Hoover—"Specialist In Public Calamities”

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 364, 26 May 1928, Page 26

Hoover —"Specialist In Public Calamities”

nan ILL IRWIN, in “Herbert f Hoover: A Reminis- . » &/ cent Biography,” tells 6AI.W Jl/ oE tlle romantic and picturesque years which Mr. Hoover spent as a mining engineer in Australia, China, Burma, Russia, and other far places. There is no particular secret about these years, from 1898 until 1914, and so few people know about them. Some of the policies Hoover developed during those years, when he operated from San Francisco a business with branch offices (at various periods) in London, Paris, Leningrad (then St. Petersburg), Melbourne and Shanghai, set a standard for American trade relations that may very profitably be followed to-day, not only in mining but in all kinds of commercial contacts. It would be idle to try to follow each of Hoover’s seven round-the-world pilgrimages. The story would read like a time-table. Sometimes he left his San Francisco office and started east for some one of his mining activities on the other side of the globe, and sometimes he started west, across the Pacific. On some occasions it was a toss-up -which wav was the shortest or quickest. Once, in 1907-1908, when he had operations that required visiting England, Egypt, Burma, Australia, New Zealand, Malay States and Ceylon, some of which required his presence for many months, it was nearly two years before he crossed the threshold of his office in San Francisco again. His first journey from home, in 1898, was to Australia. Wherever you go in the whole wide world, if you mention Broken Hill to a mining engineer, he will think “Hoover.” For Hoover saved Broken Hill. He saw the huge accumulations of “tailings” from the ore—millions of tons, from which the silver and lead had been extracted, but which still contained

their zinc, which could not be ex traded with any known method. And he thought of the vast proved ore bodies still under the ground that contained a small percentage of lead and silver that could not be mined profitably unless the zinc content could be turned to account. More than 1,000,000 tons of zinc metal were salvaged from this vast dump, and with the possibility of recovering the zinc as well as the silver and lead from the ore still underground, Broken Hill once more became a profitable property. Mr. Hoover saw the Boxer uprising in 1900 from the inside, as one of the beleaguered residents of Tientsin, but one of his most interesting pilgrimages was to the" Northern Shan States, Burma, which are hundreds of miles even beyond Mandalay. For years there had been reputed to be workings here, of ancient mines of enormous dimensions. The detritus around the workings showed that the ores contained not only silver, but lead and zinc and some copper. This was no job for a week. Hoover’s professional connection with it began when it was still jungle and remained over a period of ten or twelve years until it was a great enterprise stili pouring large quantities of lead, silver, zinc and copper into the world’s metal supply, and always requiring more and more machinery of one kind or another. The war caught Mr. Hoover abroad and brought him into that long series of activities for which every one knows' him—the Belgian relief, the United States food administration, post-war economic work in Europe, the Prussian famine, the Mississippi flood—that series of activities which caused a diplomat, newly arrived in Washington, to exclaim, according to Charlotte iCeilogg in “The Commonweal,” “Oh, Monsieur Hoover, ce specialiste dans les calamites publiques”—-the phrase we have borrowed for the title of this article.