News that a Serbian nationalist had assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, made no impression on Herbert Hoover. “Just another Balkan lapse into barbarism,” he told himself, and went about his business. Over the next several weeks, nothing he read in the London newspapers, nor anything he heard from his vast network of business and political contacts in England and Europe, urged a second thought.1
Austria-Hungary’s bellicose ultimatum of July 23, accusing Serbia of complicity in the murder of the archduke, also failed to alarm Hoover. The conflict, he believed, was a regional affair, and the diplomatic mastery of the great powers would see that it remained so. He was aware of Europe’s ancient animosities and imperial rivalries, not to mention its recent arms buildup, but a continental plunge into the madness of war was nevertheless inconceivable. He held the conventional view of Europe as the apex of civilization, the august repository of human achievement in arts, science, and politics, and the engine of global prosperity. Its peoples were enjoying what he regarded as the happiest moment in human history. Peace had reigned on the Continent for generations, and the increasing financial interdependence of the European capitals seemed to guarantee the minimum of cooperation required to prevent future hostilities.
Europe’s spell of tranquility seemed all the stronger for the fact that it was a balmy, sunny summer, as glorious a season as anyone could remember. The kaiser was racing boats in the Norwegian fjords. The czar was swimming at his summer home on the Baltic. Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, slipped out of London with his fishing tackle. Hordes of American tourists were debouching from steamships and trains, clutching their traveler’s checks and Baedekers, bound for castles, storied cities, the Riviera. Come what may in the Balkans, the rest of Europe was a playground, open at its unchecked borders to one and all. Hoover himself, who rarely holidayed, was planning a short trip to the seaside with his children over the August long weekend.
The continental markets sank on Saturday, July 25, the first unmistakable sign of broader distress in Europe. Serbia had failed to meet the impossible terms of the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum, and troop movements were reported on each side of their mutual border. The great powers began to declare allegiances. Serbia lined up with Russia and France; Germany held with Austria-Hungary. England, for the moment, played peacemaker.
U.S. stock exchanges joined the financial panic on July 28 when Austria-Hungary finally declared war and crossed into Serbian territory. Hoover was now agitated. He paced his offices all day, devouring headlines and vibrating “from small hope to great fear” as the diplomatic thunder rolled from capital to capital. He cabled his managers around the world to cut production and wondered how he would provide for his key employees in the event of a prolonged conflict. He clung to hopes that Sir Edward Grey would yet reel the continent in from the brink, or at least contain the damage to the east.2
Hoover knew what he had at stake financially. He could do the math in his head. He also understood that more than his wealth and his pleasant mode of existence was threatened. He was days from his fortieth birthday and on the cusp of realizing his ambitions of being more than just another rich man. He had signed over his directorships and engineering responsibilities to his longtime associate, John Agnew. He was deep in negotiations to purchase the Sacramento Union when the markets tanked and filled his future with uncertainty. He reluctantly suspended those talks.3
On Friday, July 31, the major European bourses went dark, and Britain announced that its banks would close on Saturday in addition to the Monday holiday. Hoover, who took pride in maintaining a sense of normality in times of crisis, kept his promise to take his children away for the weekend. On Saturday afternoon, the family drove out to Westgate, where his publishing friend, Edgar Rickard, had taken a cottage. The trip was a disaster. Hoover learned on arriving that Germany had declared war on Russia and that the French were mobilizing. Sunday morning, August 2, he heard that England’s bank moratorium had been extended three days more and that Germany had sent an ultimatum to Belgium demanding passage for its army. The Hoovers and Rickards visited the local village inn for lunch, but the charms of Westgate were no match for the gloom across the Channel. Strain showed in every face. Hoover heard rumors that gasoline was in short supply and worried about his ability to return to the city. Relieved to learn that his driver had stocked up, he finally faced the futility of holidaying under a looming catastrophe and took his family back to London that same afternoon, driving by way of Portsmouth, where he could see the British fleet off Cowes, all “dark and sinister-looking.”4
Monday morning Hoover was back in his office despite the holiday. Germany had declared war on France, and although England had yet to convey its intentions, troops were already passing on the street outside 1 London Wall. “It seemed like an earthquake,” Hoover would later write. “The substance and bottom seemed to go out of everything.” In a single weekend, the grandest of civilizations had sunk into an abyss of hatred and destruction.5
Hoover watched helplessly as his businesses crashed around his ears. Orders were canceled and production was suspended everywhere. His Russian workers were drawn from mines into armies, his ships with their cargoes of zinc, lead, and copper were ordered into port, banks were closed from Burma to South Africa, his managers were begging for direction and financial assistance. Hoover poured out his distress and amazement in a letter to a friend:
I have a body of 100,000 men at work in various enterprises and this morning I do not see how we are to meet these payrolls by any human device possible. Our products are mostly base metals the market for which is paralyzed, shipping facilities are gone, and even exchange facilities to remit money—did we have it—are out of gear. Of still more importance is the fact that the moneys which we have in reserve in London are unavailable, due to a [bank] moratorium. All of the wildest dreams of novelists as to what could happen in the case of a world war have already happened by way of anticipation, and as to what the realization of such a war may be one can only stutter at.6
Hoover had rented a house in Palo Alto and had booked passage for his family on the Vaterland for August 13. The ship was now pulled out of service. He booked another, the Aquitania, only to see it suffer the same fate. He had an inkling the crisis would not pass quickly. “If my judgment of the situation is right,” he wrote that same day, “we are on the verge of seven years of considerable privation.” At precisely that moment, with Europe’s massed armies hurtling at one another with unprecedented force, and with his own fortunes gravely imperiled, Herbert Hoover did a remarkable thing.7
On the afternoon of August 4, a few hours after German troops had crossed into neutral Belgium on a dead run for Paris, he walked over to the offices of the U.S. consulate in search of Consul General Robert Skinner. It was a short walk, covering slightly more than a city block, but it would transform Hoover’s life, launching him into the big game in a far larger way than he had ever imagined.
