Reappraising Lou Henry Hoover and Her Co

ACADEMIA Letters
Reappraising Lou Henry Hoover and her Contributions to

the History of Technology
Elena Danielson
On March 9, 1914, the Mining and Metallurgical Society of America held a dinner to be-
stow the Society’s first gold medal on Herbert Hoover (1874 – 1964) and his wife Lou Henry
Hoover (1874-1944) to honor their joint translation and annotation of a treatise on mining,
De Re Metallica. Written by the German polymath Georgius Agricola (1494-1555) [1], the
original work was published in 1556 in medieval Latin and had never before been adequately
translated and decoded into a comprehensible modern language. Agricola was revered by
such intellectual giants as the explorer Alexander von Humboldt and the poet Goethe, both of
whom had worked as mining managers as young men [2]. The treatise was often consulted,
but rarely completely understood until the Hoovers’ English version was first published in
1912-1913. The footnotes contain lengthy essays on the history of metallurgy and its role in
civilization. The Hoovers’ thesis is expressed at the end of their introduction: “Science is the
base upon which is reared the civilization of to-day.” [3]
In accordance with protocol, Herbert Hoover’s name came first on the title page, then his
wife’s name. Both Hoovers held bachelors degrees in geology from Stanford. While he was
a brilliant manager, Herbert Hoover was better at mathematics than languages and almost did
not graduate from Stanford because of his deficient English. He failed his German class and
never learned Latin. The members of the engineering profession in the United States knew
the high-profile couple well, and understood what his remarkable pragmatic talents were,
and also what her extraordinary intellectual talents were. The March 14, 1914 edition of the
Engineering & Mining Journal simply stated what everyone knew:
“In all of Mr. Hoover’s literary work, Mrs. Hoover has been an important collabo-
rator. In the preparation of his ‘Principles of Mining’ she revised the manuscript,
Academia Letters, March 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
Corresponding Author: Elena Danielson, elenad@alumni.stanford.edu

Citation: Danielson, E. (2021). Reappraising Lou Henry Hoover and her Contributions to the History of
Technology. Academia Letters, Article 485. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL485.
1
read the proofs and saw the work through the press, remaining in New York for
that purpose after Mr. Hoover had been called away. In the translation of Agri-
cola, her collaboration was more important. She accompanied Mr. Hoover in his
travels of investigation, joined in his studies of the history of mining, and bore
the brunt of the translation of corrupt, medieval Latin into fluent and accurate
English.” [4]
Lou Henry Hoover clearly saw the connections between the history of technology and
the history of civilization. The ore cart on rails depicted in De Re Metallica, supplanting
the use of buckets and baskets for removing ore, is the forerunner of railroad technology
[5]. The cart depicted in cutaway diagrams of tunnels suggest the forerunners of subways
centuries later, the water wheels that provided power apparently lead to steam engines. Over
300 woodblock prints are faithfully reproduced in the Hoovers’ 1912 interpretive translation.
The images also show the tree stumps in the landscape, despoiled by logging to build that
equipment. Both Hoovers had a deep appreciation of the power of visual representation of
data, and incorporated similar diagrams in their joint 1909 textbook The Principles of Mining,
published two years into their on-going translation project.
Herbert Hoover accepted the medal with an erudite speech. Keenly aware of her sub-
ordinate role as a woman, Lou Henry Hoover had written out an informal sounding speech
in advance [6] labelled “An impromptu reply to be made if called upon at the Gold Medal
dinner.” When called upon, she delivered a disingenuously modest, ostensibly spontaneous
speech emphasizing the partnership that produced their joint scholarship. But Lou Henry
admitted: “I did most of the drudgery.”
The Hoovers had commissioned a literal translation of the Latin De Re Metallica from
Kathleen Schlesinger, whom they greatly respected and acknowledged. Literal translations
did not explain the technology. Here is where Lou Henry used her rare combination of expert
language skills, which included both Latin and German, and hands-on scientific knowledge of
mining to reverse engineer the puzzling language and reimagine the technological processes in
question. She had to go back to the German mining terms of the era, and reconstruct the mean-
ing of Agricola’s Latin neologisms. Her achievement is more a decryption rather than simple
translation. Agricola, like Lou, rejected magical thinking whether motivated by alchemy or
religion, and reveled in the direct observation of natural processes. Mining had long been
a secretive profession with closely guarded proprietary information. There were numerous
failed translation attempts over the centuries, including an early 1557 translation from Latin
to German by Philippus Bechius, a translation which the Hoovers termed “wretched” [7], but
there was never a text in English until the Hoovers, at her instigation, spent at least five years
working on the project. Agricola himself worked on the volume for some 25 years. It was

