Herbert Henry Asquith was an urbane man of sixty-two with messy white hair and a well-earned reputation for decency and caution in politics. He liked to transact his official business with great speed, leaving plenty of time for reading, his mistress, and bridge. He opened his meeting with Herbert Hoover by saying that he was unsympathetic to the CRB and that he felt no moral or legal obligation to feed the Belgians. The duty was Germany’s, and he considered it a “monstrous idea” that Britain should “simply fill the vacuum created by German requisitions.”1
Hoover was not surprised by Asquith’s position. He had spent his whole journey to and from Belgium formulating his response. He lunged at the prime minister without preliminaries. He lectured him on the condition of the Belgian people and leveled accusations and warnings at his government:
I pointed out that the civil population had been brought to this pass through the action of the British [blockade]; that if the British claim that they were fighting the war on behalf of Belgium were true, they would be unable to substantiate this claim in history if they prevented others from saving the Belgian population from decimation by starvation or through slaughter arising out of starvation riots; that although the British Government refuses to give us assistance, it dare not put an end to our shipment of foodstuffs from America into Belgium if it wished to hold one atom of American public esteem….I was convinced that the Germans would not feed the Belgians, and that they must certainly starve unless the activities of our Commission continued.2
By Whitlock’s account, Hoover went further still, cautioning the prime minister that the American people sympathized with the Allies only out of pity for the suffering Belgians, and threatening to send a letter to the American press damning England for letting Belgium starve.3
Asquith, taken aback, told his visitor that he was unaccustomed to being addressed in such tones. Hoover gave a halfhearted apology, explaining that his concern for the Belgians and the dire future that awaited them if the prime minister offered no assistance more than justified his manner and emotion. Asquith turned conciliatory, perhaps only to escape the meeting. “You told me you were no diplomat,” he said to his guest, “but I think you are an excellent one, only your methods are not diplomatic.”4
Hoover left Asquith’s office empty-handed. The prime minister may have softened his position, but the cabinet was still opposed to relieving its enemy of the burden of feeding an occupied people. As the year 1914 came to a close, the CRB was spending over $6 million a month in food and transportation, and running a monthly deficit of more than $2 million. A sharp increase in global food prices was driving up costs, and the proliferation of mines and submarines was scaring off shipowners. Hoover was working from early morning until late at night in his London headquarters, eating meals at his desk. “How long I can go on building up this financial air-castle I do not know,” he wrote a friend, fearing it was all about to collapse. He began pledging the remains of his personal wealth as security against food purchases, a move his colleagues told him was reckless.5
When he signed up for the Belgian relief, Hoover had asked his wife if she supported his decision. She knew the question was a formality and gave her approval, although she often wondered afterward what he would have done if she had told him that adequate care of his wife and children was his first duty. Hoover did not see Herbert Jr. and Allan for eleven months after October 1914. Once Lou had the boys settled in California, she herself returned to London and did not see them for half a year, an eternity in their young lives.
Before leaving America, Lou did a remarkable thing of her own. Aware of the risks of transatlantic travel in wartime, and understanding that London was a more dangerous place than neutral America, she took measures to provide for her children in the event that something happened to their parents, and she did so without consulting her husband. Jackson Reynolds had been a classmate of both Hoovers, although he was closer to Lou, whom he always considered one of the most brilliant women he had ever met. A former star halfback of the Stanford football team, he had paid his way through college working at the library during the school year and summers on a ranch where he gained a reputation for being able to pitch more hay than any other two men in the county. He had gone on to teach law at Columbia University and was now a New York railway lawyer. Lou wrote him the day before she sailed for England:
I am doing the very inconsiderate thing of leaving you a present of my boys, if anything should “happen” to Bert and me, that we could not go on assuming our responsibility for them ourselves—and of doing it without first asking your permission.
That is because I don’t really expect anything to happen.
But of course if there should, I want them to have the best care and guidance that is possible for them, - and I don’t know anyone whose judgment I would trust as far in those matters as yours. Bert, I am sure, would agree with me. For while we have not discussed you in this relation, - we have in others—and we come to the same opinion.
Of course I do not ask you to take them into your home and father and mother them. That is too much to ask of anyone. But do direct their education and let them see enough of you to get your ideals of the world.6
Lou explained that her own father was too old to take care of her children, that her sister had married a thoroughly impractical man, and that while brother-in-law Theodore was acceptable, his wife, owing to certain “negative tendencies,” was not. Reynolds, she believed, was her best shot at raising “brave, true, honest boys.” She wanted them to have a few years of outdoor life in the West and a few years at a big school in the East. She gave Reynolds a list of family friends and suggested ways in which they might be useful. She recommended Herbert’s cousin, Harriette Miles, as “the sanest and best influence over boys of our folk,” adding that her health was not strong.7
Lou was not sure how much money would be available to her sons—perhaps a great deal, and in any event she had put aside enough in accounts in New York and California to ensure their education. She asked Reynolds not to let them get “a money measure” for all the affairs of life. “The ambition to do, to accomplish, irrespective of its measure in money or fame, is what should be inculcated,” she declared.*1, 8
Reynolds must have found it odd that his friend would offer up her children without consulting her husband, and Lou did not explain why she was acting unilaterally. There is nothing in her instructions on how to raise the boys that Bert would have found objectionable. (Indeed, he might have made a personal motto out of “the ambition to do.”) Perhaps he did not share her opinion of Reynolds, or her doubts about his own family. It may be that she wrote the letter on an impulse before leaving port and did not have time to inform Bert of her intentions, or that she was simply exercising her independent mind.