According to Lou Hoover, the consulate had called her husband and asked for his assistance. Skinner recalled that Hoover arrived at his own initiative and volunteered to help. Regardless, he was welcome. The U.S. consulate was under siege by its own citizens.8
Some 100,000 Americans were visiting Europe in the summer of 1914, and the call to arms had brought their happy adventures to a screeching halt. All were anxious to flee the Continent before the fighting began in earnest, but the amenities on which their travels depended had, without notice, ceased to exist. Banks were closed. Lines of credit, traveler’s checks, and foreign currencies were worthless. Telegraph services were unavailable. Hotels were incapacitated as their employees rushed to enlist. Borders that days before had been unobstructed were blocked. Trains, ships, and horses were appropriated for troop carriage, and the few rail and steamship services still operating were overwhelmed by demand.
Most of the panicked tourists bolted for London, which despite its eventual declaration of war on Germany offered relative safety and the best odds on passage to America. Six thousand reached the city on August 3 alone. With their plans in chaos and the crowded London hotels refusing U.S. currency, they stampeded Skinner’s consulate in the financial district and the U.S. embassy in the West End.
When Hoover arrived at the consulate, a thousand frightened and confused Americans were crowding the premises and milling in the street. Women were sobbing and fainting. Men were shouting at Skinner, wanting assurances that German aircraft were not about to bomb London. “Staunch and emphatic Americans were pounding the counter and demanding to know if their government was going to protect its citizens,” recalled Hoover. “They insisted that Mr. Skinner had no right to allow solvent Americans to sleep in parks and go hungry like that. The American government should at once demand that the American banks in London be opened….It was a disgrace.”9
Hoover did not wait for Skinner to tell him what to do. After a brief conversation with a clutch of commercial men at the edge of the mob, he determined that the most urgent need was to provide short-term loans for the many Americans without any cash. He called his office and asked two associates to bring over the few hundred pounds he had on the premises and whatever other gold and currency they could muster. He called home to gather another hundred pounds from Lou. Hoover informed Skinner that his men would aid the travelers by exchanging small amounts of their U.S. funds for British cash; those who had no money would be offered loans at no interest in exchange for IOUs. The grateful Skinner organized the grumbling horde into five lines in front of five tables, behind which Hoover and his associates sat with papers, pens, and cash. Several hundred Americans were thus delivered from immediate distress.
By the following morning, Hoover had given thought to what more he could do for his fellow citizens. As his team continued to dispense funds at the consulate, he wrote a well-connected associate stateside to suggest that if Washington wanted a special commissioner for relief of American tourists in England, he was available. Without waiting for a reply (and none ever came), he convened twenty American businessmen resident in London, most of them fellow mining executives, and most associated with the American Society in London, of which Hoover was a stalwart. The meeting established the Committee of American Residents in London for the Assistance of American Travelers. Hoover was appointed chair. The committee members volunteered their own cash and raised money from other Americans in London, all of which was to be distributed as loans to individuals whose funds were temporarily frozen, or as charity to those who had nothing. Hoover gave about $6,000 personally, likely the largest single contribution.
Within twenty-four hours, Hoover’s new committee had its own stationery, and within forty-eight hours it was operating from a booth in the ballroom of the Savoy Hotel as well as three other London locations. Through his business connections, Hoover managed to bypass restrictions on telegraphic service and open a transatlantic line to allow Americans to wire money to stranded friends and relatives. In a city suddenly flooded with refugees, he reserved for American travelers some two thousand rooms in hotels or boardinghouses. He issued a press release proclaiming that his Residents’ Committee was assuming charge of all American relief work in the city, and that in doing so it had the blessings of its honorary chairman, Walter Hines Page, the U.S. ambassador to London.
Hoover’s announcement was a surprise to Ambassador Page, who in any event was too beleaguered to object. It was also news to the leadership of another committee that had formed a day before Hoover’s, for much the same purpose. The American Citizens’ Committee had sprung out of a mob scene at the U.S. embassy. Led by the banker Fred I. Kent, it was comprised of American travelers rather than Americans who lived in London. It was operating out of the Savoy ballroom, posing a competitive threat that Hoover answered by opening his own branch there.
