The 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 postpresidential 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.

This volume is the “missing link” in Hoover’s memoirs: the final brick in a literary edifice that he began to build nearly seventy-five years ago. In its pages we learn the story of his later life, his abiding political philosophy, and his vision of the land of liberty that gave him the opportunity for service; a remarkable saga told in his own words, his way.