Herbert Hoover

by Glen Jeansonne

  Rebuilding nations upon the ruins of Central and Eastern Europe was comparable to constructing the Eiffel Tower using an Erector set. The region seemed to seesaw between leftist fanaticism and reaction, a pendulum that oscillated between chaos and Communism. The misery and suffering that followed the war had widened the gulf between the starving masses and the extravagant elite. In Hungary, for instance, parties, rulers, and ideologies rose and fell in rapid succession. There, Hoover’s ARA represented a major—perhaps the only—significant stabilizing force.

  Hungary had been an enemy nation, Austria’s partner in the Hapsburg monarchy. In the wake of a postwar revolution, a short-lived republic was installed. A second revolution soon followed, led by the Communist Béla Kun, dispatched from the Soviet Union to incite an uprising. Kun staged a brief reign of terror, purging and killing not only political enemies, but even some ARA men in the process of feeding children. Romania, encouraged by France, soon invaded Hungary and waged war on the divided nation. Hoover announced that food relief would be withheld until Kun was overthrown. Kun did fall, but the Romanians continued to loot the country, even seizing ARA food from children’s hospitals. Another coup placed into power the archduke Joseph, a Hapsburg, who vowed to restore the prewar monarchy. Hoover, fearing the archduke would precipitate a major civil war, ordered food withheld until he was removed. Viewing his situation as untenable, Joseph abdicated. This was Hungary’s eighth revolution in five months. When the 1919 harvest was reaped, Hungary became self-sufficient and the ARA mission ended. The Big Four issued an edict from Versailles ordering a blockade of Romania until it withdrew its army from Hungary. The Romanians capitulated.9 To Hoover, food relief had offered an opportunity to combat political chaos.

  Poland had been a battlefield for German and Russian armies, and it experienced some of the most grievous suffering of any country. Assured by President Wilson’s declaration promising self-determination for ethnic groups, the Poles, whose homeland had been partitioned for 150 years, declared independence from their German, Austrian, and Russian overlords immediately following the armistice. American food shipments to Poland began in January 1919 and continued until the harvest of the following spring, complemented by army surplus food and medical supplies. Using charm and persuasion, Hoover was able to arrange the shipment of supplies through German-occupied districts at a time when Germany was still under blockade.

  Like Poland, Finland had not experienced independence for centuries, having been part of czarist Russia. Finland regained its freedom after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, then plunged into civil war pitting Finns backed by Germany against Communists supported by the Bolsheviks. The pro-German faction prevailed and the Germans installed the kaiser’s brother-in-law as king. Following the armistice, the Finns expelled the German pretender and created a republic. During the armistice, Hoover defied the Allied food blockade to send food to the Finns, protected by the American navy. Initially, Hoover tapped a $5 million fund controlled by Wilson to provide free meals to 35 million Finnish children. Later, he negotiated a large food loan for Finnish relief, and Finland became the only European nation to repay its debt in full. Hoover also worked through Wilson to obtain diplomatic recognition for republican Finland. The president dispatched his relief director to persuade Clemenceau. After the conversation between Hoover and the Frenchman, the Big Four issued a letter instructing their foreign ministers to extend diplomatic recognition to Finland. Largely due to Hoover’s efforts, Finland formally gained standing as a free nation. Finland’s grateful people coined the word huuvere, meaning “charity,” or “loving all men as brothers.”10

  Working from an office in Paris, Hoover’s ARA functioned with crisp, military precision. In place of paintings, the walls were plastered with huge maps pinpointing relief operations and identifying all ARA shipping points in more than twenty-five countries. The ARA was a streamlined, maximally efficient business with a human heart. Americans, Hoover said, had never endured genuine famine on the scale of Europe, not even during the Civil War. He lamented “the pallid faces; the unsmiling eyes; the thin, anemic and bloated children; the dead palls over towns where the children no longer play on the streets; the dull, listless movements and dumb grief of the women; the sweep of contagious diseases and the unending procession of funerals.”11 Jews were particularly grateful for Hoover’s solicitude. “May I as one of 110 million Americans thank you from the bottom of my heart,” wrote Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, leader of the American Jewish Congress in 1919. “I am thinking not only of your devoted help [to the Jews] in Poland and elsewhere, but your larger inclusive service which has so greatly honored the name of our country in all European lands.” Lewis Strauss wrote on behalf of the Jewish community, after Hoover had publicly condemned anti-Jewish pogroms in Poland and Ukraine during 1919 and 1920, that Hoover stood up for European Jews when no one else seemed to be looking or listening. The slaughter and suffering he witnessed took a “psychic toll” on Hoover, his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, wrote. “A certain definite and very original kind of joy of life was stamped out of him by those war years.”12

  While the treaty negotiations simmered at Versailles, Hoover attempted to slice through numerous roadblocks that held starving populations hostage. In order to transport food to where it was needed, the infrastructure of the continent had to be rebuilt. The arteries of Europe—the Rhine, Elbe, Vistula, and Danube, as well as numerous canals and ports—lay in disarray. Locomotives stood stranded by intermittent strikes and coal shortages. Ethnic minorities fought pitched battles over disputed land and resources and issued a multitude of virtually valueless currencies unrecognized beyond their borders. Travel between nations was slowed by new and different gauges for railroad tracks, high tariff walls, and passport checkpoints every few hundred miles. In a region beset by a multitude of problems, Hoover’s subordinates were resourceful, improvising and introducing a degree of order amid the rubble. During one of the numerous guerrilla wars that erupted, neither side would yield to the other to permit passage of a food train, yet both agreed to surrender to the U.S. Food Administration, formally handing over their swords to one of Hoover’s representatives. In a race against starvation, the entrepreneurs of food distribution won—most of the time.13

  Hoover had to attack many problems simultaneously. As usual, he decentralized problem solving by finding the best man for the job and permitting him to solve it with his own ingenuity. To help Hoover restore the continent’s transportation and industry, General Pershing loaned Colonel Anson C. Goodyear, whom the general termed “the best coal man in the world.” Goodyear had civilian experience in both railroading and coal mining. Sent to the rich coal mines of Czechoslovakia, Goodyear had doubled coal production in Central Europe within a month. Like Hoover’s, his methods were unflagging energy, long hours, generosity, diplomacy, and self-sacrifice. Goodyear circulated throughout mines in Poland, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. With little help, skimping on sleep, he dashed from camp to camp, offering food and fair treatment. When he discovered $25,000 in American banknotes sitting idle in an Eastern European bank, Goodyear asked Hoover if he could use it to buy the miners tobacco. Hoover consented, the miners satisfied their craving, morale improved, production rose, and locomotives began chugging.14

  While coal powered the engine of recovery, the ARA also rejuvenated transportation and communication in order to transfer commodities and orchestrate economic recovery throughout Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe and the Near East. Hoover helped restore canals and railroads to service as well as rolling stock, boats, and barges. His men facilitated traffic along the Rhine, the Elbe, the Vistula, and the Danube while reestablishing telegraphic and postal communications. Hoover organized the European Coal Administration to manage coal production and distribution in Eastern Europe. He also directed the Eastern European Railway Administration, controlling and coordinating railway and canal transportation in that region. Working with a dysfunctional atmos
phere that screamed for order, the ARA built hospitals, warehouses, orphanages, schools, ports, roads, and telegraph lines. It constructed thirty thousand miles of rail tracks and rebuilt barge canals along the Danube. Hoover drew upon more than fifteen hundred American engineers and businessmen from the military. Constituting the core of his rebuilding effort, his men traversed international borders, uninspected, traveling on passports signed by Hoover. Equally important, the ARA commanded legions of volunteers in local communities who labored under the direction of minute American staffs. In most nations, the United States furnished only the food and a blueprint for organization; volunteers at the local and regional levels implemented the program, minimizing overhead costs.15

  In the summer of 1919, just as Europe’s famine was almost conquered, an outbreak of typhus spread westward from Russia along the Baltic to the Black Sea, enveloping Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine. It was an epidemic brought on by rampant homelessness and the lack of sanitation. Typhus is borne by lice. Fats needed to make soap had been eaten, while some people had even consumed cats that carried lice. The Big Four assigned the problem to Hoover, though it did not lie within his field of expertise, and he mobilized quickly to fight the contagion that was raging rapidly toward the heartland of Europe. Hoover drew a quarantine line stretching north-south across the continent, beyond which the disease would not be permitted to spread. Borrowing a thousand specialists from the medical corps and the Red Cross, he obtained all the delousing equipment available from the American, British, and German armies, including hair clippers, soap, and portable baths. People from within the infected zone were bathed and scrubbed, their clothes burned, and their heads shaved. Only after undergoing these procedures were they permitted to cross the line of separation into safe areas. While the military furnished most of the manpower, soldiers were supervised by ARA volunteers, who planned strategy and directed operations on-site. At the height of the epidemic, some 1 million people were infected, with one hundred thousand dying weekly. Within six months, the ARA had tamed the threat.16

  When the ARA officially expired in July 1919 and most government support ended, Hoover transformed it into a private, charitable foundation. While most aid to adults halted that summer, the feeding of children continued through the early 1920s, financed by donations from individuals, foundations, and major philanthropists. As a private group, the ARA helped supply food, clothing, and medicine for some 14 to 16 million children, chiefly in Central and Eastern Europe and the Near East. As a separate service, Hoover organized special care and food relief for 19 million war orphans. Among the major recipient nations were Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Germany, Latvia, and Lithuania. Poland and Austria were among the largest beneficiaries. In addition to assisting children, the ARA continued support for special groups among the intellectual community, such as teachers, professors, writers, and artists, among whom unemployment was widespread.17

  By the time he departed from Europe for his homeland on September 19, 1919, Hoover had delivered 28 million tons of food and supplies worth $5.5 billion in less than a year. The United States provided 96 percent of the credit for purchases and 93 percent of the supplies. ARA staff remained in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Poland well after Hoover left the continent.18

  Through Hoover’s relief efforts, as much as one-third of the population of postwar Europe was saved from death by starvation and disease. Moreover, some 15 million children were restored to health, giving them a chance for normal lives.19 Hoover’s work gave the war’s survivors a chance for renewed vigor, peace, and prosperity. He had transplanted the aphorism that charity begins at home and expanded it to encompass a continent. In the short run, it meant survival; in the long run, it meant hope.20 His biographer George H. Nash writes, “Herbert Hoover was responsible for saving more people than any person in history.”

  Aside from delivering food, rebuilding railroads, and dredging canals, Hoover had attempted to heal the wounds of war in less tangible ways. He made a valiant, if not entirely successful, effort to avert chaos and build a bridge to normality. He and his volunteers helped stem the infection of totalitarianism, at least temporarily, and gave Europe a chance to preserve and incubate democratic institutions. Hoover was sickened by the slaughter of war, as well as by the spirit of vengeance and diplomatic bungling that followed, while populations starved and nations disintegrated. Hoover feared that within a generation another catastrophic war might materialize. He believed it could be prevented, but he lamented that wisdom and generosity had died on the battlefield.

  In his public career during the Great War, Hoover was single-minded but multidimensional. He devoted his energies to feeding populations, saving the lives of children, avoiding a punitive peace, and creating stability that would avert another war. In all of this he remained a pragmatic American nationalist who, once his country entered the war, exerted every effort to win it, and, once that was done, to protect American interests. He comprehended, more than almost any American of his time in public life, the autocratic nature of much of the European continent, and he knew this autocracy would inevitably be overturned by its peoples, whatever America did. He was also realistic about the embedded ethnic and nationalistic rivalries, the tradition of militarism, and the appeal of messianic doctrines that addressed genuine grievances even if they did not solve them, or solved them at too great a cost. He believed that America had a role to play in world affairs but could not dictate the outcome of global events through military might. He felt that America’s best policy was to allow the European nations to work out their problems, to help mitigate them when it could, and to facilitate stability and a degree of prosperity. These goals should be accomplished by neither retreating nor intruding. The League of Nations was a tool but not a panacea. He did not believe American troops should remain in Europe, nor should the United States intervene in any European revolution. He did believe in joining the League of Nations, imperfect though it might prove to be. From relief of the anguished to treaty making, Hoover was a man with a soft heart and a hard head.

  As he returned to America, Hoover wanted to temporarily withdraw from public life, enjoy the outdoors, and catch up with his family. Upon arriving in California, he announced that for the coming month he would answer no telephone calls, read no letters longer than a single page, nor deliver any long speeches. After loading their car with fishing gear, the family embarked on a vacation, yet public responsibilities compelled Hoover to return after four days. He had become a quasi-celebrity and could not in good conscience shirk duty. Lou, for her part, desired a more normal family life and began to construct a magnificent dream house she had designed herself adjacent to the Stanford campus. Originally planned as an intimate cottage, it morphed into a fifty-seven-room mansion with openings at each level to a terrace.

  Hoover had refused remuneration for his relief work during the war, and now, with a diminished fortune, he pondered his financial future. After a brief interlude he opened an engineering office in San Francisco with the full intention of resuming his career in engineering, yet he never did. Interested in shaping public opinion without holding a public office, he dallied with the idea of publishing a newspaper. He purchased shares in the Sacramento Union and the Washington Herald and loaned money to friends to buy stock in the dailies. In 1919, he performed some discreet editorial duties for the Herald and met with the daily’s managing editor and its reporters. During the same period Hoover tried, but failed, to purchase shares in the New York Herald and the Baltimore Sun.21

  Hoover’s life had reached a crossroads. Either he would return to the familiar, lucrative task of mining, or he would commit himself permanently to public life, a decision dictated only in part by his own preference. He found his opinions in demand, and he felt obligated to respond. His involvement occurred incrementally, yet the long road to politics and public service had no end. The war had produced explosive changes that disconcerted him. It had unl
eashed the genies of nationalism, Communism, and destructive technology that could not be rebottled. Hoover remained fundamentally a resolute optimist and a believer in gradual progress. Personal success should be linked to communal responsibility. “Character,” he remarked, “is made in the community as well as the individual by assuming responsibilities, not by escape from them.”22

  Despite his desire for simplicity, the pace of Hoover’s life did not slacken upon his return to America; if anything, it intensified. Much in demand to speak and write, he threw himself into explicating the issues of the day. During the fifteen months after arriving in the United States, the forty-five-year-old was constantly in the public eye, delivering forty-six speeches, penning twenty-eight magazine articles, and testifying before nine congressional committees. Meanwhile, he fleshed out his personal, political, and economic philosophy, which he later condensed in his treatise American Individualism in 1922.23

  America did not emerge from the Great War unaffected by the turbulence that had rattled postwar Europe. In 1919, more than 4 million Americans participated in some three thousand strikes, aggravated by the specters of socialism, Communism, and anarchism. Such radicalism, punctuated by violence, inspired a Red Scare and an indiscriminate crackdown by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, including mass arrests and deportations. President Wilson convened two industrial conferences to devise conciliatory means of settling labor issues. The first adjourned inconclusively, with no major accomplishments, generating no legislation. Yet the second was urged to take a longer, more theoretical view and develop a philosophy to accommodate the contrasting aims of capital and labor. Hoover served as vice chairman, presided at one-third of the meetings, and played a major role in writing the report. The chief innovation, largely at his suggestion, was the concept of shop councils comprised of representatives of management and labor to defuse issues at the local level before they became exacerbated. The councils would complement, but not supersede, unions, which operated at the national level. Hoover considered strikes wasteful but did not oppose them as a last resort. He also commissioned a study of waste in industry by engineering societies in which he played a leading role. He would pursue the ideas of shop councils and curtailment of waste at greater length during his tenure as secretary of commerce.24