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The Chief’s primary stated goal was to lower the price of wheat in the face of intense global demand, which he did by setting the price lower, enraging farmers. The processors, however, had nothing to complain about. For them Hoover used a “cost-plus” formula, paying contractors an agreed-upon perc…

By the time he went solo, Hoover was less an engineer than what we might recognize today as the head of a private equity firm.11 He had a few stakes in genuinely productive mines, and new techniques for processing mine tailings for their base metals led to novel Westralia revenue, but finance ruled…

When Jordan met Lala Har Dayal in 1911, I suspect what most impressed the president was the line in the twenty-seven-year-old’s résumé about studying Sanskrit at Oxford, along with his salary requirements as an instructor of Indian philosophy: $0. FACULTY ELECTS A HINDU, announced the New York Time…

The first revolutionary party to form in California during the twentieth century was called the Social Revolutionary Party, and the society it sought to overthrow was Japan’s. Its founder was Kōtoku Shūsui, a Japanese left-wing writer and organizer who came to the States in 1905 after being release…

California’s growers were still dependent on low-wage nonwhite workers, especially with the labor demand crunch of World War I, which meant they had to get by on loopholes. Fearing the quota consequences, growers began importing Filipino workers in large numbers starting in 1923, and they attracted…