Crusade Years, 1933-1955 : Herbert Hoover's Lost Memoir of the New Deal Era and Its Aftermath

Covering an eventful period in Herbert Hoover's career-and, more specifically, his life as a political pugilist from 1933 to 1955-The Crusade Years is a previously unknown memoir that Hoover composed and revised during the 1940s and 1950s-and then, surprisingly, set aside. A parallel volume to Hoover's Freedom Betrayed, this work recounts Hoover's family life after March 4, 1933, his myriad philanthropic interests, and, most of all, his unrelenting "crusade against collectivism" in American life. Aside from its often feisty account of Hoover's political activities during the Roosevelt/Truman era, and its window on Hoover's private life and campaigns for good causes, The Crusade Years invites us to reflect on the factors that made possible his extraordinarily fruitful post-presidential years. As least as much as Theodore Roosevelt, he came to personify the activist former president; some historians have even argued that he invented it. In this realm of exertion, as in so many others, Herbert Hoover was no ordinary man. Of all the individuals who have served as president of the United States, none has ever written a set of memoirs as prodigious as his. Rescued from obscurity, this nearly forgotten manuscript is published here-and its contents made available to scholars-for the first time.