Herbert Hoover Mentions Writing to American Hebrew Medal Winner & NYT Editor-in-Chief, John Finley

Background

In July 1937, former President Herbert Hoover wrote this response to Emanuel Hertz, a New York lawyer and Lincoln scholar active in the city’s Jewish philanthropic circles. Hertz had approached the former president for support with some of his charitable initiatives, but Hoover explained that he “regrets that I am not personally able to extend any help,” as he was already “engaged in securing funds for some five different institutions.” Still, Hoover noted, he had reached out to John Huston Finley, then editor-in-chief of the New York Times.

Finley (1863–1940) was the kind of public servant Hoover most admired: principled, nonpartisan, and devoted to the work of relief in both the moral and the material sense. Like Hoover, he had confronted hunger and displacement during the First World War — Finley, as head of the American Red Cross Commission in Palestine in 1918, and Hoover on a far larger scale across Europe. Just five years before this letter was written, in 1932, Finley had received the American Hebrew Medal for his efforts at home, upon which then President Hoover had sent his warm congratulations. Through education, journalism, and public service, Finley endeavoured to foster understanding between Jews and Christians in the United States. Hoover judged that Finley richly deserved this accolade for what he called his “high-minded and effective service to so many causes in the public interest.”

Even when Hoover could not give directly, this letter shows how he channeled his influence through a trusted network of principled public servants—men whose careers, like his own, had been shaped by the conviction that relief work was both a moral duty and a public calling.

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