Herbert Hoover Part 9

And that was what Hoover wanted and intended. For he knew that only the people, all of them working voluntarily together, could really administer the food of America, as it had to be administered in the great war emergency that had come to the country.

On the day after the armistice Hoover addressed the Federal Food Administrators, gathered in Washington, for the last time. In this address he outlined his att.i.tude toward the future work of the Food Administration and, even more importantly, toward governmental food control as a policy, in the following words:

"Our work under the Food Control Act has revolved largely around the curtailment of speculation and profiteering. This act will expire at the signing of the peace with Germany, and as it represents a type of legislation only justified under war conditions, I do not expect to see its renewal. It has proved of vital importance under the economic currents and psychology of war.

I do not consider it as of such usefulness in the economic currents and psychology of peace. Furthermore, it is my belief that the tendency of all such legislation, except in war, is to an over-degree to strike at the roots of individual initiative. We have secured its execution during the war as to the willing cooperation of ninety-five per cent of the trades of the country, but under peace conditions it would degenerate into an hara.s.sing blue law.

"The law has well justified itself under war conditions. The investigations of our economic division clearly demonstrate that during the first year of the Food Administration farm prices steadily increased by fifteen per cent to twenty per cent on various computations, while wholesale prices decreased from three per cent to ten per cent, according to the basis of calculation.

Thus middlemen's cost and profits were greatly reduced. This was due to the large suppression of profiteering and speculation and to the more orderly trade practices introduced under the law.

"It is my desire that we should all recognize that we have pa.s.sed a great milestone in the signing of the armistice; that we must get upon the path of peace; that therefore we should begin at once to relax the regulation and control measures of the Food Administration at every point where they do not open a possibility of profiteering and speculation. This we cannot and will not permit so far as our abilities extend until the last day that we have authority under the law. When we entered upon this work eighteen months ago our trades were rampant with speculation and profiteering. This grew mainly from the utterly insensate raids of Europe on our commodities. I look now for a turn of American food trades towards conservative and safe business because in this period that confronts us, with the decreased buying power of our own people, of uncertainty as to the progress of the world's politics, with the Government in control of exports and imports, he would be a foolish man indeed who today started a speculation in food. This is a complete reversal of the commercial atmosphere that existed when war began eighteen months ago, and therefore the major necessity for law in repression of speculative activities is, to my mind, rapidly pa.s.sing. It is our duty, however, to exert ourselves in every direction so to handle our food during reconstruction as to protect our producers and our consumers and to a.s.sure our trade from chaos and panic."

On the same day that this address was made Hoover began the canceling of the Food Administration regulations, and this cancellation continued rapidly through November and December. It had to be done with care to prevent dangerous disorganization, and some continued control was necessary during the winter and spring in order to carry out the agreements of price stabilization entered into between the Food Administration and the producers and handlers of certain commodities, as hogs, sugar, rice, and cotton seed and its products. The wheat price guarantee and control especially provided for by Congress and later Presidential proclamation remained vested in the United States Grain Corporation. It will expire on June 30, 1920.

But Hoover could not remain in America to see this demobilization of the Food Administration through personally. Only ten days after the armistice he left for Europe, at the request of the President, to direct the partic.i.p.ation of the United States in the imperatively needed relief of the war-ravaged countries of Eastern Europe. Edgar Rickard, who had been Hoover's chief personal a.s.sistant through all of the Food Administration work, was appointed by the President as Acting Food Administrator in Hoover's absence.

CHAPTER XII

AMERICAN RELIEF ADMINISTRATION

With the coming of the armistice victorious America and the Allies found themselves face to face with a terrible situation in Eastern Europe. The liberated peoples of the Baltic states, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Jugo-Slavia, and the Near East, were in a dreadful state of starvation and economic wreckage. A great, responsibility and pressing duty devolved on America, Great Britain, France, and Italy to act promptly for the relief of these peoples who had become temporarily, by the hazards of war, their wards. But the Allies themselves were in no enviable position to relieve others. Their own troubles were many. It was on America that the major part of this relief work would fall.

