Hoover Headlines

Join Margaret Hoover, host of the PBS series, Firing Line with Margaret Hoover, for an insiders perspective at this unique program of guests that engage in a contest of ideas about important issues confronting our nation.

Margaret will be joined by Iowa Lt. Gov. Adam Gregg, who is also a member of the Hoover Presidential Foundation board of directors. Gregg will act as host and moderator for the program.

This program will examine Lincoln’s statesmanship in the context of longstanding and widespread racial bigotry against black Americans. It will explore how Lincoln attempted to inform public opinion regarding the natural rights of black Americans by reclaiming the central idea of the American regime—namely, human equality. 

Margaret will discuss the history behind the first 100 days and transition period for President Hoover and what we can expect this year. Joining Margaret will be senior political analyst and anchor at CNN, John Avlon, and Hoover biographer and historian, Dr. George H. Nash.

Learn about the Christmas Eve fire at the Hoover White House that destroyed  the newly elected president's office. Presented by Hoover Presidential Library archivist Craig Wright.

This free virtual program outlines how planned giving can benefit you and your loved ones and causes you care about. 

The program will be presented by Robert Downer of Meardon, Sueppel & Downer.

Mr. Downer is co-chair of the Probate, Property and Trust Law Committee of the Iowa State Bar Association and a Fellow, American College of Trust & Estate Counsel since 1993, and Iowa Chair 2000-2005. He is also a Fellow, Iowa Academy of Trust and Estate Counsel since its creation, and listed in Best Lawyers in America for Estate and Trust Law and Estate and Trust Litigation since 1995.

This episode contains elements from a 2019 gravesite speech before an audience of elementary students from West Branch.

Among the innovative methods to publicize the work of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, and the American Relief Administration, were two documentary film efforts, both which are lost to history. 

Presented by historian and author Jeffrey B. Miller. 

Miller has written extensively on the WWI Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) and will share his insights into Herbert Hoover’s humanitarian efforts, delivering compelling portraits of young idealists who interrupted their lives to serve the CRB for no pay.

To succeed, Hoover and his band knew they had to be on the right side of worldwide public opinion: “Hoover’s understanding of this concept,and of the way the world’s news media worked, would serve him and hiscause extremely well from the very beginning,” Miller writes.

While Lou Henry Hoover did not campaign for suffrage, she did actively support the League of Women Voters once women gained suffrage.  

For many Americans, 1930 was a year of struggle as the national economy sank into what became the Great Depression. The stock market and urban unemployment often took center stage, leaving aside the hardships of rural America. None-the-less, a new threat emerged in 1930: drought.