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HERBERT HOOVER
THE MAN AND HIS WORK
BY
VERNON KELLOGG
AUTHOR OF "HEADQUARTERS NIGHTS," ETC.
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK LONDON
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
DEDICATED
TO MY COMPANIONS OF THE
C. R. B.
PREFACE
No man can have reached the position in the public eye, can have had
such influence in the councils of our own government and in the fate of
other governments, can have been so conspicuously effective in public
service as has Herbert Hoover, without exciting a wide public interest
in his personality, his fundamental attitude toward his great problems
and his methods of solving them. This American, who has had to live in
the whole world and yet has remained more truly and representatively
American than many of us who have never crossed an ocean or national
boundary line, is an object of absorbing interest today among the people
of his native land. He is hardly less interesting to millions in other
lands. He has carried the American point of view, the American manner,
the American qualities of heart and mind to the far corners of the
earth. He has no less revealed again, as other great Americans have done
before him, these American attributes to America itself.
Many questions are being asked about the life and experiences of this
man before he entered upon his outstanding public service and about the
details of his personal participation in the work of the great wartime
private and governmental organizations under his direction.
This book is the attempt of an observer, associate and friend to tell,
simply and straightforwardly, the personal story of the man and his work
up to the present.
V. K.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE vii
I. CHILDREN 1
II. THE CHILD AND BOY 10
III. THE UNIVERSITY 31
IV. THE YOUNG MINING ENGINEER 59
V. IN CHINA 80
VI. LONDON AND THE REST OF THE WORLD 102
VII. THE WAR: THE MAN AND HIS FIRST SERVICE 124
VIII. THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM; ORGANIZATION AND DIPLOMATIC
DIFFICULTIES 140
IX. THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM; SCOPE AND METHODS 165
X. AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION; PRINCIPLES, CONSERVATION, CONTROL
OF EXPORTS 199
XI. AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION; GENERAL REGULATION; CONTROL OF
WHEAT AND PORK, ORGANIZATION IN THE STATES 225
XII. AMERICAN RELIEF ADMINISTRATION 256
APPENDICES
APPENDIX I 283
APPENDIX II 291
APPENDIX III 311
APPENDIX IV 334
CHAPTER I
CHILDREN
It was a great day for the children of Warsaw. It was a great day for
their parents, too, and for all the people and for the Polish
Government. But it was especially the great day of the children. The man
whose name they all knew as well as their own, but whose face they had
never seen, and whose voice they had never heard, had come to Warsaw.
And they were all to see him and he was to see them.
He had not announced his coming, which was a strange and upsetting thing
for the government and military and city officials whose business it is
to arrange all the grand receptions and the brilliant parades for
visiting guests to whom the Government and all the people wish to do
honor. And there was no man in the world to whom the Poles could wish to
do more honor than to this uncrowned simple American citizen whose name
was for them the synonym of savior.
For what was their new freedom worth if they could not be alive to enjoy
it? And their being alive was to them all so plainly due to the heart
and brain and energy and achievement of this extraordinary American, who
sat always somewhere far away in Paris, and pulled the strings that
moved the diplomats and the money and the ships and the men who helped
him manage the details, and converted all of the activities of these men
and all of these things into food for Warsaw--and for all Poland. It was
food that the people of Warsaw and all Poland simply had to have to keep
alive, and it was food that they simply could not get for themselves.
They all knew that. The name of another great American spelled freedom
for them; the name Herbert Hoover spelled life to them.
So it was no wonder that the high officials of the Polish Government and
capital city were in a state of great excitement when the news suddenly
came that the man whom they had so often urged to come to Poland was
really moving swiftly on from Prague to Warsaw.
Ever since soon after Armistice Day he had sat in Paris, directing with
unremitting effort and absolute devotion the task of getting food to the
mouths of the hungry people of all the newly liberated but helpless
countries of Eastern Europe, and above all, to the children of these
countries, so that the coming generation, on whom the future of these
struggling peoples depended, should be kept alive and strong. And now he
was preparing to return to his own country and his own children to take
up again the course of his life as a simple American citizen at home.
But before going he wanted to see for himself, if only by the most
fleeting of glimpses, that the people of Poland and Bohemia and Servia
and all the rest were really being fed. And especially did he want to
see that the children were alive and strong.
When he came to Paris in November, 1918, at the request of the President
of the United States, to organize the relief of the newly liberated
peoples of Eastern Europe, terrible tales were brought to him of the
suffering and wholesale deaths of the children of these ravaged lands.
