Hoover in China: Yet Another Note
Hugh Deane (1990), Good Deeds and Gunboats: Two Centuries of American-Chinese Encounters (San Francisco/Beijing: China Books and Periodicals/New World Press: 0835123782), pp. 75-6:
In 1920, having gained an international reputation through relief work, and thinking of public office, Hoover began an extraordinary and costly effort to blur and falsify the record of the trial... instructed his London solicitor to "spare no expense or effort" to purchase all existing copies of the trial transcript. Burner's biography indicates that Hoover thought he had succeeded, but in fact his agents were unable to obtain the copy in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. In the early 1930s [John Hamill]... observed... that, trying to check on certain accusation, "At many sources we came only to find that somebody had been there before us, going over the hard-beaten track of Mr. Hoover's past, and taking up, buying up, and otherwise obliterating important records"....
[T]he reality was expressed at the time of the swindle by Britain's charge d'affaires in Beijing, Arthur Townley. With the help of a Yankee [Hoover], he said, an Anglo-Belgian gang had "fleeced" the Chinese, and Moreing and associates had "made pretty pile at their expense"...