The initial efforts of these committees, along with the reopening of the American Express offices in London and the announcement of a U.S. congressional appropriation of $2.5 million for relief of stranded travelers, defused some of the early panic in London. The fundamental problems persisted, however. Each day, thousands more refugees from the Continent descended on the city, many without luggage, funds, or lodgings, and the small U.S. legation remained overwhelmed. Only $300,000 of Congress’s $2.5 million was immediately available. Hoover and his resident volunteers worked around the clock to bring order to the situation and assist the travelers. Wearing badges and American flag pins, they met new arrivals at the station platform with refreshments and small loans of cash. They offered directions to hotels and boardinghouses. They arranged medical attention for those requiring it.
Some evenings, as late as midnight, Hoover himself could be found in the dim light of a near-empty platform, waiting to greet a train. Despite his badge and flag pin, he was easy to overlook, a nondescript man with a clean-shaven face and a slight stoop at the shoulder. His blue serge suit was in need of brushing and pressing. His shoes were scuffed, their laces broken and tied together in rough knots. He approached the arriving tourists directly, offering assistance and answering questions in single syllables, not a word or a minute wasted, before hurrying off toward home.
He might not have cut an inspiring figure, but Hoover’s self-worth was as high as ever. He had always considered himself the most capable man in any room, and with rare exceptions he was right. He had supreme confidence in his ability to draw up a grand scheme, map it out to the smallest detail, and execute it in every dimension. He could improvise, bully, or bluff his way around any human or physical obstacle. He felt entirely competent to deliver 100,000 busted Americans safely home in the midst of a massive European conflagration. He was not so sure about the other parties to the relief effort.
Hoover resented the “Savoy bunch,” as he called Fred Kent’s Citizens’ Committee. They had not had the sense to step aside when he announced in the press that his Residents’ Committee was prepared to manage the entire relief effort. They had been unreceptive to his suggestion of cooperation, a magnanimous gesture from a man reluctant to share authority, and they had snubbed his advice on who did and did not deserve their assistance. The tension between the committees was further aggravated when Ambassador Page handed Kent the $300,000 in government funds at his disposal, despite the fact that they were providing mostly logistical support to the tourists while Hoover’s group was doling out $10,000 a day in financial aid from its members’ pockets.10
Hoover’s frustration with Kent grew daily. He complained at the embassy that it was inefficient to have two committees leading one relief project. When his various attempts to convince Ambassador Page to force a merger came to naught, Hoover set his sights on Henry Breckinridge, the U.S. assistant secretary of war. Breckinridge arrived in London from Washington on August 17 with two dozen army officers, a staff of functionaries, a large stock of gold, and a mandate to assist in the evacuation of American travelers. On landing, he was met by a Hoover emissary who brazenly suggested that Breckinridge subsume his mission under Hoover’s Residents’ Committee. Breckinridge answered that his instructions did not permit him to share his authority. He did note in his diary that he was impressed with Hoover’s determination to be useful in the crisis.11
Hoover, for his part, could find no good in the Breckinridge delegation. He asked his colleagues how the War Department could think that dispatching a shipload of loafers and lackeys to London would help move hordes of stranded tourists. Breckinridge intended to occupy himself in traveling from one European capital to another aboard special trains, “calling on big potentates and explaining his great position in the United States” while practically ignoring the relief work. Given that the United States, as a neutral party, had no other business in the war, it made sense to Hoover that the assistant secretary would lend him a hand. Breckinridge’s failure to do so was an “appalling travesty.”12
Hoover did not have to suffer the Citizens’ Committee or the Breckinridge delegation for long. The day after his arrival, the assistant secretary met with Ambassador Page to discuss solutions to their mutual problems. They noted that with the gradual resumption of transatlantic shipping, members of Kent’s committee were packing for home, and that the U.S. legation had neither the manpower nor the expertise to handle the ongoing evacuation. Hoover’s committee, alternatively, was conspicuously willing and able. On August 20, Breckinridge and Page formally asked the Residents’ Committee to manage the organization and distribution of relief, including the $2.5 million allotted by Congress. Hoover was finally in charge.
Every day thousands more Americans poured into London, each group in worse shape than the previous one. All were met on the platform by Hoover’s committee. Among the more picturesque newcomers were members of a Wild West circus that had worked its way back from Eastern Europe, arriving in London in full regalia of chaps and feathers but without its tent or livestock. Its ponies had been seized by armies in Poland. Its elephant, lion, and tiger had been abandoned for lack of food.
Settling in as chairman of the relief organization, Hoover saw no reason it should not be run as autocratically and efficiently as his mining businesses. He arranged that all authority over hiring, finances, organizational structure, and policy reside with him. He would take care of press and diplomatic relations and anything else requiring a decision. He assembled a volunteer staff of more than a hundred, including a team of accountants and auditors to ensure proper management of the funds entrusted to him. Irked at the Savoy bunch’s policy of providing expedited service to its wealthier friends, Hoover insisted on uniform terms for all relief recipients. Among other rules, no one would return to America in a first- or second-class berth. All were booked in steerage.