Obviously concerned about her impending journey, Lou also wrote Herbert Jr. a long middle-of-the-night letter telling him that while she expected to return, “one never can tell in this world of ours when it is going to be time for us to stop being as we are, and to begin in another way.” This ominous sentiment was followed with twenty pages of spiritual guidance. Lou told her son that while she believed in the existence of God, it was foolish to spend time trying to know him: “If he had wanted us to know he would have made it quite plain and simple.” She believed in praying for strength, and in an immortal soul. She held that each individual soul has a different fate: the souls of lazy, useless people would probably sleep through the afterlife. The souls of helpful people would go on being helpful. And if at any time in his life Herbert Jr. needed help, he had only to pray and his mother’s soul would be available to him. “And that’s what I want you to be perfectly sure about me. I know that if I should die, I can pray my soul to go over to my two dear little boys and help and comfort their souls.”9
Lou did not once mention the boy’s father amid all this spiritual reassurance. This omission, together with her recruitment of Reynolds as guardian, suggests another explanation for her letters: her solitary experience of parenting. While Lou might have preferred a different balance of priorities in Bert, she nevertheless understood his nature, and she remained loyal to him. In this same flurry of prevoyage letters, she wrote her “dear darling little Allan” that “you and I both said it was right for me to go and take care of our dear Daddy, who is so kind to us, and who has to stay over there in England and work so hard. And so I am going to be very cheerful about it even if I am very unhappy about it inside me.”10
Allan wrote back, “Tell Daddy I want to see him again soon and live with him too.”11
Bert and Lou were together amid the Gothic spires of Brussels for Christmas. Passing the German ministry in the company of Whitlock, Bert noticed trees in the windows and suggested wryly that they should be decorated with bayonets.
“I admire this man Hoover,” Whitlock told his journal, “who has a genius for organization and for getting things done, and beneath all, with his great intelligence, he has a wonderful human heart.” Whitlock wrote his new friend in early January:
I am sorry you were not here on that New Year’s Day for something very beautiful occurred. Spontaneously, quietly, all day long, a stream of Belgians poured into the Legation leaving cards and signing names in a little book that Baron Lambert provided. Over three thousand in all, to express their thanks for what America has done, all sorts and conditions of men, from noblemen whose cards bore high titles, down to the poorest woman from the slums, who had carefully written her name on a bit of pasteboard, the edges of which still showed the traces of the scissors. It was very touching, very moving, and I want you to know of it, for you have done so much more than any of us to help them.12
Pleased as he would have been by this story from Whitlock, Hoover knew that unless he could relieve the financial pressures on the CRB, its efforts to relieve Belgium would soon be at an end. He refocused his attentions on the Asquith government. If a subsidy was out of the question, perhaps some other form of support was available. He scheduled a January 21 meeting with Lloyd George. He wanted the Chancellor of the Exchequer to permit people outside of Belgium to send money to individuals inside the country so that they could pay for their food, lightening the burden on the CRB. Even this small maneuver would require an exception to the blockade, and Lloyd George initially did not bite. Hopes of a short war had faded, he said, and the conflict was now bound to be decided in the long term by economic attrition. Britain wanted to starve the enemy into submission, and any food or money flowing into Belgium could find its way to Germany, increasing its economic stamina. The minister was not concerned that Belgians might starve. If that were to happen, he said, Germany would have no choice but to feed them.
Hoover was prepared for Lloyd George’s objections. Having failed to bully the prime minister, he tried reason on the Exchequer. For fifteen minutes, Hoover spoke flawlessly, not a word out of place, one hand gesturing and the other jingling change in his pocket. He reminded Lloyd George that Great Britain had entered the war with the “avowed purpose of protecting the existence of small nations,” and suggested that it would be a hollow victory over Germany if Belgium were “extinguished in the process.” He denied that the Germans had seized or would seize any CRB food (when in fact he knew they had taken much). He pointed to reports of starvation in German-occupied Northern France as evidence that Berlin would be indifferent to suffering Belgians. He raised again the support of Americans for the Belgians.13
Hoover also told Lloyd George that the CRB’s work was of significant strategic advantage to the Allies. The Belgians were as yet refusing to operate their mines, factories, and railways, or to collaborate in any other way with their occupiers. They would continue to assert their independence so long as there was food on the table. Supporting the CRB was thus the smartest military expenditure the Allies could make. Lloyd George’s reaction startled Hoover. “I am convinced,” he said. “You have my permission.” He instructed his staff to work out the details and told Hoover that “the world will yet be indebted to the American people for the most magnanimous action which neutrality has yet given way to.” Lloyd George was later quoted as saying that Hoover’s presentation was the clearest he had heard on any subject. While there is no reason to doubt this, the Exchequer’s change of heart was likely influenced as well by his government’s dependence on American money and arms, which was deepening as the war dragged on.14
Hoover was relieved to win this narrow exception to the blockade but there were two problems with it. He still required a gigantic subsidy if he was going to balance the CRB’s books, and he also knew that the exception could be pulled from him at any time. Indeed, he worried that it might be pulled immediately. Coincidental with his triumph, Berlin, anxious about its own economic stamina, imposed a war indemnity on Belgium of 40 million francs a month. The captors were now milking the captives to subsidize their military, as Lloyd George had suspected would happen. Hoover’s first thought was that he would not get another farthing from the British. How could they justify pumping resources into Belgium when the Germans were pumping them out? Berlin’s move, however, had an unanticipated effect on the Asquith government.