2
published posthumously a year after his death; the volume may even have been intended by
the author to be his letter to the future.
Very few American historians realize the impact Lou Henry has had on our understanding
of the history of technology. The two main biographies of her each devote a single page
to Agricola. Usually her interest in geology is linked to a lecture she attended by Stanford
geologist John Casper Branner.
Her interest in natural science probably began much earlier. Her parents provided access
to a rather progressive children’s magazine called St. Nicholas Illustrated Magazine. When
the magazine published Lou Henry’s precise description of her town of Whittier, California,
in 1888, she was 14 years old. [8] The magazine launched a national association of clubs for
school children to study science by direct observation, roaming outside in nature. Lou estab-
lished a chapter of the club in her community and was elected president. The club members
collected botanical samples and mineral samples to study, the start of a life-long habit. [9]
Her father invested in a gold mine in Acton, California, and the entire family of four spent
the summer of 1891, when she was 17, living in a tent in the Sierras, while he tried to make
the mine profitable. The sheer joy of going down in a mine shaft and working the winches
and other equipment comes through clearly in Lou Henry’s diary. [10]
When John Casper Branner encouraged her to study geology, she quickly followed him to
Stanford and enrolled. Because of her family’s genteel but cash-strapped financial situation,
Branner provided part time jobs for her as well as for another financially embarrassed student
named Herbert Hoover. Both Lou and Bert became aware of De Re Metallica because of
Branner’s bibliophile interests. They both could interpret Agricola’s ingenious woodblock
prints, cut-away diagrams of workers descending into deep mine shafts. At the turn of the
century Lou Henry accompanied her husband on mining inspection trips in China, and she
insisted on going down into mine shafts herself. The scandalized local mining officials, highly
superstitious as traditional miners often have been, tried to exorcise the dangerous effects of
a woman in a mine by setting off firecrackers. [11]
Later while living in London where her husband had his mining offices, Lou Henry did
extensive research on mining history at the British Museum. In 1905 the German historian
Reinhold Hofmann published the first exhaustively researched Agricola biography, the key
to the story. [12] Intense work went into her scholarship. While Herbert Hoover enjoyed
the project, he was preoccupied with mining interests in Russia. The best-selling novelist
Mary Austin once began gathering material for a biography of Lou Henry Hoover–which
never actually materialized–emphasizing Lou’s bravery during the Boxer Rebellion in China
in 1900. Lou wrote to Austin “Don’t forget Mr. Agricola.” [13]
The publication date corresponds to the time when Herbert Hoover was exploring a re-