Hoover’s rules were put to the test when, early one morning, a wealthy but temporarily penniless American woman asked the committee for passage home and refused to take anything but a first-class ticket. When her histrionics failed to sway the clerks, she sat down in the ballroom of the Savoy and declared a hunger strike. Hoover ignored the woman through the morning and lunch hour. He waited until she appeared to wilt in the late afternoon, then brought her funds for supper and a steerage ticket. She accepted both.
Other complainants were received with less patience, including a hotheaded professor of history from the University of Michigan who wrote to accuse the Residents’ Committee of mistreatment. Hoover refuted his charges indignantly and comprehensively, copying his response to the president of the university and its board of regents. After a meeting with his employer, the professor returned Hoover an abject retraction and apology.13
By early October, two months from the start of the war, 120,000 troubled Americans had passed through London to America, and the work of Hoover’s Residents’ Committee was finally winding down. More than forty-two thousand individuals had registered with his organization and many more besides had benefited from its work. In excess of $400,000 had been distributed, most of it in loans, including some $150,000 in government funds. All but a few hundred dollars of the loaned funds were eventually repaid. Hoover’s administrative costs were negligible: he had relied upon volunteer labor, and his overhead, including offices and telegraph lines, was mostly donated.14
Ambassador Page, a balding, weak-eyed man with a bulbous nose, knew better than anyone the panic and confusion that had reigned when the first throngs of Americans descended on London. He wrote Hoover a personal note: “I count ourselves exceedingly fortunate in having your Committee at our service….We couldn’t have done the job without it.” Not sure what to make of him at the outset, the ambassador now considered Hoover among the most trustworthy and devoted men he had ever known. Page’s confidence would be critical to Hoover in the far greater and more desperate battles ahead.15
Throughout the two months of Hoover’s relief work in London, competence of a different, entirely destructive character was blowing apart the Continent. The Great War was launched with frightening scale and force, reflecting years of weapons stockpiling and military strategizing by the great powers. The opening assaults were superbly engineered by a generation of officers educated in industrialized combat at Europe’s proliferating staff colleges and war academies. They deployed their million-strong armies and awesome loads of artillery with mathematical precision and terrible speed. Germany alone scheduled eleven thousand trains in its mobilization.16
Berlin had demanded the right to pass through neutral Belgium to France on August 2. Its troops invaded two days later without having received a response. King Albert’s valiant Belgian army, its cavalry in fur busbies and its infantry in feathered bonnets, was no match for Germany’s new twelve- and sixteen-inch howitzers. It was like “laying a baby on the track before a locomotive,” said one diplomat in Brussels. Albert retreated all the way to Antwerp and clung to that corner of his kingdom for the remainder of the war.17
Rolling south, Germany blasted the French infantry off the beet fields of the Sambre and routed the British Expeditionary Force at Mons. The whole Allied army backed up to the Marne Valley, just short of Paris, and regrouped for a savage war of position in the last week of August. Under a blazing sun, 2 million men clashed in open fields without benefit of fortification or strong defensive holds. More than half a million were left dead or wounded before the armies began digging into protective trenches along a 450-mile line from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier. While the Somme Offensive and the Battle of Verdun loom larger in the popular imagination, the bloodiest fighting and the highest kill rates of the First World War were seen in those first two months of mobile combat.18
While the bloodletting was generally restricted to the battlefield, the collateral damage was profound in Europe and around the world. By the time Hoover looked up from his work on the American evacuation he found his diverse business interests “shot to pieces” by the war. Mining, shipping, smelting, refining, and the system of international finance that supported his enterprises had all “gone to smash.” The fortune anticipated from his mining investments had evaporated.19
There was no longer any question of decamping to California. Hoover needed to salvage something of his holdings, and short on cash, he needed the income from his fees for attending and chairing various directors’ meetings in London. On October 3, he stayed behind as Lou, Allan, and Herbert Jr. boarded the Lusitania, headed ultimately for Palo Alto. They would be safe in the United States, sheltered from Europe’s strife by the Atlantic Ocean and the sentiments of the American people, who were unanimously determined to remain neutral in the conflict.20
Even by his own doleful standards, Hoover’s outlook in October of 1914 was bleak. The Europe he had known was dead, and it was never coming back. He thought it would take him five to ten years to make money again, and he had no interest in trying. He told a friend that his reversal of fortune had left him “stunned and unstrung,” and for the first time in his life he lacked a clear sense of direction. It was hard, he said, to become accustomed to world wars.21
Dark as things appeared, Hoover never stopped working. For each ounce of pessimism in his character, there were at least two of physical and mental vitality. Running at full capacity was his natural state, and he saw no reason to change because of the war. He also admitted to a psychological need to feel useful in the maelstrom of horrible events. “The troubles of American tourists served to reduce the feeling of helplessness,” he said.22
It was perhaps inevitable, then, that as the war progressed Hoover would find another opportunity to serve. It appeared in the first week in October, in the days between his waving good-bye to his family and his receiving a cable from Lou announcing that they had arrived safely in New York, and that Herbert Jr. had eaten seven cream puffs in one day. At first blush, the new opportunity did not look like a life changer. It looked more like a chore. Hoover had been introduced to an American engineer named Millard Shaler, who needed help shipping 1,500 tons of cereals to Belgium.
