The Great Humanitarian
On August 6, 1914, two days after Germany invaded neutral Belgium and four days before his fortieth birthday, Hoover took up a command post at London’s Savoy Hotel ballroom in the midst of a milling throng of panicky Americans. More than one hundred thousand U.S. nationals were fleeing the Continent only to find that their letters of credit could not be cashed and there was no way to buy passage home. That day Hoover had organized a group of U.S. businessmen in the City into a “Committee of American Residents in London for Assistance of American Travellers.” He had been dragooned into the task, he claimed. In fact, he had been pushy. In wresting control of the operation from another group, Hoover maintained that he had the sponsorship of the U.S. ambassador, Walter Hines Page—who had no knowledge of what Hoover was doing.
Brazen though he was, Hoover, displaying superb managerial skills, deserved all the plaudits he was to receive. Even before the event at the Savoy, he had pulled together every shilling and tuppence he could lay hands on and had doled out small loans to his stranded countrymen. Each day brought legions of arrivals, and his committee sustained them—men, women, and children—until they could book passage to the United States, then advanced money for tickets in steerage. In these days of acute anxiety,
Hoover was unflappable. When one matron angrily insisted upon a written guarantee that no U-boat would sink her ship on the transatlantic voyage, he coolly wrote her out a pledge. Over the course of two months in which Hoover worked indefatigably, the group raised and disbursed some $400,000. Almost every dollar was repaid.
To Hoover, the experience offered the first of a series of proofs he took to heart: voluntarism and private charity could answer any crisis; it was not necessary to involve the state. He gave little notice to the reality that he had been able to act with such authority because his committee had been granted semiofficial status. Nor did he heed that the sizable sum of $150,000 he distributed had come from the U.S. government.
His task completed, Hoover packed his bags to sail home on the RMS Lusitania in mid-October, only to receive an urgent summons from the U.S. embassy. The situation in Belgium, Ambassador Page told him, had become desperate. German armies had uprooted more than a million Belgians, ruthlessly wiped out hundreds of villages, destroyed factories, demolished means of transportation, and seized crops and livestock. In addition, the British, to starve the Reich into submission, had imposed a blockade on the whole continent, closing off shipments to a country that imported 70 percent of its food. The Belgians faced mass starvation within two weeks. Brussels had only a four-day stock of flour. Would Hoover agree to head a private undertaking (with the unofficial sanction of the U.S. government) to save the Belgians from famine?
As chairman of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Hoover took on a daunting mission. He needed to raise a million dollars a week; buy tens of thousands of tons of food from all quarters of the globe; see that specially marked ships took the precious cargo through perilous seas to Holland, then through canals into Belgium; and make sure that it reached the people for whom it was intended and nobody else. He did not let a moment lapse. Reckoning that the Chicago wheat exchange would be open for another hour, as soon as he returned from his meeting with Page he wired an
order, and on November 4, 1914, a ship laden with food embarked for Rotterdam. Boldly, Hoover placed orders for foodstuffs costing five times as much as the cash he had on hand and, to guarantee delivery, pledged every penny he had in the world—and more. If a man without Hoover’s daring had held his post, many thousands would have starved to death.
An organization with no legal standing and no stable source of funds, the Commission for Relief in Belgium crossed national frontiers in the midst of the world’s first global war, plunged into markets on two continents, and spent unheard-of sums. Nothing daunted Hoover. He seized control of railways, took over factories and warehouses, and commandeered five hundred Belgian canal boats. When the kaiser’s armies occupied northern France, Hoover extended his realm there too. The CRB, said a British Foreign Office functionary, was “a piratical state organized for benevolence.”
Provisioning the Belgians required Hoover to engage in delicate transactions with the belligerents. Early in 1915, he conferred with Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George and Reich Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. To enlist greater support from the French, he met with the president of the Third Republic, Raymond Poincaré. Ambassador Page said of Hoover: “He is probably the only man living who has privately (i.e. without holding office) negotiated understandings with the British, French, German, Dutch and Belgian Gov’ts.” So unorthodox was this behavior that Senator Henry Cabot Lodge threatened to prosecute Hoover under the Logan Act of 1799, which prohibited U.S. citizens from engaging in diplomatic dealings with foreign powers, until the senator’s good friend Teddy Roosevelt quieted him. “I will hold his hand,” T.R. assured Hoover.
Though well before the war Hoover had established a close relationship with a number of government leaders in England, especially Sir Edward Grey, the Germans unexpectedly proved more tractable than the British. Hoover secured from the Reich a passport reading “This man is not to be stopped anywhere under any circumstances,” and when General von Bissing, the imperious
governor-general of Belgium, became confrontational, Hoover hastened to Berlin and had him overruled. The British, reasonably enough, asked why they should allow their blockade to be perforated. Incensed at his lack of sympathy, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, called Hoover an SOB.