3
turn to Stanford and expanding his role as trustee. Lou’s work helped cement his academic
credentials. The Hoovers generously gave the sumptuous volume as a valued gift to Stanford
trustees, Stanford faculty, friends, associates, and libraries around the world. Branner in his
thank you letter praises the work, but acknowledges that they would not recover any financial
investment in it [14]. The first edition did not sell well in bookstores (maybe 18 copies in two
years), and the storage fees were burdensome [15].
Lou and Bert moved on to public service as World War I broke out two years later. They
became embroiled in raising funds for the starving population of German-occupied Belgium
and started on the “slippery slope” of public life [16].
The Hoovers were apparently both unaware that the copies of De Re Metallica that they
distributed mostly as gifts were being carefully studied by people unknown to them. The
Germans, sponsored by the Deutsches Museum, published the first accurate German trans-
lation in 1928. [17] The introduction responds to the Hoovers’ criticism that Agricola had
been neglected by his compatriots, and praises their reliable technical explanations as of such
a high caliber that they could directly use the research for their German translation without
reinvestigating the ancient processes.
Another reader from the 1920s was Lewis Mumford. In his pathbreaking book, Tech-
nics and Civilization, there is an entire chapter on De Re Metallica and another on mining
in general, all using Lou Henry Hoover’s analysis.[18] Mumford, largely inspired by Lou’s
research, went on to change our understanding of the history of technology, and by extension
the evolution of modern civilization: the same thesis expressed at the end of the Hoovers’
introduction.
In 1950, few years after her death in 1944, the well-known publisher of classic reprints,
Dover Publishing, asked Herbert Hoover’s permission to re-publish an inexpensive edition of
De Re Metallica. Hoover granted permission, but noted there was little hope of making any
profit off of the text that had not sold well to begin with. [19] In fact, the reprint has been
continuously in print some 70 years, over a hundred years since the book originally came out
in 1912. Lou Henry Hoover’s research was never superseded. Its influence has spread quietly
over the decades until quotations from Lou Henry Hoover’s annotations are now ubiquitous
in the literature on the role of technology in the course of civilization. Not forgotten, Lou
Henry’s extraordinary decryption of Agricola has now become a standard tool. It may have
been her letter to the future, to us, and time for a reappraisal.

4
References
1. Georgius Agricola, De Re Metallica, transl. by Herbert Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover
from the first Latin edition of 1556, London: The Mining Magazine, 1912 [1913],
reprinted New York: Dover Publications, 1950. There is a digital version preserved by
the Hathi Trust: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/010249958? (accessed Novem-
ber 29, 2020). Lou Henry first initiated the projected when she consulted with Branner
on the feasibility of a translation as early as December 28, 1906. See George H. Nash,
The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Engineer, 1874-1914, New York: Norton, 1983, p.
490 and p. 732. Other biographers agree with Nash, that it was Lou Henry who initiated
the project. See Nancy Beck Young, Lou Henry Hoover: Archivist First Lady, Lawrence
Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2004, p. 20. Also Anne Beiser Allen, An Indepen-
dent Woman: The Life of Lou Henry Hoover, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,
2000, p. 50. For the 16th c. text online see https://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/
resolve/display/bsb10199044.html (accessed November 30, 2020).
2. Agricola, Goethe, and Humboldt were part of a centuries-long German tradition of

“Savant Officials,” a term used by Ursula Klein, “Savant Officials in the Prussian Mining
Administration, Annals of Science, 2012, 69:3, pp. 349-374.
3. Agricola, De Re Metallica, Dover reprint p. xv.
4. “The Hoover Dinner,” The Engineering & Mining Journal, March 14, 1914, p. 577.
For the racial bias in Herbert Hoover’s 1909 bookPrinciples of Mining, see Allison
Margaret Bigelow, “Gained, Lost, Missed, Ignored: Vernacular Scientific Translations
from Agricola’s Germany to Herbert Hoover’s California.” Modern Philology, Spe-
cial Issue on “Multiplicities: Recasting the Early Modern Global,” edited by Carina
L. Jonson and Ayesha Ramachandran. Forthcoming, August 2021. I am grateful to
Allison Bigelow for sharing a prepublication version of her article. It is important to
note that Lou Henry Hoover published an article in the Contemporary Review, 1909,
“The Empress Dowager of China,” in which she denounces racial prejudice and foreign
exploitation of labor and resources.
5. Dover reprint of Agricola p. 156. The image of the 16th century ore cart intricately de-
signed to roll on wooden rails is used in the Wikipedia entry on the history of railroads:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport (accessed November 29, 2020).
Herbert Hoover’s account can be found in volume one of the Memoirs of Herbert Hoover:
The Years of Adventure, New York: Macmillan, 1951, pp.117-119.