Prior to the war, Belgium had been a thriving nation of 7.5 million, the sixth-largest economy in the world. Its capital, Brussels, was one of the most charming cities in Europe, an urban paradise of fine restaurants, stately homes, drowsy boulevards, and beautiful high-walled formal gardens. Diplomats considered it the ideal posting. “Nothing can happen in Brussels,” they said, and they continued to say it, amid dances at the palace and rounds of golf in the suburbs, right up until the first weekend of August 1914.23
The simple fact of Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality had been sufficient to overcome antiwar sentiment and bring Great Britain into the war. The manner of the invasion outraged the international community. In Tamines, 383 civilians, including women and children, had been herded into the square and shot by German execution squads, the survivors bayoneted. Large-scale massacres, along with lootings and torching, had been repeated in town after undefended town in what came to be known as the Rape of Belgium. The worst brutality occurred in Louvain, the Oxford of the Low Countries, where German troops had shot the mayor, the university rector, and hundreds of civilians before forcing the evacuation of the entire population of forty-two thousand. Some 1,100 buildings had been destroyed, including the magnificent university library with its irreplaceable collection of Gothic and Renaissance manuscripts. Despite all the carnage to come in the Great War, the reputation of the German army never recovered from the barbaric assault on Louvain.24
From high on the terrace of Saint Gudula church, Brand Whitlock, the American ambassador in Brussels, had watched a “gray, grim horde, a thing of steel, that came thundering on with shrill fifes and throbbing drums…and wild song.” German soldiers paraded into the city past sullen crowds of Belgians. Whitlock listened in the glinting sunlight to boots beating on paving stones, the clatter of the wagons bearing heavy guns, the pounding drums, and the proclamation of occupation. He decided that the old Brussels was already lost.25
“All the big factories are closed,” wrote a secretary in Whitlock’s legation. “Most of the shops have their shutters up and the streets are filled with idle people. Importations of foodstuffs even from the outlying districts have stopped dead.”26
The stoppage of food transport would prove more consequential to the average Belgian than the fact of military defeat. Densely populated, Belgium produced only 20 percent of what it ate and traded for the rest. The German army had helped itself to the nation’s fall harvest, as well as to all the livestock it could round up. The British had meanwhile imposed a naval blockade to prevent shipments of food, arms, and other items to Germany and its occupied territories, including Belgium. With nothing coming in from field or port, shelves in stores from Bruges to Liège quickly emptied.
The Germans disavowed all responsibility for feeding an occupied people, and under international law they indeed had the right to provision themselves at the expense of their hosts. They blamed the British blockade for the specter of mass hunger in Belgium. The British countered that they could not be expected to feed German captives. Caught between these warring powers, 7.5 million Belgians worried about their next meal. By early September, Brand Whitlock had noticed a new phenomenon: women begging in the streets of Brussels.27
That same month, a group of Belgian businessmen calling itself the Comité Central de Secours et d’Alimentation received permission from the Germans to send one of its members, Millard Shaler, across the Channel to buy $100,000 worth of food for distribution in Brussels. Shaler arrived in London on September 26 and made his purchase. He then sought an export permit, no sure thing given that he was intending to transport his food behind enemy lines in violation of the British blockade. After much negotiation, British trade officials declared that a permit would be granted if the U.S. government, as a neutral party, would supervise Shaler’s payload. That stipulation led Shaler to Ambassador Page, who asked permission of the State Department in Washington, which thought it advisable to request explicit approval of the shipment from the German government. It all took a great deal of precious time.28
Hoover met Shaler on or about October 6 and was as galvanized by Belgium’s distress as he was furious at Washington’s foot dragging. It was obvious to him that his government had a moral obligation to help. “The French, German, Austrian, English and Russian people are quite well able to take care of their own,” he said. The Belgians, on the other hand, were blameless and “the most acutely tried.” Through his friend Ben S. Allen, London bureau chief of the Associated Press, Hoover fired a salvo at the State Department under Shaler’s name on October 13. The article depicted Brussels as a starving city on the verge of food riots thanks to Washington’s inaction. Thousands of lives were in the balance. “The American government,” he declared, “owes it from reasons of pure humanity to insist that Germany take favorable action or to make shipments through American diplomats, whether Germany agrees or not.” The story appeared under the headline U.S. RED TAPE STARVES BRUSSELS. The State Department was unmoved.29
Hoover continued to fret about Belgium as Shaler’s 1,500 tons of cereals wasted on the docks. News reports indicated that Liège, Charleroi, and other Belgian cities were at least as desperate as Brussels, their populations resorting to miserable diets of potato soup and black bread. With the Allies and the Central Powers digging in on the Western Front, it was clear that the predicament of the Belgians would end no time soon, and it was obvious to Hoover that Shaler’s single purchase of food would be nowhere near sufficient to the nation’s needs. A much larger effort would be required.