No man knew this situation, as far as it could be known before the veil of blockade and military control was lifted from it, better than Hoover. And no man realized more clearly than he the direful consequences that it threatened not only to the peoples of the suffering countries themselves but to the peace and stability of the world, to restore which every effort had now to be exerted. Hoover was not only the man logically indicated to the President of the United States to undertake this saving relief on the part of America, but he was the man whom all of Europe recognized as the source of hope in this critical moment. He came to the gigantic endeavor as the man of the hour.

Hoover naturally made Paris his headquarters, for the Peace Conference was sitting here, and here also were the representatives of the Allies with whom he was to a.s.sociate himself in the combined effort to save the peoples of Eastern Europe from starvation and help them make a beginning of self-government and economic rehabilitation.

His first steps were directed toward: First, securing coordination with the Allied Governments by setting up a council of the a.s.sociated governments; second, finding the necessary financial support from the United States for making the American contribution to this relief; third, setting up a special organization for the administration of the American food and funds; and, fourth, urging the provision of funds and shipping by the Allied Governments.

The special American organization for a.s.sisting in this general European relief was quickly organized under the name of the American Relief Administration, of which Hoover was formally named by the President Director-General, and Congress on the recommendation of the President appropriated, on February 24, 1919, $100,000,000 as a working fund for the new organization. In addition to this the United States Treasury was already making monthly loans of several million dollars each to Roumania, Serbia, and Czecho-Slovakia. But while waiting for the Congressional appropriation the work had to be got going, and for this the President contributed $5,000,000 from his special funds available for extraordinary expenses.

Before actual relief work could be intelligently begun, however, it was necessary to find out by personal inspection just what the actual food situation in each of the Eastern European countries was, and for that purpose investigating missions were sent out in December, 1918, and January, 1919, to all of the suffering countries.

Hoover had quickly gathered about him, as nucleus of a staff, a number of men already experienced in relief work and food matters who had worked with him in the Belgian relief and the American Food Administration. Others were rapidly added, both civilians of business or technical experience and army officers, detached at his request, especially from the Quartermaster and Service of Supplies corps. From these men he was able to select small groups eager to begin with him the actual work. His own impatience and readiness to make a real start was like that of a race-horse at the starting gate or a runner with his toes on the line awaiting the pistol shot.

The atmosphere of Paris was an irritating one. The men in control were always saying "wait." There were a thousand considerations of old-time diplomacy, of present and future political and commercial considerations in their minds. They were conferring with each other and referring back to their governments for instructions and then conferring again. Common sense and necessity were being restrained by political sensitiveness and inertia. In Hoover's mind one thing was perfectly clear. Time was of the essence of his contract. Every day of delay meant more difficulty. The Eastern countries, struggling to find themselves in the chaos of disorganization, waiting for an official determination of their new borders, were already becoming entangled in frontier brawls and quarreling over the control of local sources of food and fuel. Their people were suffering terribly and were clamoring for help. Hoover was there to help; he wanted to begin helping. So he began.

Hoover had already taken the position that the day of hate was pa.s.sed.

With the end of mutual slaughter and destruction came immediately the time for help. It was like that pitiful period after the battle when the b.l.o.o.d.y field is taken over by the stretcher-bearers, the Red Cross nurses, and the tireless surgeons. So Hoover had already clearly in mind that the hand of charity was going to be extended to the sufferers in Hungary and Austria and Germany as well as to the people who were suffering because of the ravages of the armies of these nations. Dr.

Alonzo Taylor and I, whom he had sent early in December to Switzerland to get into close touch with the situation in Eastern and Central Europe, listened, for him, in Berne to the pitiful pleas of the representatives of starving Vienna. By January Hoover's missions were installed and at work in Trieste, Belgrade, Vienna, Prague, Buda-Pest, and Warsaw. In February Dr. Taylor and I were reporting the German situation from Berlin.

The att.i.tude of the people in these countries was one of pathetic dependence on American aid and confidence that it would be forthcoming.

The name of Hoover was already known all over Europe because of his Belgian work, and the swiftly-spread news that he was in charge of the new relief work acted like magic in restoring hope to these despairing millions.

