Herbert Hoover

Herbert Clark Hoover, born August 10, 1874, in West Branch, Iowa, and died October 20, 1964, served as the thirty-first President of the United States from 1929 to 1933. Before his presidency he had built an international reputation for humanitarian relief work, organizing large-scale food aid for Belgium and other parts of Europe during and after the First World War. Only months into his term, the stock market crash of October 1929 began the Great Depression, the worst sustained economic collapse in American history, and his administration's efforts to combat it were widely judged inadequate by voters, who defeated his 1932 reelection bid decisively.