On October 10, Hoover announced to Ambassador Page that he was considering various schemes for provisioning the Belgians. He asked if he might count on the embassy for diplomatic support. Page readily assented, and within forty-eight hours Hoover returned to his office with a comprehensive plan for the relief of Belgium. Page convened a meeting to discuss Hoover’s proposal, inviting Emile Francqui, chairman of the Comité Central in Brussels, among other officials. Francqui was one of the richest men in Belgium and a former lieutenant for King Leopold II in the Congo. Stout, round, with fine dark features set off by glowing brown eyes, he was “sociable and genial,” according to Whitlock, “but with dignified reserve. He is one of those men who…feel it as a necessity of their natures to rule, to dominate.”30
Francqui was known to Hoover. They had overlapped for six months in China, with Francqui representing Moreing’s Belgian partners in the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company. They had not gotten along but now put aside their differences in the ambassador’s presence. They spent four days discussing the situation in Belgium, the dietary requirements of its people, the soaring costs of purchasing large quantities of food, the supreme difficulties of cargo shipping in wartime, the reluctance of the British to lift their blockade, and the German army’s tendency to requisition all consumables in occupied territories.
Page was impressed with the performance of Hoover, who was at his best in small meetings. Clear-headed and focused, he spoke sparingly but powerfully, offering a thorough and lucid answer to each problem that arose. Surprisingly, given the state of the world, the logistics of acquiring and distributing enough food to sustain a country of 7.5 million people were of little concern to Hoover. A certain broker in Chicago would handle the wheat futures. A friendly agent in Rotterdam would arrange shipping. The greater challenge, he guessed, would be to convince the British to allow relief shipments through the blockade to enemy territory, and then to keep the Germans from stealing the provisions once they had landed in Belgium. Lord Kitchener in the War Office was of the opinion that if the Belgians were allowed to starve, German troops would need to be diverted from the front to put down revolts, strengthening the military prospects for the Allies. A Prussian finance minister had already summed up the German position, saying in September, “it’s better that the Belgians starve than we do.” Relieving Belgium, as one observer said, was “like trying to feed a lamb trapped in a cage with a lion and a tiger.”31
Hoover knew that the great powers were sensitive to international opinion, and to American sentiment in particular. The British relied on the United States for arms and money. Germany wanted Washington to remain neutral and an ocean away from the Western Front. Hoover thus proposed a monumental international public relations campaign to stoke sympathy for the starving Belgians. His hope was that public pressure from the U.S. would persuade the British to ease the blockade and prevent the Germans from confiscating provisions.
In the midst of Page’s meetings, unbeknownst to its participants, Brand Whitlock cabled President Wilson from Brussels that the situation in Belgium was now critical. Families, rich and poor alike, had run out of food. Winter was coming and they had nowhere to turn. “In two weeks,” he wrote, “the civil population of Belgium, already in misery, will face starvation.”32
Page’s summit at the embassy culminated in the founding of the Committee for the Relief of Belgium (CRB). Hoover wrote a long letter to the ambassador dated October 20 that laid out an informal charter for the committee. It would be a private, neutral, volunteer organization based in London. It would raise money from governments and private individuals and purchase food from around the world, shipping it to the neutral port of Rotterdam and from there by canal boat to Belgium. Hoover would chair the CRB, working in concert with Francqui’s Comité Central, which would handle the distribution of food on its arrival in Belgium.
The letter bore several Hoover watermarks, beginning with its heavy load of facts and figures organized in point form. It noted that myriad relief committees were springing up both inside and outside of Belgium and urged consolidation. “It is impossible to handle the situation except with the strongest centralization and effective monopoly, and therefore the two organizations will refuse to recognize any element except themselves alone.” The letter also contained Hoover’s usual autocratic and slightly paranoid demands for “absolute command” of his part of the enterprise, which, in this instance, would ultimately prove to be sound strategy. He also wanted the relief effort to reflect his philanthropic ideals, by which he meant that it “couldn’t be run like a knitting bee.” He might permit honorary chairs, but there would be no drones or dilettantes, no “titled non-entities” or “decorative personalities” cluttering his hallways. The CRB’s officers would be men of commercial experience working for free, covering their own expenses entirely so that every penny raised would go to purchasing food for Belgians.33
The CRB was not the world’s first international relief effort. There are many examples throughout history of private and public aid programs for peoples afflicted by hunger and natural disaster. The Irish potato famine of the 1840s, the Russian famines of the 1890s, the volcanic eruptions in St. Vincent and Martinique in 1902 all prompted gifts of cash and goods from the United States and other nations. Nor was there anything novel about a nongovernmental agency stepping up in the face of crisis. Private aid, in fact, was far more common than governmental aid at the time. The Red Cross and innumerable sectarian and nationalist organizations were well established by 1914. What separated the CRB from all previous efforts was its preposterous ambition.34
Hoover was not contemplating a one-time shipment of food or money to a troubled land, nor was he proposing to supplement the meager diet of a people in lean times. The aim of the CRB was to provide almost the entire food supply for a nation of 7.5 million people, indefinitely. Hoover, representing a neutral country, intended to move massive supplies of food from the capital of one belligerent country (London) to the capital of a captive country (Brussels) occupied by their mutual enemy (Berlin). He would manage all of this in an atmosphere of war-bred suspicion and hate, and despite the disruption of conventional transportation and commercial activity in what was already shaping up as the most destructive war in history.