When the first food mission to Poland, making its way in the first week of January, 1919, with difficulty and discomfort because of the demoralized transportation conditions, had reached that part of its journey north of Vienna towards Cracow which brought it into Czecho-Slovakia, our train halted at a station gaily decorated with flags and bunting among which the American colors were conspicuous. A band was playing vigorously something that sounded like the Star-Spangled Banner, and a group of top-hatted and frock-coated gentlemen were the front figures in a great crowd that covered the station platform. I was somewhat dismayed by these evident preparations for a reception, for we were not coming to try to help Czecho-Slovakia, but Poland, between which two countries sharp feeling was already developing in connection with the dispute over the Teschen coal fields.

I told my interpreter, therefore, to hurry off the train and explain the situation.

He returned with one of the gentlemen of high hat and long coat who said, in broken French: "Well, anyway, you are the food mission, aren't you?" I replied, "Yes, but we are going to Warsaw; we are only pa.s.sing through your country; we can't do anything for you."

"But," he persisted, "you are the Americans, aren't you?"

"Yes, we are the Americans."

"Well, then, it's all right." And he waved an encouraging hand to the band, which responded with increased endeavor, while the crowd cheered and waved the home-made American flags. And we were received and addressed, and given curious things to drink and a little food--we gave them in return some Red Cross prisoner packages we carried along for our own maintenance--and then we were sent on with more cheers and hearty G.o.dspeeds.

Delay so plainly meant sharper suffering and more deaths that even before the necessary financial and other arrangements were completed or even well under way, Hoover had made arrangements with the Secretary of War by which vessels carrying 135,000 tons of American food were diverted from French to Mediterranean ports, and with the Grain Corporation, under authority of the Treasury, by which 145,000 tons were started for northern European ports. Thus by the time arrangements had been made for financing the shipments and for internal transportation and safe control and fair distribution, the food cargoes were already arriving at the nearest available ports. Within a few weeks from the time the first mission arrived in Warsaw and had reported back to Hoover the terrible situation of the Polish people, the relief food was flowing into Poland through Dantzig, the German port for the use of which for this purpose a special article in the terms of the armistice had provided, but which was only most reluctantly and by dint of strong pressure made available to us.

Similarly from Trieste the food trains began moving north while there still remained countless details of arrangement to settle. I was in Vienna when the first train of American relief food came in from the South. The Italians were also attempting to send in some supplies, but so far all the trains which had started north had been blocked at some border point. The American train was in charge of two snappy doughboys, a corporal and a private. When it reached the point of blockade the corporal was told that he could go no farther. He asked why, but only got for answer a curt statement that trains were not moving just now.

"But this one is," he replied, and called to his private: "Let me have my gun." With revolver in hand he instructed the engineer to pull out.

And the train went on. When I asked him in Vienna if he had worried any at the border about the customs and military regulations of the governments concerned which he was disregarding, he answered with a cheerful smile: "Not a worry; Mr. Hoover's representative at Trieste told me to take the train through and it was up to me to take her, wasn't it? These wop kings and generals don't count with me. I'm working for Hoover."

But the whole situation in these southeastern countries because of their utter disorganization and their hopeless embroilment in conflict with each other, was too impossible. Whatever degree of peace the capitals of these countries recognized as the diplomatic status of the moment, the frontiers had no illusions. There were trenches out there and machine-guns and bayonets. Men were shooting at each other across the lines. Either the trains or cars of one country would be stopped at the border, or if they got across they did not get back. Some countries had enough cars and locomotives; some did not. If one country had some coal to spare but was starving for lack of the wheat which could be spared by its neighbor, which was freezing, there was no way of making the needed exchange. The money of each country became valueless in the others--and of less and less value in its own land. Everything was going to pieces, including the relief. It simply could not go on this way.

Finally, as a result of Hoover's insistence at Paris on the terrible danger of delay both to the lives of the people and the budding democracy of Europe, the Supreme Economic Council took the drastic measure of temporarily taking over the control of the whole transportation system of Southeastern Europe which was put into Hoover's hands, leaving him to arrange by agreement, as best he could, according to his own ideas and opportunities, the other matters of finance, coal, the interchange of native commodities between adjacent countries and the distribution of imported food.