Churchill was not the only one to curse out Hoover or to find him obnoxious. “Tact,” Lloyd George remarked, “is not one of his many qualities.” Hoover, he later said, “had a surliness of mien and a peremptoriness of speech.” Similarly, the Belgian minister in London found Hoover’s style of speaking “parfois impératif.” He was chronically bad tempered—quick to take offense, primed to scent conspirators leagued against him, unwilling to control outbursts of rage. Again and again, as in meetings with Spanish diplomats, he blew a fuse. Even someone who thought well of Hoover remarked, “He can express himself so accurately and so indignantly that his victim will go off nursing a grudge for the rest of his natural life.”
The U.S. ambassador to Belgium, Brand Whitlock, who had won renown as reform mayor of Toledo, Ohio, started out with great goodwill toward Hoover but wound up loathing him. In the early days of the CRB, Whitlock wrote that Hoover “has a genius for organization and for getting things done, and beneath all, with his great intelligence, … has a wonderful human heart.” It did not take long, though, for the envoy to conclude that Hoover was “fruste” (uncultivated) and “boorish,” or to deplore his acting “in a brutal manner.” After reading a domineering cable to the king of the Belgians drafted by the CRB chairman, Whitlock commented that Hoover was “always trying to force, to blackmail, to frighten people into doing things his way … . What a bully! He would even bully a poor exiled King!”
Throughout his tenure, Hoover insisted on deference to his will. He had hardly begun work when he announced that “it has got to be recognized by everybody … that I am the boss, and that any
attempts to minimize the importance of my leadership would do … infinite harm.” Hoover “did not like you to disagree with him,” one of his subordinates later commented. “He definitely did not like you to disagree with him.” In his relations with foreign leaders, he repeatedly threatened to take his marbles and go home if he was not given his way. “After many sleepless nights, I went to Belgium and found everybody dead against me,” he told a friend. “I stayed there a little over two weeks … . I … brought Whitlock to my side within twenty minutes—I had the Belgians my way in 24 hours and in a week the Americans in control were either bashed into line or were eating out of my hand.” Subsequently, he confided by cable, “We will train a machine gun on our troublesome friends this week.”
Many who had dealings with Hoover found him soul chilling. He was capable of traveling all the way to Belgium without uttering a word to the men accompanying him. He avoided personal encounters with the starving—even with children, though he was known to be concerned about their welfare. Hoover had become, the historian Kendrick Clements has commented perceptively, “very much like those relatives who had taken in the young orphan,” people who “sustained his body but offered … little emotional support.” When at the end of his London stay in April 1917, a large group of colleagues turned out at Euston station to bid him farewell, he buried his head in correspondence at a window seat and never waved back or even looked up. After he arrived in Washington that spring, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, who had been eager to meet the Great Humanitarian, reported, “He told of the big work in Belgium as coldly as if he were giving statistics of production. From his words and his manner he seemed to regard human beings as so many numbers. Not once did he show the slightest feeling.”
Some of his detachment may be attributed to the burdens he bore. Later, Lou Hoover wrote their children: “Those years of his life, and ours, he gave up to the cause of the little man … . And not only those years, but most of the kind of happiness, of pleasure,
that had been his before. A certain … kind of joy was stamped out of him by those war years. Can you remember that … he completely changed? Not that he became altogether solemn … , but the old sparkling spontaneity is now only occasionally glimpsed far below the surface.” The letter only hints at the price his family paid. When in 1915 Lou left England for a five-month stay in California, her husband did not see her off; instead, he sent a three-word telegram to the Liverpool dock. And there were stretches when the boys had neither mother nor father with them.
Yet, however icy Hoover was, no one questioned that he was prodigiously effective. Lord Eustace Percy in the British Foreign Office regarded the American as “the bluntest man in Europe,” but acknowledged that he was “able, without apparent effort, to handle a situation involving more irreconcilable elements than any other situation in this war.” On one occasion, a high-placed British official told him, “Men have gone to the Tower for less than you have done,” but then acceded to demands that shortly before he had said were “out of the question.”
Moreover, Hoover had some redeeming qualities that were not readily discernible. Though often greedy as an engineer and administrator to claim credit not due him, he went out of his way to make sure that his name was not publicly associated with charitable deeds—perhaps because of an ingrained Quaker sense that promoting oneself was unworthy. He also was generous toward subordinates. In 1915 Hoover told Ray Lyman Wilbur: “There is one bit of advice that I will hazard you … and that is never to be afraid of the ability of one’s lieutenants but to bear in mind that the more able the men with whom one surrounds oneself the more certainty one has of ultimate success.” That year, one of the young men under him wrote, “Mr. Hoover is such a fine, quiet, kindly man that everybody votes for him on sight—and no second choice! … If you want to start a wave of enthusiasm among the younger members of the C.R.B., simply say ‘Mr. Hoover.’ … He has no idea of our absolute loyalty.” He added on another occasion, “Though he never notices any of us very much we all idolize him.”
Much of his staff’s devotion doubtless derived from recognition that Hoover spared himself no ordeal. In October 1914 he made his first inspection of war-ravaged Belgium. Before he could embark, British intelligence forced him to undergo a humiliating strip to the buff, and on landfall, the Germans required him to bare himself again. The Channel crossing held far worse perils, but Hoover repeatedly set out over the mine-strewn waters, never knowing if he would reach the farther shore. In January 1915 Ambassador Page wrote President Wilson: “Life is worth more, too, for knowing Hoover. But for him Belgium would now be starved … . 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.”
His skill and daring as an administrator astonished friend and foe. He operated on a colossal scale. When, after returning to America, he was pressed by an inquisitorial Oklahoma senator to state the price of a bushel of beans, Hoover retorted, “I have always bought them by the ton.” An audacious manipulator, he exasperated agents of the Allies and of the Central Powers by deception and casuistry. Sometimes he told outright lies. In a period when he knew that the Germans were stealing food intended for the Belgians, he assured the British that his delivery system was impregnable. But as a British editor said, Hoover “won admiration from most and extorted respect from all.” The Belgian minister to Great Britain marveled at Hoover’s “rapidité de décision” and his capacity to create “cet extraordinaire mécanisme.” An inspector for the Rockefeller Foundation who had closely scrutinized his operation was even more laudatory. “Mr. Hoover,” concluded the future U.S. senator Frederic C. Walcott, “is a perfect wonder.”
“By the end of 1916,” George Nash has written, Hoover “stood preeminent in the greatest humanitarian undertaking the world had ever seen.” He had raised and spent millions of dollars, with trifling overhead and not a penny lost to fraud. At its peak, his organization was feeding nine million Belgians and French a day. Hoover took special pains to care for Belgium’s world-famous lace-makers.
In addition to feeding the forty thousand women, he saw to it that they were supplied with thread so that they could carry on their precious craft. Under a “soupe scolaire” program, some two million children got a hot lunch of filling vegetable soup with white bread, and, thanks to Hoover, cocoa too.
Hoover drew from this experience the same lesson he believed he had learned in aiding the Americans stranded in London in 1914—that one should rely not on government but on civic-minded individuals “imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice in full measure.” He had been able to recruit a staff of 350 volunteers, including more than two dozen Rhodes scholars domiciled in England and “gentlemen of wide commercial experience … willing to devote their entire time, at their own expense.” In the course of the war, his aversion to the state rigidified. Semaphoring the attitude he would take during the Great Depression, Hoover called a plan to aid Belgians rendered jobless by the German invasion “socially wrongly founded.” He told Belgium’s finance minister, “I cannot see anything but social harm in giving workmen payment as a right for idleness.”
His celebration of voluntarism badly distorted the historical record. Even at the start, Hoover had bluntly told Ambassador Page that private contributions, “no matter how great,” would be of such “uncertain quantity” that it was “absolutely necessary” for the Allied governments to bankroll the venture liberally. Early in November 1914, he had notified Allied ambassadors that “Government subvention” was essential, and, less than three weeks later, he had instructed Lord Percy that, since philanthropy could not be counted on, “we must obtain a regular governmental subsidy.” The CRB, Hoover pointed out in 1916, “is … almost wholly supported by Government funds … . I feel that if the whole engine were placed simply on a governmental basis it would be actually safer than in the hands of a volunteer body.”
Nearly four out of every five dollars Hoover spent came out of government treasuries. Of the $12 million required each month to feed the Belgians, $10 million were provided by British and French
officials; by the beginning of 1917 they were the source of 90 percent of the CRB’s funds. In February 1917 Hoover asked Woodrow Wilson to obtain an appropriation from Congress for his organization. Two months later, the United States was at war, and, from that moment until the end of the CRB’s operation, the organization’s money came entirely from the U.S. government. Contrary to the impression Hoover fostered, charitable contributions from Americans constituted only 4.5 percent of the funds the CRB disbursed.
Whatever his misconceptions, Hoover had earned worldwide kudos as “the Almoner of Starving Belgium.” In June 1915 the American diplomat Hugh Gibson had written his mother: “I should like to see H.C.H. run for President. He has all the qualities required—rare common sense and judgment—wonderful executive ability—and high idealism of a practical sort. The only trouble is nobody ever heard of him.” No longer could that last sentence be said. Addressing his staff early in 1917, Ambassador Page remarked on the CRB: “There never was anything like it in the world before, and it is all one man and that is Hoover.” Woodrow Wilson came to the same judgment. Herbert Hoover, he told his future wife, was “a great international figure.” The president added, “Such men stir me deeply and make me in love with duty!”