No humanitarian venture, public or private, had ever approached Hoover’s initiative in scale or audacity. Whitlock admired the initiative but worried that the CRB had set itself goals impossible even for peacetime. In wartime, it was “a piece of temerity that no one but a set of God’s own fools would ever have undertaken.”35
Hoover did have some inkling of the scope of his project and the extreme demands it would make upon him, and the consequences for his business career. Will Irwin, a Stanford friend and war correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, was living at Red House through the week of Page’s meetings. He heard his host pacing upstairs long into the nights. One morning, Hoover came down to breakfast without having slept, looked his guest in the eye, and said, “Let the fortune go to hell.”36
The CRB set up shop at No. 3 London Wall Buildings, two doors from Hoover’s business offices. Even before he had hired a secretary, Hoover was orchestrating what he called his campaign of “enormous propaganda.” He browbeat newspapers and governors in the United States to raise money and collect food on the CRB’s behalf, playing the politicians off against each other by dropping hints in one state that another had done more. He urged reporters to investigate the famine conditions in Belgium and play up the “detailed personal horror stuff.” He personally arranged for a motion picture crew to capture footage of food lines in Brussels, and he hired famous authors, including Thomas Hardy and George Bernard Shaw, to plead for public support of the rescue effort. Wrote Shaw, if “one Belgian goes without a full meal whilst thousands of lapdogs are living in luxury from Canterbury to San Francisco…there is really nothing more to be said for mankind.”37
Hoover wrote Lou, now in Palo Alto with her sons, with orders to promote relief in California.
Over one million people on bread line in Belgium at present moment with supplies estimated to last from one to three weeks. While we are securing some supplies here for emergency purposes real situation cannot be met without direct exports from States and we shall require upwards of twenty thousand tons foodstuffs monthly. Can you interest…prominent San Franciscans to present shipload food from California…I can think of no greater contribution to this occasion of world’s stress than a food ship from California and if possible one from Oregon and another from Washington. It might be pointed out that our Commission is largely Californian and that we should have support of our own state. Could also make some claim as to Oregon in my connection.38
He signed this cable to his wife, as he often did, with his whole name, “Herbert Hoover.”39
It was one of several insistent messages Hoover sent to Lou in these weeks urging her to work for the cause and to return to London as soon as possible: “It is the greatest work to which we could be devoted.” She sent him an exasperated reply:
You may think I am not busy building fences over here, but I just am. I believe it has been worth my coming, even if there were no boys in the problem. And the more this war goes on and the more I see the boys in California—the more glad I am I brought them over.
I should have been worried beyond endurance if I had stayed in England with them—but I am sorry you think I am foolish!40
Softening somewhat, she added that everyone at Stanford was proud of her husband for answering “the call of humanity,” and that the boys were flourishing. She then signed off using her own full name, Lou Henry Hoover.41
The American people were predisposed to sympathize with the Belgians, having read for weeks of the neutral nation’s plucky but doomed effort to repel the Germans. The first shipload of gift food—3,500 tons of beans, bacon, flour, and rice—arrived in Holland on November 21. More would follow. Hoover succeeded in making short work of many of the CRB’s logistical problems. Emphasizing the voluntary nature of the relief, he convinced two of the largest British shipping concerns to provide transport free of charge, and arranged for telegraph and railroad services and New York piers at no cost. He soon had at his disposal a global supply network of warehouses, docks, barges, and ships with remarkably low overhead, as well as a back-office staff to receive and distribute funds and keep audited records of each transaction. Francqui did a masterful job of organizing the distribution of food to his country’s 2,633 self-governing municipalities, or communes, at a time when the normal machinery of life inside Belgium had ground to a halt.42
To Hoover’s dismay, his early announcement that the CRB and Francqui’s Comité would monopolize the relief of Belgium had not stopped thousands of committees of philanthropists and do-gooders around the world from independently adopting the popular cause. Some of these, like the multimillion-dollar Rockefeller Foundation, Hoover took as mortal threats. He tried, unsuccessfully, to coopt the Rockefellers to his committee. He next charged them, privately and in the press, with compromising his ability to raise funds by waving their money around and giving potential donors the impression that no more was needed. He said they were trying to monopolize the Belgian issue and acting with jealousy and malice, which, of course, was not unlike what he was doing.43
By pressuring his political connections and Ambassador Page in London on the need for efficiency and a single line of communication with the belligerents, Hoover was eventually able to get written confirmation that his was the only gate into Belgium. The other agencies backed away, including the Rockefellers.