Shortly after his conversation with Lloyd George, Hoover was pulled aside by Sir Edward Grey, who suggested that if the CRB could persuade Berlin to change its mind about the war indemnity, the cabinet would consider itself “under the obligation of supporting the Commission” by way of a subsidy. The British feared that the German money grab was the first stroke in a larger initiative to integrate Belgium into its war effort. They were coming to believe that the power of the Belgians to resist the Germans was directly related to their food supply, the very point Hoover had made to Lloyd George. Taking up Grey’s challenge, Hoover packed his bags for Berlin.15
Hoover left London on January 26 intending to cross the channel to Holland but changed his mind on the train and returned to the city to inform U.S. secretary of state William Jennings Bryan by cable that he was headed for Berlin on CRB business. Despite having no diplomatic standing, Hoover brazenly instructed the secretary to speak with the German ambassador to the United States about the importance of the CRB’s work. Specifically, he wanted Bryan to tell the ambassador that the CRB was conferring “a vast advantage” to Berlin by preventing an uprising of starving Belgians and by convincing the Allies to absorb the expense of feeding the population. This, of course, was opposite to what Hoover had told Lloyd George. It also ran contrary to official American policy, which was to regard the CRB as a neutral humanitarian operation.16
It is difficult to say which side Hoover honestly believed was benefiting from the CRB’s activities in Belgium.*2 It is clear from his actions that he did not much care. While his letters indicate that his private sympathies were with the Allies, his only loyalty as a neutral American was to Belgium; his job, as he saw it, was to keep 7.5 million people from being crushed between the German and British war machines. To accomplish that, he needed a subsidy, and he would wield whatever arguments were necessary to obtain one. Questions of military strategy and good faith in negotiations were secondary.
Hoover arrived in Berlin intending to “besiege the German government at the top directly and on all fronts,” and he succeeded in meeting countless officials, including the finance minister, the foreign minister, and, ultimately, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, chancellor of the German Empire. At each opportunity, he repeated his contention that the CRB’s efforts gave Germany a military advantage worth a great deal more than the 40 million francs a month that the occupier was squeezing from Belgium. He not only asked the government to drop the indemnity, he wanted Berlin to publicly state that it would do so only if the British financed the relief. He led the German officials to believe that aid to Belgium was so unpopular within the Asquith government that the CRB might be compelled to cease operations any day, leaving Berlin to deal with a nation of starving Belgians.17
Sadly for Hoover, the fate of his mission was to be decided by the tall, dashing figure of His Excellency von Bethmann Hollweg, the same man who at the outset of the war had famously dismissed Germany’s guarantee of Belgian neutrality as “a scrap of paper.” They met at 6 p.m. on February 7. Bethmann Hollweg told Hoover that he was grateful for the CRB’s work but said “at once with emphasis” that German public opinion demanded the indemnity, and international law allowed for such measures in support of an occupying army. With a hint of desperation, Hoover reminded the chancellor that Germany benefited from Washington’s neutrality and could not afford to have these issues tried in the court of American public opinion. Bethmann Hollweg snorted that the United States was already selling arms to the Allies and that it would continue to do so, ensuring a protracted war. He had nothing to fear from American opinion. Hoover tried a last-ditch appeal to Bethmann Hollweg’s humanity, but that only brought more complaints about the barbarity of the British blockade. The Germans did discuss with Hoover the notion of a large loan to the Belgians on complicated and unattractive terms. That, and a headful of disagreeable impressions of wartime Berlin, was all the CRB chairman took back to London.18
On his return, Hoover brooded over what he had seen in Germany. All of the officials and many of the civilians had been in uniform, and he could remember one instance of laughter during the whole of his ten-day trip. He had felt himself amid “the Spartans of Europe.” Any lingering hopes of a short war, he believed, were folly. As each month passed, the combatants had dug deeper into their trenches, reinforcing their positions with concrete, steel, and wire, supplementing their machine guns and mortars with flamethrowers, chemical weapons, and massive howitzers capable of lobbing powerful shells with fearsome accuracy. They were stockpiling enough artillery at certain battle sites to pound each other with 100 shells a minute for six months on end. Worse, the conflict was spreading in every direction, to the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. It was being fought on land, at sea, underwater, and in the air. Sixty-five million Europeans would wear uniforms, and their blood would mingle in the mud and water with that of young men from four other continents.19
Hoover knew the war was unusual in historical terms. It was not army meeting army in columns and squares on some distant plain. Entire economies had been redirected to military aims, entire populations were mobilized to arm, feed, and otherwise supply their warriors, and entire societies were living under siege. The Allied blockade, by denying food to the Central Powers, projected hatred into German homes with every meal. Germany, with its submarine attacks on merchant ships and its Zeppelin raids on British cities, was indiscriminately killing women and children. There was mass privation and extreme animus on both sides. Total war, he realized, engendered total hate. Negotiation and compromise were out of the question: too much had been lost on both sides, and nothing short of total victory could justify the horrible sacrifices made by the combatants.20
Hoover got a firsthand glimpse of some of those sacrifices on a later visit to German general staff headquarters in Northern France:
We motored for several hours to a point near a hilltop observation post in the forest, a distance back from the forward trenches and a mile or two away from the main roads. During the last few miles an occasional shell cracked nearby but the ingenious camouflage of the road…seemed to give protection to our route. At the post the constant rumble of artillery seemed to pulverize the air. Seen through powerful glasses, in the distant view laid the unending blur of trenches, of volcanic explosions of dust which filled the air where over a length of sixty miles a million and a half men were fighting and dying. Once in a while, like ants, the lines of men seemed to show through the clouds of dust. Here, under the thunder and belching volcanoes of 10,000 guns, over the months of this battle, the lives of Germans and Englishmen were thrown away. On the nearby road unending lines of Germans plodding along the right side of the front, not with drums and bands, but in the silence of sodden resignation. Down the left side came the unending lines of wounded men, the “walking cases,” staggering among cavalcades of ambulances. A quarter of a million men died, and it was but one battle in that war.
