The primary basis of the commodity control, that is the control of the manufacture, wholesale selling, storage, and distribution of foodstuffs lay in the licensing provisions of the Food Control law. Any handler of foods, not an immediate producer or a retailer whose gross sales did not exceed $100,000 a year, could be forced to carry on his business under license, and authority was provided to issue regulations prescribing just, reasonable, non-discriminatory and fair storage charges, commissions, profits, and practices. This license control was the Food Administration's principal means of enforcing provisions against all wasteful, unjust, and unreasonable charges and procedures.

But it was far from easy to determine all at once either what trades and commodities should be taken under control or what kind and degree of control should be exercised. As Hoover said to the Senate Committee on Agriculture, using a metaphor springing from his engineering experience:

And, referring again to the same matter in an address before the United States Chamber of Commerce in September, 1917, he said:

Hoover believed in making haste slowly. But he had to move. The crisis of the situation was upon us, the dike was already leaking and measures were demanded which would stop the leak before it became a flood. In the exigency there was no time for the Food Administrator to devise and carefully test plans suggested by even the most favored theories of economists, if these plans offered remedies which would only be available in an indeterminate future. The scope of the war had disorganized the life and practices of the whole world, had overthrown all precedents, shattered all fundamental relations. And on nothing was its disturbing influence upon the normal more potent than in relation to food supply.

The means of control by license regulations adopted by the Food Administration were many and various. From the beginning the stocks of manufacturers and dealers were limited, so that a continuous and even distribution might prevent shortage and high prices; contracts for future delivery were limited again to secure an equal distribution and lessen the possibility of speculative profits from the rising market. Wasteful and expensive practices were forbidden. All these means were capable of rather definite application. But a greater difficulty came in the equally important and necessary work of limiting profits and securing a more direct distribution from manufacturer and large food handler to consumer.

The many regulations and the varying activities necessary to achieve these needs were mostly looked after by a Division of Distribution and certain allied divisions, devoting their attention to special groups of commodities. The principal division was under the immediate direction of Theodore Whitmarsh, one of the most vigorous and able of Hoover's volunteer helpers. Under Hoover's direction Whitmarsh and his associates at the head of the special commodity divisions worked out the manifold details of a regulatory system which was gradually extended to a most varied assortment of foodstuffs, trades and manufactures.

At the end of 1918 over 250,000 food-handling corporations, firms, and individuals were under Food Administration licenses. Meat, fish, poultry, eggs, butter, milk, potatoes, fresh and dried vegetables, and fruits, canned goods, the coarse grains and rice, vegetable oils, coffee, and such various commodities accessory to food-handling, as ice, ammonia (for ice-making), arsenic (for insecticides), jute bags, sisal, etc., were under direct control to greater or less extent, except when in the hands of the actual producers and the ultimate retailers. And by the indirect means of a wide publicity of "fair prices," and by an influence exerted through the wholesalers, even the retailers were brought into some degree of agreement or control in connection with the Food Administration effort to eliminate unfair dealing and food profiteering.

But more important than the control of any one of these many foods, or perhaps than of all of them together, and more discussed both in Food Administration days and since, was the control of wheat, and, as a part of it, of flour and bread. Some of the methods and results of food conservation as especially applied to wheat have already been referred to, but here we are especially concerned with the methods of governmental control as applied to this grain.

Hoover had learned in Belgium, and by his observation of the situation in England and Europe, that the poetic expression that bread is the staff of life becomes endowed with an intense practical significance to the food controllers and the peoples in bread-eating countries suffering from food-shortage. The loudest call of hungry people, their primary anxiety and the first care of the food-controlling authorities all converge on wheat. The dietetic régime for a semi-starving people is strong or weak, appeasing or dangerous, in proportion to the bread it contains. If the bread ration is normal or sufficient much repression can be used in the case of other foods. With bread there is life. The call of the Allies on America was for wheat above all else. More than one half of the normal dietary of France is composed of wheat bread. England normally uses less bread and more meat, but in the war time she found she could lessen meat supply more safely than bread supply. It was for the possible lack of 75,000,000 bushels of wheat that Lord Rhondda saw the defeat of the Allies staring him in the face.

The government control of the American wheat as contrasted with its voluntary conservation, took many forms, touching it as grain, as flour, and as bread, as object of special stimulation for production, as prior commodity for transportation, and as export product. But curiously, that feature of its control for which the Food Administration has been most subject to ill-considered criticism is one for which the Food Administration has the least responsibility; this is the government-established "fair price" to the grower.