Its early success notwithstanding, the CRB soon ran into serious difficulties. Hoover had estimated that he would need to ship “upwards of twenty thousand tons” of wheat, maize, rice, and dried peas into Belgium each month. By late October the breadlines had lengthened and Francqui was cabling to say that at least 80,000 tons would be required to meet minimum monthly requirements. And Francqui meant “minimum”: Belgium had imported about 250,000 tons of grain per month before the war. Hoover began purchasing food on credit even before he had figured out how to pay for it. His original calculation had been that $1 million a month would sustain his organization, an amount he would raise through charitable gifts, assistance from the Belgian government-in-exile, as well as Belgian banks with holdings abroad, and proceeds from the sale of food to those Belgians who could afford to buy it. It was now clear he would need to raise at least $4 million, far more than these sources could supply. He needed what he called “a substratum of government subvention,” which was geologist-speak for a massive government subsidy.44
He first turned to Sir Edward Grey at the Foreign Office. Grey had been quick to encourage Shaler’s initial efforts, and he had mused aloud about a monthly subsidy for the CRB, but his cabinet colleagues were sharply divided on the issue. A large faction, including Prime Minister Asquith, Kitchener at the War Office, Winston Churchill at the Admiralty, and David Lloyd George at the Exchequer, objected to supporting a civilian population in enemy territory. The Belgians, they maintained, were the responsibility of the German army. If the Allies did attempt to ship food into Belgium, the occupiers would confiscate every scrap of it for themselves. Either that, or they would let the Allies feed their captives and help themselves to the next Belgian harvest. Hoover’s activities, they insisted, would have the net effect of strengthening the enemy and prolonging the war. They cut Grey’s suggestion of a monthly subsidy to a one-time grant of $500,000. The CRB’s chairman was disappointed, but he was not finished with the Asquith government.45
While plotting a new approach, Hoover decided to see for himself the condition of the Belgian people. Booking passage on a ship for Rotterdam, he was strip-searched and made to stand in line for three hours on leaving England, and he received the same treatment from German soldiers at the Dutch-Belgian frontier. Passing the barbed-wire fences of the German border controls, he felt the cold reality of Europe’s war. It was like entering “a land of imprisonment.” The Belgians were “surrounded by a ring of steel and utterly unable by any conceivable effort of their own to save themselves.” On each lifeless street corner, Hoover saw a German soldier in a steel helmet and black hobnailed boots. He toured the remains of the Louvain library, and block after block of destroyed homes and buildings in Antwerp.46
The night before Hoover arrived in Brussels, Brand Whitlock sat before the great fireplace in Emile Francqui’s drawing room on Avenue Louise in Brussels. Francqui gave the ambassador a lengthy description of Hoover’s character, summing it up by tracing an arc with his finger below his own double chin: “Une mâchoire, vous savez.” A jaw, you know.47
Whitlock, a literary man who prior to the outbreak of war had expected to write four novels during his quiet posting in Belgium, had trouble reconciling Francqui’s gesture with the anxious figure in blue serge who arrived in his office the next day and sank into a chair. Apart from the strong jaw, he saw nothing else that might distinguish Hoover as a man of force. His hands and feet were unusually small. His smooth-shaven face had a youthful air. It was “not at all the face of the sanguine type of business man, but a face sensitive, with a delicate mouth, thin lips, a face that wore a weary expression, as of one who dispensed too much nervous force and was always tired.” His eyes were dark and scowling when he spoke of the problems of relief; they turned soft and pitying when he spoke of the plight of the Belgians. His voice was dull whatever the subject. Hoover also seemed to have lost his comb. Whitlock decided he was a splendid type of American businessman: able, positive, direct, and uncouth.48
A third of Brussels’s population was receiving free food at more than a hundred canteens set up by the Comité Central and supplied by the CRB. Ration cards entitled the bearer to coffee, soup, and bread. On the cold, wet morning of December 1, Whitlock took Hoover to the street outside a theater that had been converted to a canteen in the Quartier des Marolles. They saw hundreds of Belgians shivering silently in the breadline, some of them wearing wooden shoes, all of them holding bowls or pitchers, not a smile among them. Hoover noted how the recipients whispered “Merci” as they took their food and shuffled off into the rain.49
Whitlock kept his eyes on Hoover throughout the visit and saw him turn away and stare off down the street rather than share his feelings. Whitlock understood Hoover’s reaction as simple reticence. Others witnessing the same sort of behavior found it disturbing. They noticed how Hoover obsessed over the logistics of food distribution while avoiding interaction with recipients of relief and thought him a bloodless man. “He told of the work in Belgium as coldly as if he were giving statistics of production,” said a U.S. official. “From his words and his manner he seemed to regard human beings as so many numbers. Not once did he show the slightest feeling.”50
Hoover’s reticence was chronic. He was the sort of man who could sit for three hours on a train with his closest colleagues and not utter a single word, or bid farewell to his wife, not expecting to see her again for several months, in a curt telegraph: “Goodbye. Love, Bert.” It was often difficult to know if his behavior was due to bad manners, callousness, anxiety, or an effort to manage powerful emotions, because he was capable of all of these things. Indeed, a few days after he averted his eyes from the breadline, he wrote, “It is difficult to state the position of the civil population of Belgium without becoming hysterical.” The sight of ragged and hungry children had especially bothered him, and he soon inaugurated a program of daily hot meals of bread and cocoa at Belgian schools.51
Returning to London on December 3 with visions of breadlines fresh in his mind, Hoover worked his cabinet contacts with new vigor. To his surprise, he gained an appointment with Prime Minister Asquith the very next day.