A nice house concert at Dave Hawkins’ house in College Hill, Ohio (Cincinnati) offered an opportunity to play tunes with the host. As fellow Local 1000 Board Members we’ve roomed together at the Folk Alliance in Memphis, but had never performed together, so it was fun to play on his tunes and have some back-up for a hammered dulcimer version of Paul Desmond’s “Take Five.”....
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Heading west across Indiana and Illinois, I can feel the excitement that comes with fewer vitamins left in my daily compartments. I was able to talk on the telephone with a few people who missed the concert (one of whom lived only blocks away but had forgotten the earlier email I’d sent out!)....
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Because I had some time, I decided to stop in the Herbert Hoover Presidential Museum in eastern Iowa. For those westerners headed east and vice versa, the brown sign along I-80 offers an oft-over-looked invitation to explore this former president’s boyhood home. I am glad I finally RVSP-ed with a “yes.”....
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In my undergraduate study of history I did not form a positive opinion of the president between Calvin Coolidge and Franklin D. Roosevelt. This museum helped me move a considerable direction from negative to just past neutral on the positive side! (There was a survey which asked this question at the end of the tour.) I’m following up with a book that is tracing Hoover’s development as a “forgotten progressive” --an engineer who graduated in the first Stanford class, who operated successful mines in Australia and China, made tons of money and then decided that he needed to be involved in something larger that making money.....
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That restlessness led to his organization of an amazing relief effort, during World War I, that prevented thousands of refugees in Belgium from starving, even as both German and British militaries suspected him of being a spy for their enemies. This, in turn, led to his becoming the Secretary of Commerce and seeking to create numerous efficiencies in production and labor relations that have had long-lasting, positive effects that we still experience.....
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He was able to bring disparate groups together and help them recognize their common interests and even set aside resistance to work together to create massive projects like the Hoover Dam, for example.....
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Despite his faith in the importance of persuasion to move public opinion, his inability to clearly communicate his own ideas and his unwillingness to take enough decisive moves at the beginning of the fiscal crisis at the fall of Wall Street undercut public opinion which turned to view him as a do-nothing goat, rather than a life-saving hero.....
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As I read I find myself growing more sympathetic to his situation and the pressures he faced—another reminder of why I love to study history and see behind the us-or-them polemic that is often presented as truth.....