Hoover became, in a word, general economic and life-saving manager for the Eastern European countries. It is from my personal knowledge of his achievements in this extraordinary position during the first eight months after the Armistice that I have declared my belief earlier in this account that it was owing more to Hoover and his work than to any other single influence that utter anarchy and chaos and complete Bolshevik domination in Eastern Europe (west of Russia) were averted. In other words, Hoover not only saved lives, but nations and civilizations by his superhuman efforts. The political results of his work were but incidental to his life-saving activities, but from an historical and international point of view they were even more important.

Before, however, referring to them more specifically, something of the scope and special character of the general European relief and supply work should be briefly explained.

Altogether, twenty countries received supplies of food and clothing under Hoover's control acting as Director-General of Relief for the Supreme Economic Council. The total amount of these supplies delivered from December 1, 1918, to June 1, 1919, was about three and a quarter million tons, comprising over six hundred shiploads, of a total approximate value of eight hundred million dollars. There were, in addition, on June 1, port stocks of over 100,000 tons ready for internal delivery, and other supplies came later.

The twenty countries sharing in the supplies included Belgium and Northern France (through the C. R. B.), the Baltic states of Finland, Esthonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, a small part of Russia, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Germany, German Austria, Hungary, Roumania, Bulgaria, Greater Servia, Turkey, Armenia, Italy, and the neutrals, Denmark and Holland. By the terms of the Congressional Act appropriating the hundred million dollars for the relief of Eastern Europe, no part of the money could be used for the relief of Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, or Turkey. But Vienna needed help more quickly and imperatively than any other eastern capital. Hoover arranged that money should be advanced by England and France for food purchases in America for Austria and Hungary. This food was put into Hoover's hands, and to him was left the problem of getting it into the suffering countries. Germany was supplied under the approval of the Allies in accordance with the armistice agreement.

The "relief" of Eastern and Central Europe was, of course, not all charity in the usually accepted meaning of the term. The American hundred million dollars and the British sixty million dollars could not buy the needed eight hundred millions' worth of food and clothing. In fact, of that American hundred million all but about fifteen are now again in the U. S. Treasury in the form of promises to pay signed by various Eastern European Governments. About ten millions of it were given by Hoover outright, in the form of special food for child nutrition, to the under-nourished children from the Baltic to the Black Sea. By additions made to this charity by the Eastern European Governments themselves and by the nationals of these countries resident in America, and from other sources, two and a half million weak children are today still being given (May, 1920) a daily supplementary meal of special food.

Hoover's experience in Belgium and Northern France had taught him how necessary was the special care of the children. All the war-ravaged countries have lost a material part of their present generation. In some of them the drainage of human life and strength approaches that of Germany after the Thirty Years War and of France after the Napoleonic wars. If they are not to suffer a racial deterioration the coming generation must be nursed to strength. The children, then, who are the immediately coming generation and the producers of the ones to follow, must be particularly cared for. That is what Hoover gave special attention to from the beginning of his relief work and it is what he is now still giving most of his time and energy to.

For the general re-provisioning of the peoples of Eastern and Central Europe all of the various countries supplied were called on to pay for the food at cost, plus transportation, to the extent of their possibilities. Gold, if they had it--all of Germany's supply was paid for in gold--paper money at current exchange, government promissory notes, and commodities which could be sold to other countries, made up the payments. The charity was in making loans, providing the food, getting ships and barges and trains and coal for its transportation, selling it at cost, and giving the service of several hundred active, intelligent, and sympathetic Americans, mostly young and khaki-clothed, and a lesser group of Allied officers, all devoted to getting the food where it was needed and seeing that it was fairly distributed.