And when those of us who went to Poland for him in January, 1919, to
find out the exact condition and the actual food needs of the
twenty-five million freed people there, made our report to him, a single
unpremeditated sentence in this report seemed most to catch his eyes and
hold his attention. It did more: it wetted his eyes and led to a special
concentration of his efforts on behalf of the suffering children. This
sentence was: "We see very few children playing in the streets of
Warsaw." Why were they not playing? The answer was simple and
sufficient: The children of Warsaw were not strong enough to play in the
streets. They could not run; many could not walk; some could not even
stand up. Their weak little bodies were bones clothed with skin, but not
muscles. They simply could not play.
So in all the excitement of the few hours possible to the citizens of
Warsaw and the Government officials of Poland to make hurried
preparation to honor their guest and show him their gratitude, one thing
they decided to do, which was the best thing for the happiness of their
guest they could possibly have done. They decided to show him that the
children of Warsaw could now walk!
So seventy thousand boys and girls were summoned hastily from the
schools. They came with the very tin cups and pannikins from which they
had just had their special meal of the day, served at noon in all the
schools and special children's canteens, thanks to the charity of
America, as organized and directed by Hoover, and they carried their
little paper napkins, stamped with the flag of the United States, which
they could wave over their heads. And on an old race-track of Warsaw,
these thousands of restored children marched from mid-afternoon till
dark in happy, never-ending files past the grand stand where sat the man
who had saved them, surrounded by the heads of Government and the
notables of Warsaw.
They marched and marched and cheered and cheered, and waved their little
pans and cups and napkins. And all went by as decorously and in as
orderly a fashion as many thousands of happy cheering children could be
expected to, until suddenly from the grass an astonished rabbit leaped
out and started down the track. And then five thousand of these children
broke from the ranks and dashed madly after him, shouting and laughing.
And they caught him and brought him in triumph as a gift to their guest.
But they were astonished to see as they gave him their gift, that this
great strong man did just what you or I or any other human sort of human
being could not have helped doing under like circumstances. They saw him
cry. And they would not have understood, if he had tried to explain to
them that he cried because they had proved to him that they could run
and play. So he did not try. But the children of Warsaw had no need to
be sorry for him. For he cried because he was glad.
But the children of Warsaw were not the only children of Poland that
Hoover was interested in and wanted to see. His Polish family was a
large and scattered one; there were nearly a million children in it
altogether, and some of them were in Lodz and some in Cracow and others
in Brest-Litovsk and Bielostok and even in towns far out on the Eastern
frontier near the Polish-Bolshevist fighting lines. But of course he
could not visit all of them, and much less could he hope to visit all
the rest of his whole family in Eastern Europe. For while an especially
large part of it was in Poland, other parts were in Finland, Esthonia,
Latvia and Lithuania, and some of it was in Czecho-Slovakia and Austria,
and other parts were in Hungary, Roumania, and Jugo-Slavia. Altogether
this large and diverse family of Mr. Hoover's in Eastern Europe numbered
at least two and a half million hungry children. And it only asked for
his permission to be still larger. For at least a million more babies
and boys and girls thought they were unfairly excluded from it, because
they were sure that they were poor and weak and hungry enough to be
admitted, and being very hungry, and not being able to get enough food
any other way, was the test of admission to Mr. Hoover's family.
When the American Relief Administration, which was the organization
called into being under Hoover's direction in response to President
Wilson's appeal to Congress soon after the armistice, saw that its
general assistance to the new nations could probably be dispensed with
by the end of the summer of 1919, the director realized that some
special help for the children would still be needed. The task of seeing
that the underfed and weak children in all these countries of Eastern
Europe, extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea, received their
supplementary daily meals of specially fit and specially prepared food,
could not be suddenly dropped by the American workers. There could be no
confidence that the still unstable and struggling governments would be
able to carry it on successfully. But with the abolition of the blockade
and the incoming of the year's harvest, and with the growing possibility
of adequate financial help through government and bank loans, the
various new nations of Eastern Europe could be expected to arrange for
an adequate general supply of food for themselves without further
assistance from the American Relief Administration.
Just what the nature and methods of this assistance were, and how the
one hundred million dollars put into the hands of the Relief
Administration by Congress were made to serve as the basis for the
purchase and distribution to the hungry countries of over seven hundred
million dollars' worth of food, with the final return of almost all of
the original hundred million to the United States Government (if not in
actual cash, at least in the form of government obligations), will be
told in a later chapter. Also how it was arranged, without calling on
the United States Government for further advances, that the feeding of
the millions of hungry children of Eastern Europe could go on as it is
now actually going on every day under Hoover's direction, until the time
arrives, some time this summer, when it can be wholly taken over by the
new governments.
But just now I want to tell another story.