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Hoover Institution

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Hoover Tower

The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace is a conservative public policy think tank and library founded by Herbert Hoover at Stanford University, his alma mater. It has also been called the West's citadel of anticommunism. It recently has been called Bush's 'brain trust', as some of its fellows have connections to the Bush administration. The Institution was founded in 1919 and over time has amassed a huge archive of documentation related to Hoover, World War I, and World War II, specifically focusing on the root causes of these wars.

Since 2001, Hoover also has published Policy Review magazine, one of the world's leading conservative journals.

History

Herbert Hoover, who later became the thirty-first president of the United States, founded the Institution originated as a specialized collection of documents on the causes and consequences of World War I. The collection grew rapidly and soon became one of the largest archives and most complete libraries in the world devoted to political, economic, and social change in the twentieth century.

By the late 1940s, the richness of the collection had led to the recruitment of scholars to use the documents in their work. Expanding its agenda to include specific research endeavors led to a vast accumulation of knowledge, and the Hoover Institution became one of the first and most distinguished academic centers in the United States dedicated to public policy research. Today, with its world-renowned group of scholars and ongoing programs of policy-oriented research, the Hoover Institution puts its accumulated knowledge to work as a prominent contributor to the world marketplace of ideas defining a free society.

Mission and Philosophy

Now more than four decades old, Herbert Hoover's 1959 statement to the Board of Trustees of Stanford University on the purpose and scope of the Hoover Institution (see text below) continues to guide and define its mission in the twenty-first century.

The principles of individual, economic, and political freedom; private enterprise; and representative government were fundamental to the vision of the Institution's founder. By collecting knowledge, generating ideas, and disseminating both, the Institution seeks to secure and safeguard peace, improve the human condition, and limit government intrusion into the lives of individuals.

"The Hoover Institution's well known antipathy to federal social welfare policies was ... expressed by the chair of the Hoover board when he declared that 'there is growing realization that we either must accede to the gathering force of the welfare state or return to the more promising ways of freedom.'" -- Hoover Institution Annual Report, 1995.[1]

"Hoover, with $3.2 million in grants between 1992-1994 and an operating budget of close to $19 million in 1995, has focused particular attention on tax policy, promoting the flat tax for well over a decade and organizing policy briefings and conferences on the issue ... It was, according to one well-placed journalist and author, one of four leading policy institutions that pulled the nation's economic policy debate to the right in the early 1980s." --Edsall, The New Politics of Inequality.[2]

Personnel

File:Hoover-tower-postcard.png
Hoover Tower postcard

The following is a short list of past or present Hoover Institution fellows:

Honorary Fellows

Former Honorary Fellows

Distinguished Fellows

Senior Fellows

Senior Research Fellows

Research Fellows

Distinguished Visiting Fellows

Funding

The Hoover Institution receives much of its funding from private charitable foundations, including many attached to large corporations.

A partial list of its recent donors includes:

Between 1985 and 2001, the Institution received $15,431,103 in 136 separate grants from only nine foundations:

Publications

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