It is impossible to depict the utter bewilderment and helplessness of the governments of the liberated nations of Eastern Europe at the beginning of the armistice period. Nor is it possible to explain adequately the enormous difficulties they faced in any attempt at organizing, controlling, and caring for their peoples. With uncertain boundaries--for the demarcation of these they were waiting on a hardly less bewildered group of eminent gentlemen in Paris; with a financial and economic situation presenting such appalling features of demoralization that they could only be realized one at a time; with their people clamoring for the immediately necessary food, fuel and clothing, and demanding a swift realization of all the benefits that their new freedom was to bring them; and with an ever more menacing whistling wind of terror blowing over them from the East--with all this, how the responsible men of the governments which rapidly succeeded each other in these countries retained any persistent vestiges of sanity is beyond the comprehension of those of us who viewed the scene at close range.

For a single but sufficient ill.u.s.tration let us take the situation in the split apart fragments of the former great Austro-Hungarian Empire, which now const.i.tute all or parts of German Austria, Hungary, Czecho-Slovakia, Jugo-Slavia and Roumania. For all these regions (except Roumania) Vienna had for years been the center of political authority and chief economic control. In Vienna were many of the land-owners, most of the heads of the great industries, and the directors of the transportation system. It was the financial and market center, the hub of a vast, intricate, and delicate orb-web of economic organization. But the people and the goods of the various separated regions, except German Austria, the smallest, weakest, and most afflicted one of them all, were cut off from it and all were cut off from each other. The final political boundaries were not yet fixed, to be sure, but actual military frontiers were already established with all their limitations on inter-communication and their disregard of personal needs. Shut up within their frontiers these regions found themselves varyingly with or without money--if they had any it was of ever-decreasing purchasing power--with or without food, fuel, and raw materials for industry; and with lesser or larger numbers of locomotives and railway cars, mostly lesser. But of everything the distribution bore no calculated relation to the needs of the industry and commerce or even to the actual necessities of the people for the preservation of health and life.

Vienna, itself, "_die l.u.s.tige schone Stadt Wien_" was, as it still is today and for long will be, the saddest great capital in Europe. Reduced from its position of being the governing, spending, and singing and dancing capital of an empire of fifty-five million people--it never was a producing capital--to be the capital of a small, helpless nation of scant seven million people concentrated in a region unable to meet even their needs of food and coal--Vienna represents the pathetic extreme of the cataclysmic results of War.

But if the situation was most complex and hopeless in the south, it was far from simple or hopeful in the north. Poland, the smaller Baltic states and Finland were all in desperate plight and their new governments were all aghast at the magnitude of the problem before them.

To add to the difficulties of general disorganization of peoples, lack of the necessities of life, and helplessness of governments, there was ever continuing war. Armistice meant something real on the West and Austro-Italian fronts, but it meant little to Eastern Europe. There was a score of very lively little wars going on at once over there: Poland alone was fighting with four different adversaries, one at each corner of her land.

But the climax of the situation was reached in the realization by all immediately concerned that something saving had to be done at once, or the whole thing would become literal anarchy, with red and howling death rampant over all. Bolshevik Russia, just over the Eastern borders, was not only a vivid reality to these countries, but it was constantly threatening to come across the borders and engulf them.

Its agents were working continuously among their peoples; there were everywhere the sinister signs of the possibility of a swift removal of the frontiers of Bolshevism from their Eastern to their Western borders.

In Paris the eminent statesmen and famous generals of the Peace Conference and the Supreme Council sat and debated. They sent out occasional ultimata ordering the cessation of fighting, the retirement from a far advanced frontier, and what not else. Inter-Allied Economic and Military Missions came and looked on and conferred and returned.

But n.o.body stopped fighting, and the conferences settled nothing. The Allies were not in a position--this need be no secret now--to send adequate forces to enforce their ultimata. An Inter-Allied Military Mission of four generals of America, Great Britain, France and Italy started by special train from Cracow to Lemberg to convey personally an ultimatum to the Ruthenians and Poles ordering them to stop fighting.

The train was sh.e.l.led by the Ruthenians east of Przemsyl, and the generals came back. Eastern Europe expected the great powers to do something about this, but nothing happened, and the discount on ultimata became still more marked.

Somebody had to do something that counted. So Hoover did it. It was not only lives that had to be saved; it was nations. It was not only starvation that had to be fought; it was approaching anarchy, it was Bolshevism.