who had substantial pecuniary motivation

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 the world now. He found that rationalization and efficiency were good ways to attract capital, but the ultimate results didn’t always correlate with his gains. Hoover didn’t have to invest a ton of money or reorganize production in order to prosper on a new project. He just had to convince other financiers that something previously uninvestable was now a good bet; then he could sell them his stake at a profit and do it again. Instead of South Africa and Westralia, his five offices were in San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, and Petrograd. In the years following settlement of the Russo-Japanese War he advised both the Russian czar and Japanese capital on carving up the Siberia-Korea-Manchuria nexus, but he spent most of his time in the world’s Paper Belt, traveling between his five offices and Belgium, where a spike in rubber prices combined with the Crown’s superexploitation of African slave labor on the Congo plantations enriched King Leopold II and his affiliated financiers.

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 percentage above their costs rather than setting a price.iii He earned the ire of staple-farmer populists, the loyalty of the processing industries, and the admiration of anyone who believed what was printed in the corporate press. America won the war, and the boys came home with an appreciation for canned food and candy. Rather than scale down mass production when soldiers went back to their local food systems, the processors plowed their wartime profits into advertising designed to convince the country that processed foods from national companies were better and safer.

Even when the associative state triumphs, there are always malcontents complaining about the relationship between capital and government. Once Hoover was gone, Congress took a closer look at the airmail contracts and the flurry of corporate activity surrounding them. Pop Hanshue told the legislators exactly how Western became so successful. Why had the company been confident it was going to get the mail contract? He testified that the company’s friends Robinson (“the banks”) and Chandler (“the newspapers”) had friends in the Hoover administration.19 He laid it out plainly, in a way that has convinced many historians that the whole mess was a corrupt blunder corrected by Roosevelt. But Hoover never hid his intentions. That was the way it was supposed to work. The government facilitated leading men, who in turn facilitated the government’s facilitation. It wasn’t corruption that enabled Herbert Hoover Jr., after being the first person to take a class in radio engineering at Stanford, to study aeronautical economics at Harvard on a Guggenheim grant and then get hired to run radio development at the Chandler-and-Robinson-financed federal-Guggenheim contractor Western Air Express. It was coordination, the way royal families arrange marriages. There weren’t any planes and then there were a lot of planes—that was the important part, not who got rich. After all, somebody had to. The tangle of names and firms, partnerships and stock offerings and board positions, starts to sound less like the tense strings of a conspiracy network and more like the dull thrum of business as usual.

World War I ended with the collapse of Europe’s global empires, and with them went the colonial model of the California engineer. As new countries formed, some repudiated the debts and concessions imposed on them by previous unelected governments. But if populations held some sort of fundamental right to cancel these contracts unilaterally under a principle we might call “economic democracy,” then how could anyone make investments in the first place? And it wasn’t just Europe and Russia; in Mexico, where a lot of California capital lived, the 1917 constitution declared that “the Nation shall at all times have the right to impose on private property such limitations as the public interest may demand, as well as the right to regulate the utilization of natural resources which are susceptible of appropriation, in order to conserve them and to insure a more equitable distribution of public wealth.”27 This began a two-decade process of expropriation as the Mexican state dispossessed American owners such as Hearst and Chandler. What was next—America’s new Panama Canal?