herbert hoover

#31 FACTS:

--In the presidential election of 1928, Hoover easily won the Republican nomination, despite having no previous elected office experience (Hoover was the Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge). To date, Hoover is the last cabinet secretary to be directly elected President of the United States, as well as one of only two Presidents (along with William Howard Taft) to have been elected President without electoral experience or high military rank.

--When the Wall Street Crash of 1929 struck less than eight months after he took office, Hoover tried to combat the ensuing Great Depression with volunteer efforts, none of which produced economic recovery during his term. The consensus among historians is that Hoover's defeat in the 1932 election was caused primarily by failure to end the downward economic spiral.

In his campaigns around the country during the run-up to the Presidential election of 1932, Hoover encountered perhaps the most hostile crowds any sitting president had ever faced. Besides having his train and motorcades pelted with eggs and rotten fruit, he was often heckled while speaking, and on several occasions the Secret Service halted attempts to kill Hoover by disgruntled citizens, including capturing one man nearing Hoover carrying sticks of dynamite, and another already having removed several spikes from the rails in front of the President's train. He lost the election by a huge margin to Franklin Roosevelt, winning only six out of 48 states.

--Hoover invented his own sport (called 'Hooverball', naturally) to keep fit while in the White House. The game was a combination of volleyball and tennis, and he played it every morning. The Hoover Presidential Library Association and the city of West Branch, Iowa, co-host a national championship each year.

--The character played by James Cagney in the 1949 film "White Heat" was unofficially inspired by Hoover, who suffered from severe headaches and often pretended to be a gangster. He daydreamed about committing daring robberies, and enjoyed indiscriminately spraying machine gun fire while wandering the White House grounds. In fact, the movie made use of Hoover's famous catch-phrase, "Top of the world, Ma!", which he would shout into his wife's face every night before going to bed.