The horror of it all did not in the least effect the German officers in the post. To them it was pure mechanics….They said that the British were losing two to one—butting their heads against a stone wall. That was true. It was all a horrible, devastating reality, no romance, no glory.21
The barbarism he saw in Europe left Hoover wondering if civilization “has yet accomplished anything but enlarged ruthlessness in destruction of human life.”22
Disheartening as it was to have his humane entreaties for Belgian relief rejected in the highest offices of the great warring nations, Hoover gained clarity from the encounters. He returned to London in a different frame of mind. He had a new measure of the fear and desperation that gripped the leadership on both sides, and he saw plainly that appealing to the better natures of the governments would only try their patience. Henceforth, he would downplay the humanitarian dimensions of his mission and manipulate the fears of the great powers to force their hands.
On February 15, Hoover reported to the British Foreign Office on his meeting with Bethmann Hollweg. He exaggerated the generosity and workability of Berlin’s offer of a loan to the Belgians. As he expected, the British were immediately concerned that the desperate captives might throw themselves into the arms of the enemy. It would be a diplomatic coup for Bethmann Hollweg to be seen as the savior of a country he had so recently sacked. It would raise Germany in the eyes of neutral nations, especially America, while the Asquith government, having failed to act, would lose international prestige. This was a risk Britain could not afford to take as its dependence on America escalated.
Two days after his meeting at the Foreign Office, on a Wednesday afternoon, Hoover received a call from Lloyd George who said that the cabinet would meet at noon the next day to consider feeding the Belgians, and that while Churchill and Kitchener remained “very much opposed, on military grounds,” the Exchequer was now agreeable. He wanted Hoover to write him a comprehensive memo to use against his fellow ministers. “He stated that I should make it as vigorous and as strong as possible, and to approach the subject as though our work were about to be suppressed, and to put any arguments in which would meet such a proposal,” wrote Hoover in a CRB memorandum.23
Three hours later, Lloyd George had in his hands a powerfully worded document containing all of the arguments in Hoover’s arsenal. Without a continuation of relief, he had written, the Belgians would be decimated: “Except for the breadstuffs imported by the Commission there is not one ounce of bread in Belgium today.” The Germans had refused to feed its occupied peoples before, and “it was perfectly clear and confirmed” that they would do so again. The British people had embarked upon “the greatest war of their history” to defend Belgian neutrality, which entailed protecting its citizens from starvation. Relief was of no military advantage to Germany; rather, it assisted the Allies by encouraging the passive resistance of Belgium. Finally, “I cannot too strongly emphasize the fact that should this relief work fail to receive the sympathy and support of the English people, it would have a most serious bearing on the whole attitude of public sentiment in the United States.”24
The cabinet met on February 18, after which Lloyd George cheerfully informed Hoover that His Majesty’s Government had agreed to recommend to its French ally a joint subvention of almost $5 million per month in the form of nominal loans to the exiled Belgian government, with the money intended for support of the CRB. “You have made a good fight,” Lloyd George told Hoover, “and deserve to win out.”25
Interestingly, the cabinet had decided against directly subsidizing the CRB. Loaning the money to the Belgian government-in-exile rather than granting it to Hoover allowed Lloyd George to bypass the House of Commons and keep the whole matter under wraps. The government was not keen on a public debate on the advisability of diverting scarce resources to German-occupied territory. That was fine with Hoover, who did not want Berlin to think that the English were anxious about the Belgians, which would only result in rougher treatment for the captives. He and Lord Grey went so far as to pretend in publicly released correspondence that the cabinet had rejected a subsidy.26
With five months of work, Hoover had secured the immediate financial future of what was by then the largest relief organization the world had known. Roughly $1.8 million worth of food was being purchased weekly from America, Australia, and the Argentine. Hoover had a fleet of several dozen cargo vessels skimming back and forth over the oceans, in addition to six hundred tugs and barges operating on the canals of Holland and Belgium. He oversaw a hundred volunteers in his London office and tens of thousands of volunteer fund-raisers from Spain to Canada, and the monies collected were distributed equitably in shattered Belgium by another forty thousand volunteers. In 1915, at the request of desperate French citizens caught behind the Western Front, Hoover expanded the CRB’s operations to include 2 million people of Northern France, bringing his total client base above 9 million, spread over twenty thousand square miles.27
The scope and powers of the CRB were mindboggling. Its shipping fleet flew its own flag. Its members carried special documents that served as CRB passports. Hoover himself, after his first round of strip searches, was granted a form of diplomatic immunity by all belligerents, with the British permitting him to cross the Channel at will and the Germans providing him a document stating: “This man is not to be stopped anywhere under any circumstances.” Perhaps no other individual in the world moved so easily across enemy lines during the Great War. Hoover had privileged access to generals, diplomats, and ministers. He enjoyed personal contacts with the heads of warring governments. He negotiated treaties with the belligerents, advised them on policy, wrote letters that they released under their own signatures, and delivered private messages among them. Great Britain, France, and Belgium would soon be turning over to him $150 million a year, enough to run a small country, and taking nothing for it beyond his receipt. He did all this as a sovereign agent, with minimal input from the State Department. As one British official observed, Hoover was running “a piratical state organized for benevolence.” Whitlock, in Brussels, put it another way: the CRB “is one of the modern wonders of the world, if there are any more wonders in this world.”28
