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It was founded in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who later became the thirty-first president of the United States. 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.
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]
John E. Chubb, Newt Gingrich, Gidon Gottlieb, Paul R. Gregory, Paul T. Hill, E.D. Hirsch Jr., Caroline M. Hoxby, Edwin Meese III, Diane Ravitch, Herbert J. Walberg, and Pete Wilson
Between 1985 and 2001, the Institution received $15,431,103 in 136 separate grants from only nine foundations: