Herbert Hoover Part 1

Herbert Hoover.

by Vernon Kellogg.

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 att.i.tude 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 partic.i.p.ation in the work of the great wartime private and governmental organizations under his direction.

This book is the attempt of an observer, a.s.sociate and friend to tell, simply and straightforwardly, the personal story of the man and his work up to the present.

V. K.

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 grat.i.tude, 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 gra.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 a.s.sistance 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 a.s.sistance from the American Relief Administration.

Just what the nature and methods of this a.s.sistance 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.

CHAPTER II

THE CHILD AND BOY

The account of Mr. Hoover's sympathetic interest in the child sufferers from the Great War, and of his active and effective work on their behalf, makes one wonder about his own childhood. He is not so old that his childhood days could have been darkened by the one war which did mean suffering to many American children, especially those of the South.

He was not born in the South, nor of parents actually afflicted by poverty, and did not spend his early days in any of the comparatively few places in America, such as the congested great city quarters and industrial agglomerations of poor and ignorant foreign working-people, where real child distress is common; so he certainly did not, as a growing child, have his ears filled with tales of child suffering, or with the actual crying of hungry children.

There was one outstanding fact, however, in his relations as a child to the world and to the people most closely about him, which may have had its influence in making him especially susceptible to the sight of child misfortune. This is the fact that he, like many of his later wards in Europe, was orphaned at an early age. But he was by no means a neglected orphan. So I hardly think that his own personal experience as an orphan is a sufficient explanation of the pa.s.sionate interest in the special fate of the children, which he displayed from the beginning of the war to its end.

Nor can the explanation lie in the coldly reasoned conclusion that the most valuable relief to a people so stricken by catastrophe that its very existence as a human group is threatened, is to let whatever mortality is unavoidable fall chiefly to the old and the adult infirm for the sake of saving the next generation on which alone the future existence of the group depends. This actual fact Hoover always clearly saw; but the thing that those close to him saw quite as clearly was that this alone accounted for but a small part of his intensive attention to the children.

It is, then, neither any sad experience in his own life, nor any sociologic or biologic understanding of the hard facts of human existence and racial persistence, that does much to explain his particular devotion to the health and comfort of the millions of suffering children in Europe. The explanation lies simply, although mysteriously, in his own personality. I say mysteriously, for, despite all the wonderful new knowledge of heredity that we have gained since the beginning of the twentieth century, the way by which any of us comes to be just the sort of man he is is still mostly mystery. Herbert Hoover is simply a kind of man who, when brought by circ.u.mstances face to face with the distress of a people, is especially deeply touched by the distress of the children, and is impelled by this to use all of his intelligence and energy to relieve this distress. What we can know of his inheritance and early environment may indeed reveal a little something of why he is this kind of man. But it certainly will not reveal the whole explanation.

Herbert Hoover, or, to give him for once his full name, Herbert Clark Hoover, was born on August 10, 1874, in a small Quaker community of Iowa which composed, at the time of his birth, most of the village of West Branch in that state. That is, he usually says that he was born on August 10, but sometimes he says that this important day was August 11.

He seems to slide his birthday back and forth to suit the convenience of his family when they wish to celebrate it. He does this on the basis of the fact that when, in the midst of the general family excitement in the middle of the night of August 10-11, one of the busy Quaker aunts present bethought herself, for the sake of getting things straight in the family Bible, to say: "Oh, doctor, just how long ago was it that baby was born?" she got the following answer, "Just as near an hour ago as I can guess it." Thereupon she looked at the clock on the wall, and the doctor looked at his watch, and both found it exactly one o'clock of an important new morning!

Herbert's Quaker father, Jesse Clark Hoover, died in 1880, and his Quaker mother, Hulda Minthorn, in 1884. The father had had the simple education of a small Quaker college and was, at the time of Herbert's birth, the "village blacksmith," to give him the convenient t.i.tle used by the town and country people about. But really he was of that ambitious type of blacksmith, not uncommon in the Middle West, whose shop not only does the repairing of the farm machines and household appliances, but manufactures various homely metal things, and does a little selling of agricultural implements on the side. Jesse Hoover's mind was rather full of ideas about possible "improvements" on the machines he repaired and sold. And his two sons, Herbert and Theodore, and Herbert's two sons, Herbert, Jr., and Allan, are all rather given to the same "inventiveness" about the home.