Hoover’s accomplishments naturally attracted the attention of newspapermen, exciting his usual ambivalence about the press. He wanted the attention. He reveled in public approbation, and he relied on coverage to promote his fund-raising efforts and to pressure the belligerents into cooperating with his relief plans, but he also wanted to be noticed on his own terms. He was furious when a CRB publicity release mentioned his past business associations: “I see no occasion to advertise Bewick, Moreing at my expense.” He was mortified when stories exaggerated his adventures in the Boxer uprising and tried to present him as a warm and folksy character. Fearing for his dignity and reputation, he insisted that Lou give interviews to set the record straight. She gamely informed a reporter for the San Francisco Bulletin that her husband, in fact, had not been a war hero in China.29
Washington was also interested in this new man, Hoover. The State Department began to compile a dossier on him, a development his suspicious mind worked up into an effort to discredit him. He managed to pack a jumble of wounded, contemptuous, humble, and arrogant sentiments into a short letter of response to a government contact:
It is really difficult for me to take the matter seriously for I want nothing from the President or anyone else in this World except my good name amongst men. As to my social standing, I have broken bread with lawyers, engineers, Earls, Viscounts, plain Knights, Chevaliers, Prime Ministers and ex-Prime ministers, Members of Parliament, United States Senators, Congressmen, Editors of Newspapers, miners, porters, and sundry other persons. I regret that I have never organized these efforts into that Social Status which of course can only be evolved by close attention to the feminine side, shoots, hunts, balls, dinners and so forth. As you know, on the contrary, I have preferred a modest existence and with my off-time devoted to literary work.30
He added that with an income of $100,000 a year, he could pay his bills.
Proud as he was of the launch of the CRB and much as he enjoyed his growing international stature, Hoover knew that it was still hanging by a thread. The winning of a subsidy in no way guaranteed the future of the organization. Hardly a week went by without him feeling that the whole edifice was about to crash.
One major threat came in the person of His Excellency, Baron von Bissing, a seventy-year-old Prussian with a hard, leathery face, piercing dark eyes, and a long saber banging against his thin legs. He was governor general of Belgium, and it irked him to see American relief workers dashing around Brussels receiving salutes and cheers from the same Belgian people who treated their occupiers with open contempt. Von Bissing believed that the CRB permitted the Belgians to avoid work, leaving it to the German army to operate civil services and keep order in the country. Just as Hoover was getting his finances sorted out, the governor general decided to assert his authority. He would bring the Belgians to heel by seizing control of Hoover’s relief effort.31
Von Bissing demanded that the number of CRB delegates in Belgium be reduced and that they be replaced with his own appointees. Hoover protested that the British only permitted his food purchases through the blockade because they trusted the CRB to ensure its distribution to qualified recipients. Regardless, Von Bissing began to impose restrictions on CRB operatives. An enraged Hoover went over the governor general’s head to Berlin, threatening to withdraw from Belgium if his freedom of movement was not reinstated. Calculating the cost in international standing and the expense of provisioning the Belgians itself, Germany relented, and Hoover kept control of his organization, something the Red Cross was not able to do in Belgium.32
The ruthless von Bissing would soon find another way around his problem, one that Hoover was powerless to prevent. He rounded up and forcibly deported 58,432 Belgians to German factories and munitions plants. He press-ganged another 62,155 to work in France and Belgium, some of them building trenches and roads at the front lines.33
Elements of the British government also continued to take a dim view of the CRB. Hardly a month went by without the Foreign Office raising objections to Hoover’s operations. He was instructed to stop shipping emergency clothing to Belgium when the British learned that Germany was seizing all raw or manufactured wool in occupied lands, and his shipments of canned condensed milk were protested on the grounds that they provided tin to the enemy. Charges that Germany was sneaking food out of Belgium were constant, and often accurate. Hoover had knowledge, for instance, that Belgian peasants were growing oats instead of wheat because the Germans would pay more for oats.34
It was the Admiralty, however, that most wanted the CRB out of business. Hoover had blown a hole in the blockade of German-controlled ports that its officers were at pains to close. After several failed attempts to stop the relief shipments, and an aborted effort to convince the CRB to gather intelligence of German military operations on its behalf, the Admiralty hit on a new line of attack: it would investigate and attempt to discredit Herbert Hoover. Allegations were brought that Hoover had an unsavory background, and that he was aiding the enemy through his German business connections. The Foreign Office was compelled to launch an inquiry, a judge was appointed, and Hoover, outraged and humiliated, was compelled to testify. The scrutiny triggered his paranoia. Convinced that his opponents were being fed information by a former employee, Hoover hired a spy in New York to follow the man, whom he insisted was mentally unstable, an accusation he would throw at enemies, real or imagined, with regularity. The judge cleared Hoover of any wrongdoing, but the Admiralty would continue to be an obstacle throughout his thirty-month run at the CRB.35
Hoover’s ability to maintain the Belgian relief in the face of powerful adversaries, under the ever-darkening clouds of suspicion and enmity, is testament to the soundness of his initial strategy. The massive scale of the CRB and its monopoly over the flow of food into Belgium shielded it from the bullying and manipulation of the great powers. Messing with the CRB’s chairman meant messing with the fate of 7.5 million Belgians, something Hoover had understood intuitively when he insisted on consolidating all relief efforts at the outset. The neutrality of the CRB and its high public profile—two other features insisted upon by Hoover—afforded further protections. Although the structure of the CRB was improvised in the early weeks of the war, and suggested (or at least encouraged) by his personal quirks and imperious management style, it was built to last. The credit is due Hoover, whose vision and experience enabled him to foresee the demands of industrial-scale humanitarianism in an age of industrialized global war.
Perversely, given the might of his external opponents, it was his partners in the Belgian relief who frustrated Hoover the most. Not long after he had stabilized the CRB’s finances, the once cooperative Comité Central in Brussels decided it was competent to run the relief without American involvement. For the better part of a year, Hoover and Emile Francqui engaged in a near-psychotic quarrel for preeminence in the relief cause. They accused each other of ambition, corruption, and deceit, and both of them threatened to resign if they did not get their way. Hoover at one point talked of laying a train of powder to blow up Francqui, and at another threatened to train a machine gun on the “glory hunting Belgian pinheads.” The infighting drove Ambassador Whitlock to despair. It was a needless distraction at a time when the Germans were menacing the independence of the CRB and conducting slave raids on the Belgian population.36
Eustace Percy, the Foreign Office staffer with responsibility for policy toward Belgium, shared Whitlock’s dismay. An incredibly adept young diplomat, Percy happened to believe in the relief, unlike many of his colleagues. He made a personal project of trying to resolve matters between Hoover, whom he liked and admired, and Francqui. In late November 1916 he offered Hoover a friendly warning:
If, by any action of yours, you make it more difficult at this eleventh hour for America to act a part in preventing the destruction which threatens to follow upon the growth of German despair, you will lessen, instead of save, the dignity of America. Every sign points to a new campaign of frightfulness on the part of Germany: a campaign which is going to bring upon Belgium sufferings all the more bitter and overwhelming because they come at the very moment of reviving hope; and I ask you all with confidence to make greater sacrifices than ever in order that you may not be drawn into the greatest sacrifice of all, namely the sacrifice of your position as the advance guard and symbol of the sense of responsibility of the American people towards Europe.37
It was a brilliant note, appealing all at once to Hoover’s good nature, self-interest, fears, dignity, and patriotism. It was as though Percy had studied every aspect of the man’s vanity and vulnerability and crafted the best possible paragraph to pull him from the brink of self-destruction. He played Hoover as well as Hoover had ever been played, and failed.
The battle between Hoover and Francqui raged on until the end of December, when the Belgian finally relented. The warring champions of relief met at the Savoy in London and aired their differences. They came to terms, but not before Francqui had accused Hoover of using a sledgehammer to kill gnats, and Hoover had replied that he would “use a pile driver to kill a malarial mosquito.” They agreed to maintain relations between the CRB and Francqui’s Comité much as they were before their dispute.38
Before long, yet another internal fracas came dangerously close to ending Hoover’s reign at the CRB and ruining his standing in American public life. Lindon Bates was an engineer and a close personal friend of Hoover employed as vice chairman in the CRB’s New York office. He had been making speeches on the noble cause of Belgium, saying nothing that Hoover himself had not said but neglecting to mention his chairman by name in his remarks. Reporters were left with the impression that Bates and the New York office were largely responsible for the commission’s success. Hoover seized upon a Saturday Evening Post story of August 1915 and fired a long and intemperate letter to Bates enumerating “46 absolute untruths and 36 half-truths” in the article. He accused his colleague of being an attention seeker and prohibited the New York office from doing further publicity. The wounded Bates marched off to the U.S. State Department and the Justice Department to charge Hoover with criminal transgression of the Logan Act, a piece of legislation prohibiting American citizens from engaging in unauthorized negotiations with foreign governments.39
The charge of violating the Logan Act was not easily answered given the scope of Hoover’s activities, his interventions in the affairs of Britain, Germany, France, and the Belgian government-in-exile, and specifically his efforts to establish work-for-food programs in Belgium, all of which might be viewed as breaches of American neutrality. Hoover first attempted to dismiss the complaint by using a pile driver on Bates personally. He claimed that his friend was an unreliable source and jealous of his authority. Relying again on ad hominem attacks, he said that Bates was deranged by the loss of his son, who had gone down with the Lusitania the previous May. The Justice Department, however, was disinclined to reject the complaint on Hoover’s testimony alone. He was forced to return to the United States in October to defend himself.
