Today’s column (gift link) is, as I put it in our editorial meeting, “for the fans.” Once again, and certainly not for reasons of algorithm, the state’s largest newspaper has allowed me to write about history.
History is like a washing machine. You throw all the dirty laundry in there and something just a little bit different comes out. The really bad stains remain, but a lot of the smaller blemishes go out the waste pipe. Many of my clothes have held up pretty well over the years, but none wear exactly the same way.
Spending 10 years on research for a book project (yet unpublished! ha ha ha twitch) was its own kind of spin cycle. My methodology was decidedly blunt: read all the newspapers from Hibbing, Minnesota from the 1910s and ’20s. I was following one man, Victor Power, but ended up immersed in another universe, one where a mutually intelligible language was spoken.
Along the way, I came to see national political figures the way people of the time likely did, though always armed with knowledge of how it turns out. So much ink was spilled on William McAdoo’s attempts to become President. He was all the talk, had some good ideas, but failed twice to win the Democratic nomination. I’m betting you haven’t heard of him.
Is this a tragedy? Not really, because for all his attractive qualities he was a unrepentant segregationist whose best chance to win ended when he refused to repudiate the Ku Klux Klan. The obscurity provided by time is its own sort of detergent.
So when President Trump recently started talking his desire to avoid repeating the legacy of President Herbert Hoover, I perked up.
Hoover? You mean that promising young mining engineer who visited Hibbing?
This weird perspective (and it is weird) allows me to write about current events in ways you might not expect.
The argument that Hoover was our worst president always seems to miss an important point. He was our best president, right up until he wasn’t.
Read “Trump risks learning the wrong lessons from Herbert Hoover,” in the Thursday, June 25, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.