Hulda Randall Minthorn Hoover, Herbert's mother, was a woman of unusual mental gifts. After her husband's death she gave much attention to church work, and became a recognized "preacher" at Quaker meetings. In this capacity she revealed so much power of expression and exhortation that she was in much demand. Her death, in 1884, came from typhoid fever. Those who knew her speak of her "personality." They say that she had color and attractiveness, although she was unusually shy and reserved. One can say exactly the same things of her son Herbert.

The immediate Hoover ancestry is Quaker. The more remote is Quaker mixed with Dutch and French Huguenot. The Dutch name was spelled with an _e_ instead of the second _o_. All of Herbert's grandparents were Quakers, and the Quaker records run back a long time. One of the family branches runs into Canada, with the story of a migration there of a group of refugees from the American colonies during the Revolution. These emigrants came from prosperous farms in Pennsylvania, but while they wanted to be free from England's control, they could not, as Quakers, agree to fight for this freedom. So as the neighbors were inclined to be a little "unpleasant" about this, and as Canada was just then offering free farms to colonists, they packed up their movables and _trekked_ north.

Another Canadian branch, French Huguenot in origin, has traditions of hurried removals from France into Holland before St. Bartholomew's Night, and of later escapes into the same country. But all finally decided that Europe anywhere was impossible, and hence they determined on a wholesale emigration to Canada. Here by chance they settled down side by side with the little Quaker group which had come from Pennsylvania. Close a.s.sociation and intermarrying resulted in the Quakerizing of the European Huguenots--their beliefs were essentially similar, anyway--so in time all the descendants of this double Canadian line were Quakers.

There were two other children in Jesse and Hulda Hoover's family: one a boy, Theodore, three and a half years older than Herbert, and the other a girl, Mary, who was very much younger. Theodore, like his younger brother, became a mining engineer, and after a dozen years of professional and business experience with mines all over the world--part of the time in connection with mining interests directed by his brother--is now the head of the graduate department of mining engineering in Stanford University.

After the father's and mother's death, the three Hoover orphans came under the kindly care of various Quaker aunts and uncles, and especially at first of Grandmother Minthorn. This good grandmother took special charge of little Mary, and pretty soon carried her with her out to Oregon, where she had a son and daughter living. There had been a little property left when the father died, enough to provide a very slender income for each child. But if the dollars were few the kind relatives were not, and the little Hoovers never suffered from hunger.

These relatives were not limited to Iowa, and the boy Herbert soon found himself in a new and strange environment, surrounded by a different race of human beings, whose red-brown skin and fantastic trappings greatly excited his boyish wonder and imagination. For he was sent to live with his Uncle Laban Miles, U. S. Government Indian Agent for the Osage tribe in the Indian Territory, who was one of the many Quakers who had dedicated their lives to the cause of the Indians at that time. Here Herbert spent a happy six or eight months, playing with some little cousins and learning to know the original Americans. For when other pastimes palled there were always the strange and wonderful red people to watch and wonder about.

But his life among the original Americans was interrupted by the solicitous aunts and uncles, who, realizing that an abundance of barbarians and a paucity of schools might not be the best of surroundings for a child coming to its first years of understanding, decided on bringing him back into a more civilized and Quakerish environment; at least one less marked by tomahawks, bows and arrows, and other tangible suggestions of a most un-Quakerish manner of life.

So he was sent back to Iowa, where he lived for two very happy years in the home of Uncle Allan Hoover. To this uncle, and to his wife, Aunt Millie, the impressionable boy became strongly attached. And there were some energetic young cousins always on hand to play with. The older brother Theodore, or Tad, was living at this time with another uncle, a prosperous Iowa farmer, also much loved by both of the boys. He lived near enough to permit frequent playings together of the two, and on another farm, with Grandmother Minthorn, was still the baby sister Mary, who was, however, too young to be much of a playmate for the brothers.

Indeed, the country all around bristled with the kindly uncles and aunts and other relatives and playmates, all interested in making life comfortable and happy for the little orphans.

There was also an especially attractive little black-eyed girl, Mildred Brook, who lived on a near-by farm, who later went to the same Quaker academy at Oskaloosa as Theodore, and is now Mrs. Theodore Hoover. In those days she was known as "Mildred of the berry-patches," as all the children for miles around a.s.sociated her in their minds with the luxuriant vines on the farm of her Uncle Bransome with whom she lived.

Her home was the children's Mecca in the berry season.