Lou Hoover was summering in California with her sons when the Bates controversy arose. She received an urgent cable from her husband asking her to come east while he crossed from London: “Developments make it absolutely necessary for me proceed New York. Expect leave here Sixteenth…Do not wish anyone to know of journey as do not wish to be bothered exterior interests. Expect remain one week.”40
Although this message came three days after another informing Lou that Bert had no plans to visit America and wanted her to return to London as soon as possible, she dutifully rushed to New York with the boys to meet their father, whom they had not seen in almost a year. They caught up to him in Manhattan, with disappointing results. “New York was such a jumble,” Lou told a secretary. “[Bert] spent his entire time on Belgium Commission business. I scarcely saw him, and never had time for a word or any other subject. The hotel sitting room always had 3 or 4 men there discussing that.”41
After several days in New York, Hoover traveled to Washington and began a lobby in his own defense. His two most important contacts were Wilson confidant Colonel Edward House and Franklin Lane, secretary of the interior. Hoover relied primarily on an indignant plea that he was serving a noble cause, the Logan Act be damned. To that end, he coaxed his reliable London booster, Ambassador Page, to cable a personal reference describing him to the secretary of state, whose department was giving Hoover the most grief, as “the soul of intellectual integrity.” Said Page:
The Commission for the Relief of Belgium is Hoover and absolutely depends on Hoover who has personally made arrangements with the governments concerned and has carried these delicate negotiations through only because of his high character and standing and unusual ability. If he is driven to resign the Commission will instantly fall to pieces.42
Through Franklin Lane, Hoover gained a meeting with Woodrow Wilson on November 3, 1915. He was not unknown to the president. In the opening weeks of the war, Wilson had written to thank Hoover for his aid in the evacuation of Americans stranded overseas. Around the same time, Wilson had asked Lane for a dossier on the humanitarian engineer. Lane obliged, misinforming the president as to Hoover’s age, his college education, the title of his Agricola book, and the name of his wife before confidently concluding: “There is no American sojourning abroad who has a higher financial, mining or social status than Mr. Herbert C. Hoover.”43
It was a good time to visit the White House. The president was in the sweet spot of his tumultuous first term. He had been elected unexpectedly in 1912, the first Democratic president since Cleveland and the prime beneficiary of a cleavage in the Republican base caused by Theodore Roosevelt’s launch of the Progressive Party, also known as the Bull Moose Party. Wilson’s first year was impressive, producing tariff reforms, a federal farm loan act, a workman’s compensation system, a ban on child labor, and the Federal Reserve System, among other measures. His wife of twenty-nine years, Ellen, died in the summer of 1914, and with her went much of the administration’s momentum. The president admitted to Colonel House that he was broken in spirit and no longer fit to hold office. He wandered for six months in blind grief until giddily rebounding into the arms of the voluptuous widow Edith Galt. House soon came to believe his friend unworthy of office for entirely different reasons: “It seems the President is wholly absorbed in this love affair and is neglecting practically everything else.”44
Wilson was ill cast in the role of lothario, looking and acting, as Roosevelt said, “like an apothecary’s clerk.”*3 Fifty-eight years old, thin and prissy, the president admitted to a “vague, conjectural personality” and a lack of “human traits and red corpuscles.” He was nevertheless in love with Mrs. Galt, dancing little jigs and whistling “Oh, You Beautiful Doll” when he had her in mind, which was often. Cabinet officers and senior congressional figures complained of the besotted president’s inaccessibility. He wrote her three times a day and eventually married her.45
By the fall of 1915, when Hoover and Bates were at odds, Wilson was clinging to the notion that the war was a European matter “whose causes cannot touch us.” It was a precarious position, given that the fight had crashed American markets, upset American trade, and inflamed American citizens, who were providing funds and arms to the belligerents. Still, Wilson sought to keep his distance and assert the rights of neutral nations. Consistent with this pose, he was sympathetic to the predicament of the Belgians, victims of German aggression. Hoover had no problem convincing the president of the importance of the relief. After their meeting, Wilson wrote his fiancée:
My most interesting interview to-day…has been with Mr. Herbert Hoover, the Chairman of the Belgian Relief Commission. I wish you could meet him. He is a real man….He is an American mining engineer living in London—one of the very ablest men we have sent over there, and has devoted his great organizing gifts and a large part of his fortune, too, to keeping nine million people alive…so that he has become a great international figure. Such men stir me deeply and make me in love with duty!46
Wilson issued a public statement of support for Hoover and the CRB, and the Bates controversy died. While it is likely true that Bates was disturbed by the loss of his son, Hoover’s counterattack on his erstwhile colleague was vicious. His habit of resorting to discreditable measures to defend his actions and integrity had carried over from private affairs to public life.
