Herbert Clark  HOOVER

Herbert Hoover, the 31st President of the United States, served from 1929 to 1933. He was born on August 10, 1874, in West Branch, Iowa, and grew up in a Quaker family. Hoover's early life was marked by his orphanhood at the age of nine, following the deaths of his parents. Despite these challenges, he managed to attend Stanford University, where he studied geology and became the first person in his family to graduate from college.

Hoover's professional life began as a mining engineer, and he gained international recognition for his work in the field. His career took him to various parts of the world, including Australia and China, where he built a reputation for successfully managing complex mining operations. This experience in business and engineering made him wealthy and well-respected before he entered politics.

During World War I, Hoover played a crucial role in humanitarian efforts. He led the Commission for Relief in Belgium, which aimed to provide food to the

In the election of 1928, Hoover overwhelmed Gov. Alfred E. Smith of New York, the Democratic candidate and the first Roman Catholic to run for the presidency. He soon faced the worst depression in the nation's history, but his attacks upon it were hampered by his devotion to the theory that the forces that brought the crisis would soon bring the revival and then by his belief that there were too many areas in which the federal government had no power to act. In a succession of vetoes, he struck down measures proposing a national employment system or national relief, he reduced income tax rates, and only at the end of his term did he yield to popular pressure and set up agencies such as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to make emergency loans to assist business.

After his 1932 defeat, Hoover returned to private business.

President Herbert Hoover pressed a button in Washington, D.C., and on came the lights in the world's tallest skyscraper. Before that, the Chrysler Building briefly held the record at 1046 feet.

Standing proud on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street in New York City, the Empire State Building has 102 stories and reaches a height of 1,454 feet. Motivated by a competition between the leaders of Chrysler and General Motors, John Jacob Raskob of General Motors and Alfred E. Smith, a former governor of New York, formed a corporation to finance the building. Construction started in 1930. The steel framework of the Empire State Building rose to the sky at an incredible rate of 4 and 1/ 2 stories per week. The building's construction was completed in a phenomenal one year and forty-five days! The mast on top was originally a mooring for dirigibles which, in the 1930s, were considered to be the future of air travel.