5
6. Lou Henry Hoover Papers, Box 191, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library (HHPL), West
Branch, Iowa.
7. Dover reprint of Agricola, p. xvi. The Bechius translation is available online see https://
daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/ db/0009/bsb00090302/images/ (accessed November 30,
2020).
8. St. Nicholas, Volume XVI, Part I, November 1888 to April 1889, page 77. The letter
is erroneously cited in the literature as being published in December 1887.Harlan H.
Ballard, “History of the Agassiz Association,” Science – Supplement, Vol. 9, Issue 208
S, pp. 93-96, January 28, 1887. The clubs’ only connection with Louis Agassiz (1807-
1873) was to link their interests with his fame as a natural scientist. Louis Agassiz’s
son Alexander Agassiz authorized the clubs to use the name: Harlan H. Ballard, Hand-
Book of the St. Nicholas Agassiz Association, Lennox, Mass: [H.H. Ballard], 1884, 2nd
edition, p. 6.
9. Lou Henry Hoover Papers, Diary 1891, HHPL.
10. “I always go underground and all over the plants of any interesting mines we come to
in any country,…whenever I had been down there would be a procession to go down
shortly after with …firecrackers and tom toms and priests…” Lou Henry Hoover to
Mary Hunter Austin, box 84, Hoover, Lou Henry , “China Description,” p 7, Huntington
Library, San Marino, California,
11. Reinhold Hofmann, Dr. Georg Agricola. Ein Gelehrtenleben aus dem Zeitalter der Ref-
ormation. Gotha: F. A. Perthes, 1905. Hofmann located widely scattered, previously
unpublished documents on Agricola in various local archives in Germany and Italy. For
online text see https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=ZzrcKBGYicMC&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA1
12. (accessed November 30, 2020).
13. Lou Henry Hoover to Mary Hunter Austin, “China Description,” p 17.
14. Lou Henry Hoover correspondence, box 7, HHPL.
15. Edgar Rickard to Herbert Hoover, February 7, 1923: “White does not advise me as to the
sales in England, but I imagine they are negligible. We have the agency for the U.S.A.
and have disposed of eighteen in the last two years….There is a considerable expense
involved in the storage…” De Re Metallical Collection, box 11 folder 2, HHPL, West
Branch, Iowa.

6
16. Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: Years of Adventure, 1874-1920, New
York: The Macmillan Company, 1951, p. 148.
17. Georg Agricola, Zwölf Bücher Vom Berg- Und Hüttenwesen, translated by Carl Schiffner,
et al. Berlin: Agricola-Gesellschaft beim Deutschen Museum, VDI-Verlag, 1928. It
took a large team of scholars to produce the German edition, and they praise the Hoovers’
research for saving them much effort.
18. Lewis Mumford, Civilization and Technics, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1934.
Mumford’s first draft was completed in 1930, then revised and published in 1934. Mum-
ford was at Stanford in 1941, but does not seem to have met with the Hoovers.
19. Herbert Hoover to Dover Press, De Re Metallica Collection, HHPL, box 13, folder 1.


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ACADEMIA Letters

Reappraising Lou Henry Hoover and her Contributions to

Corresponding Author: Elena Danielson, elenad@alumni.stanford.edu

Corresponding Author: Elena Danielson, elenad@alumni.stanford.edu

Corresponding Author: Elena Danielson, elenad@alumni.stanford.edu

Corresponding Author: Elena Danielson, elenad@alumni.stanford.edu

2. Agricola, Goethe, and Humboldt were part of a centuries-long German tradition of

3. Agricola, De Re Metallica, Dover reprint p. xv.

Corresponding Author: Elena Danielson, elenad@alumni.stanford.edu

9. Lou Henry Hoover Papers, Diary 1891, HHPL.

12. (accessed November 30, 2020).

14. Lou Henry Hoover correspondence, box 7, HHPL.

Corresponding Author: Elena Danielson, elenad@alumni.stanford.edu

Corresponding Author: Elena Danielson, elenad@alumni.stanford.edu

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