, in Dunlap’s telling, Mrs. Hoover is right there, always chuckling, filled with ideas, never slowing down.

It comes as an almost personal shock, therefore, when she says one morning “I’m not feeling very well” and then two hours later drops dead. The abrupt, almost determined, nature of the departure seems fitting for the woman, but it leaves the reader feeling as bereft as “Bert,” who remained grief-stricken for the rest of his life. 

A Woman of Adventure captures all of this with a spirited readability. This isn’t a tome, not, despite its own billing, a panoramic “life and times,” but given how relatively little Lou Henry Hoover gave (or cared to give) to the arguments of posterity, maybe it never could be. 

-Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.