THE HOOVER EXHIBIT
U.S. Embassy Brussels
Office of
Public Diplomacy
HOOVER'S HUMANITARIAN VISION
When the United States entered the war in 1917, Hoover returned home and soon became head of the U. S. Food Administration, an agency created at the request of President Woodrow Wilson. Hoover's challenge was formidable: he must--by suasion, if possible; by coercion, if necessary--stimulate American food production, reduce American food consumption, curb inflation of food prices, and create a substantial food surplus for export to America's needy allies. "Food Will Win the War" was his slogan: an exaggeration, perhaps, but not if stated negatively. A dearth of food would surely lose the conflict. By the autumn of 1918 America, under its food controller's guidance, had become a cornucopia upon which the beleaguered British, French, and Italians--our allies--could draw with confidence.
On November 16, 1918--just five days after the Armistice--Hoover set sail for Europe to organize food distribution to a continent careening towards disaster. In the months following the end of World War I, across vast stretches of Europe, famine, disease, and bloody revolution threatened to sunder a civilization already traumatized by "the war to end war." While American and Allied leaders struggled to draft a peace treaty at Versailles, Hoover, as Director-General of Relief for the Allied and Associated Powers and chairman of the American Relief Administration (ARA), organized the delivery of food to desperate people by the millions and helped to stem the advance of Bolshevik revolution from the East.
The task that Hoover and his associates performed was no routine process of sending food to the needy. From all over the world, millions of tons of supplies had to be purchased, shipped to Europe, and distributed in more than twenty nations. Many of these countries had only rudimentary governmental machinery; in some, communication had broken down and transportation services were chaotic. Every frontier was a barrier of suspicion; ethnic tensions and separatist impulses abounded.
It was a Herculean undertaking of immense complexity. From November 1918 to September 1, 1919, Hoover and his ARA colleagues coordinated the delivery of more than 4,000,000 tons of food and other supplies. The infant republic of Austria, for instance, perhaps the most desperately afflicted of any country in all Europe, received more than half a million metric tons of supplies at a time when its own food sources were severely depleted and its financial plight seemed nearly insuperable.
But the American-led relief program entailed much more than the simple revictualing of starving populations. Economic rehabilitation and increased productivity were deemed to be critical if Europe were truly to recover. Many of Hoover's policies in 1919 were designed to achieve this objective. He arranged for hundreds of American engineers and other experts to become technical advisors to the governments of Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. These advisors, some of whom stayed for three years, helped to reorganize railways, create efficient transportation networks, reform currencies, and modernize agriculture. Hoover also helped to establish the Inter-Allied Danube River Commission that labored to clear this vital river way for commercial traffic. And with the approval of the Allied governments, he dispatched American agents to Silesia and other mining regions where they helped to settle strikes and increase urgently needed coal production.
With the signing of the peace treaties in the summer of 1919 Hoover's relief and reconstruction efforts entered a new phase under non-governmental auspices, a phase that did not completely terminate until 1923. In this period he concentrated on providing assistance in the form of daily meals to the children of eastern and central Europe as well as to certain particularly distressed sectors of the population.
Once again, the need was appalling. Medical examinations in 1919 disclosed that 96% of the children of Vienna under the age of fifteen (to take but one example) were suffering from undernourishment. With the cooperation of dedicated volunteers from many countries, and with the support of their governments, the American Relief Administration's European Children's Fund eventually provided daily food for an estimated 3,000,000 European children at thousands of separate relief stations.
Still another Hoover innovation was the invention of a form of remittance known as food drafts by which American citizens could send aid to their kinsfolk in Europe. Any American could purchase such a draft at a bank in the United States and mail it to his relatives in Europe. The Europeans could then present this draft at American relief warehouses established in their own country and receive in exchange carefully standardized packages of food equivalent to the amount stated on the draft.
In this way, individual Americans did not themselves have to send food packets that might be lost or stolen en route. It was an ingenious device. To provide these food allotments, Hoover's organization set up more than sixty warehouses in five European countries. In all, more than 400,000 food drafts were sold and delivered, and more than 14,000 metric tons of food were thereby distributed.
No wonder, then, that President Wilson labeled the ARA the "Second American Expeditionary Force to Save Europe." In 1919 and later, Hoover's far-flung apparatus seemed truly on the march. In Estonia, for instance, nearly one child in four received regular meals for a time from Hoover-led agencies. In Poland, as many as 1,315,000 children per day received ARA-supplied food at the peak of the organization's efforts.
Undoubtedly the most extraordinary ARA undertaking occurred more than two years after the war ended, in Soviet Russia. There, from 1921 to 1923, at the request of Communist authorities, Hoover's agency administered a gigantic relief program to combat a devastating famine in the Volga River region. At its peak the organization fed upwards of 10,000,000 people a day.
Between 1919 and 1923 Hoover and his associates delivered to Russia and other Soviet-held territory more than 768,000 metric tons of supplies. So great was this assistance that some historians believe it indirectly stabilized Lenin's Bolshevik regime. Whatever the merits of that contention, for ordinary Russians the immediate gain was palpable. While no exact figures on the number of recipients are available, in the judgment of Hoover's staff the total exceeded 20,000,000 people.
In short, between 1914 and 1923 Herbert Hoover directed, financed, or assisted a multitude of international humanitarian relief efforts without parallel in history. During this nearly ten-year period, the CRB, the U. S. Food Administration, the ARA, and various other institutions and governments delivered nearly 34,000,000 metric tons of food to the lands and people imperiled by World War I and its aftermath. The monetary value of this sustenance exceeded $5,234,000,000: a figure that, in today's currency, would approach $50,000,000,000.
For most of this incredible undertaking, Herbert Hoover had high administrative responsibility In this manner Hoover--the "food regulator for the world" (as General Pershing called him) --coped with what Hoover later labeled "the greatest famine of all time." In this way he earned the epithet "the Great Humanitarian."
How many people owed their lives to his endeavors? Although precise statistics were never compiled in many instances, reasonable inferences about the number of beneficiaries can be drawn. Several years ago, after carefully studying the relevant data, a Hoover scholar concluded that between 1914 and 1923 more than 83,000,000 men, women, and children in more than twenty nations received food allotments for which Hoover and his associates were at least partly responsible. This figure did not include the belligerent populations (120,000,000 people) of America's wartime allies who received critically needed foodstuffs from the United States in 1917-1918: a form of "foreign aid" that cannot be considered humanitarian assistance in the ordinary sense of the term.
Eighty-three million people: it is a staggering figure. But whether this estimate is high or low, the bottom line is irrefutable: as someone remarked a number of years ago, Herbert Hoover was responsible for saving more lives than any other person in history.
George Nash article:
A Determined Humanitarian: Herbert Hoover in Europe
http://hoover.archives.gov/programs/4Iowans/Nash.html