It does not excuse his handling of the Bates matter to note that Hoover was not at his best in these months. He was working endless hours. He took no holidays or breaks. The intellectual and emotional loads of the relief were tremendous, and they took their toll. When Lou rejoined him in London toward the end of 1915, she noticed that he had developed a wheeze, accompanied by severe headaches, chronic ear abscesses, and throat problems. She also noticed changes in her husband’s personality. She had always appreciated in him capacities for happiness—a “quaint whimsicality,” a certain “sparkling spontaneity”—that no one else would ever claim to see. The previous winter she had watched him stop on his way to work amid a heavy London snowfall and roll a snowman. That part of him was now lost, or at least buried deep beneath the surface by the strain of war and command.47
Bates’s defection was an anomaly in Hoover’s administration. He worked primarily with a small, handpicked circle of associates, most of them younger men, many of them engineers or Americans. It was a loose organization, surprisingly so for a man obsessed with efficiency. “An organization isn’t a chart,” he liked to say, “it’s a body of men.”48
Although aloof from his associates at a personal level, he impressed them with the integrity of his work and his passion for his cause, and he commanded a high degree of loyalty. One journalist credited Hoover with exercising a strange, mesmerizing, low-voltage magnetism. A diplomat, after meeting him, said: “Somehow I feel like doing what that man asked me to do.”49
No one was more impressed with Hoover than Ambassador Page, who wrote unprompted to President Wilson:
Life is worth more, too, for knowing Hoover. But for him Belgium would now be starved, however generously people may have given food. He is gathering together and transporting and getting distributed $5,000,000 worth a month, with a perfect organization of volunteers, chiefly American. He has a fleet of thirty-five ships, flying the Commission’s flag—the only flag that all belligerents have entered into an agreement to respect and to defend. He came to me the other day and said, “You must know the Commission is $600,000 in debt. But don’t be uneasy. I’ve given my personal note for it….” He’s a simple, modest energetic little man who began his career in California and will end it in Heaven; and he doesn’t want anybody’s thanks.50
An equally high recommendation came from an unlikely source. Lord Kitchener was a determined opponent of the CRB throughout the war, but in the spring of 1915 he summoned its chairman to a meeting at the War Office. He asked if Hoover would renounce his American citizenship and become a British subject. Hoover asked why. Kitchener replied that he wanted him to do a “great service” for the war effort. The Asquith government had been damaged by reports of a shortage of shells at the Western Front, a scandal that would soon shorten Kitchener’s career. It was now proposing to give Hoover charge of its munitions production, perhaps as minister of munitions in a new cabinet department. The War Office thought he could fix the greatest industrial crisis Great Britain had ever faced. Hoover answered that he would like to help but would not renounce his citizenship: “I should soon lose my Yankee energy,” he said. The conversation went no further. When Hoover mentioned the offer at the U.S. embassy, an astonished Ambassador Page told him he had thrown away a peerage, a notion that Hoover dismissed with a grunt.51
Hoover was capable of answering almost any proffered honor with a grunt, but it was always an eloquent grunt, far more so than Page could have known. It spoke for the welter of conflicting impulses that tortured Hoover: it reflected his altruistic belief that good works were their own reward; his ingrained Quaker conviction that the pursuit of personal glory was sinful; his acquired sense of noblesse oblige that required him to at least appear to work selflessly for the public good. At war with all this was his psychological need to collect his measure of acknowledgment and validation; his compulsion to advertise his deeds and rank and salary; his pride in belonging in the company of senators and chevaliers; his desire to reap the opportunities that flowed from making a difference. Complicating matters still more was Hoover’s practical understanding that the first rule of self-promotion was to hide one’s self-promotions.
The battle in Hoover’s breast between humility and the desire for recognition, always a close fight, may have been tipped toward a grunt of refusal in the case of Kitchener’s offer by another factor entirely. The British had always made Hoover feel inferior as an individual and a professional. He shielded himself with a sense of superiority as a free-born American and a self-made man. He held the British honors system, wasted on “noodle-headed” nonentities and other ornamental personages, in contempt.52
Over the years he would accept his share of honors, including a bushel of honorary degrees from the likes of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Oxford. When he rejected an accolade, as with Kitchener, he tended to let others know, thereby brokering a compromise between his warring parts.53
Over a mantel in the lunchroom of the CRB’s London office was a placard reading THIS CANNOT GO ON FOR EVER. It ended for Hoover in early 1917 with Wilson’s decision to enter the Great War. With his status as a neutral compromised, Hoover reluctantly handed the CRB over to Dutch and Spanish authorities.54
In thirty months, the CRB had spent $200 million and shipped 2.5 million tons of food. By the peace, the total relief distributed would amount to $865 million (the U.S. government eventually kicked in as much as $20 million a month), with only $4 million of the total going to administrative overhead, a detail in which Hoover took great pride. It was, as Lord Curzon remarked, “an absolute miracle of scientific organization. Every pound of food and supplies is accounted for.”55
It is impossible to say what would have happened to the Belgian people under German occupation if Hoover had not founded and led the CRB. There would have been other relief efforts, certainly, but it is doubtful any of them would have had the scale and strength of Hoover’s commission. It is possible that Germany might have decided to feed the Belgians if they began to starve. Its own population, however, was living on meager rations, averaging less than one thousand calories a day toward the end of the war, and there is no chance Berlin would have given Belgium food without demanding that its people commit to the German war effort. It is conceivable that the twentieth century’s horrific string of man-made famines might have run through Belgium had the CRB not intervened.56
As Hoover made his exit from his commission, the New York Times surveyed the “machinery, the orderly plan, the large, wise humanity of the distribution of relief among the ruined populations of Northern France and Belgium” and proclaimed Hoover’s leadership “the most splendid American achievement of the last two years.” This was precisely the sort of acclaim Hoover needed as he now set his sights on President Wilson and his next move in the big game.57
*1 Jackson Eli Reynolds, who counted Franklin Roosevelt among his least esteemed law students, would go on to argue the famous Reading antitrust suit before the Supreme Court. Still later, according to Time magazine (November 5, 1934), he cut “an awesome figure astride the highest peak in the mountain range of Morgan banks.”
*2 His brother, Theodore, tended to side with the British Admiralty on the military impact of the CRB: “As a cold-blooded proposition in the strategy of the World War the Belgian Relief Commission may have been a mistake.” (Theodore Hoover, “Statement of an Engineer,” Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum.)
*3 Roosevelt made a fetish of insulting Wilson, also calling him a “damned Presbyterian hypocrite” and a “Byzantine logothlete.” (David Pietrusza, 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents. New York: Basic Books, 2008, p. 61.)