The Food Control Law as passed by Congress in August, 1917, contained a provision, guaranteeing a price of two dollars a bushel for the 1918 wheat crop. It was put in to stimulate production to insure the needed supply for the war period. And it was intended to benefit the farmer. On the basis of this the Government would presumably be able, by proper regulation of the food handlers and commercial practices intermediate between the producer and consumer, both to assure the farmers of a good price and the consumer of not being driven to panic and revolt by an impossible cost of his daily bread. That such a regulation was absolutely and immediately necessary was obvious from the fact that at the very time the Food Administration was being organized unofficially along the lines of conservation propaganda in May, 1917, wheat was selling in Chicago at $3.25 a bushel and the consumer was paying for his bread on that basis, although the official estimate of the Department of Agriculture of the average price actually received by the farmer for his crop was but $1.44 a bushel.

Congress had provided a government guarantee only for the 1918 crop. At the time of the organization of the Food Administration the 1917 crop was on the point of coming to market. It seemed highly desirable for the sake of the farmers to insure their receipt of a fair price for this crop, also. Therefore the President appointed a committee composed of representatives of leading farmers' and consumers' organizations together with a number of agricultural experts from the agricultural colleges of the country under the chairmanship of President H. H. Garfield of Williams College, later U. S. Fuel Administrator, to fix on a "fair price" for the 1917 crop. The Food Administrator, as publicly announced by President Wilson at the time, took "no part in the deliberations of the committee" nor "in any way intimated an opinion regarding that price."

The Committee in view of the fact that the price for 1918 wheat was already guaranteed at $2.00—it was later increased by the President to $2.26—and that any smaller price would undoubtedly lead to a considerable holding over of 1917 wheat for sale at the 1918 price and that a higher price would have been dangerously unfair to the consumers, especially the great body of working men, recommended a "fair price" of $2.20 a bushel for 1917 wheat. It was a price a little higher than that guaranteed by England to its farmers, about the same as that adopted by Germany, and a little less than that guaranteed by France, so desperate that she was ready to pay anything for production, and was already forestalling the complaint of consumers by subsidizing the bread. The President adopted the price as recommended to him by the Committee, but there was no Congressional guarantee to back it up. So, with the fair price thus determined by an independent commission, the Food Administrator proceeded with plans for holding the price of wheat at this level and reflecting it to the farmer. The principal steps taken to effect this were:

First, the creation of a government corporation (the U. S. Grain Corporation) which, acting under the provision of the Food Control Law authorizing the government to buy and sell foodstuffs, could deal in wheat and exert its influence in the maintenance of the fair price by acting as a dominant commercial agency for the buying, selling, and distribution of wheat.

Second, the licensing of all store handlers and millers of wheat and controlling them both through voluntary agreements and license regulations.

Third, the prohibition of trading in futures.

As an illustration of the results quickly obtained by these measures we may note that while the farmer was getting in the year just before the war about 27 per cent of the cost of each loaf of bread for the wheat in it, to which the miller added about 6½ per cent and the middlemen and bakers the remaining 66½ per cent, and in 1915, after the war began, the respective proportions were 30 per cent, 11 per cent, and 59 per cent, in 1918, after the Food Administrator's control was in force, the farmer got 40 per cent, the miller 3 per cent, and the others 57 per cent. Or, as another illustration, while in 1917, when there was no food control the difference between the price of the farmers' wheat and the flour made from it was $11.00 per barrel this margin during Food Administration days was about $3.50.

An enumeration of the many and ingenious measures adopted by Hoover and Julius Barnes, the self-sacrificing and highly efficient head of the Grain Corporation, to acquit themselves and the Government with fairness to all interests of the tremendous responsibility and undertaking thus imposed on them would carry us beyond the limits of our space. These controllers of the American wheat had in their hands the fate of nations. The Allies had to be supplied; and the American farmers had to be stimulated to top effort; and the American consumers, which means the whole people, had to be kept uninjured in working efficiency and undismayed by possibility of food panic which would result from prohibitive prices, or actual shortage. If the war was to be won there simply had to be wheat enough for all, America and Allies alike, and it had to be available both as regards distribution and price.

The results of the American wheat control can be summed up in one word: success. The unwearying labors and undiminished devotion necessary to achieve this success in face of great difficulties and much criticism cannot be so readily summed up. But without them the history of the war would have been a different history. We should never forget this. In the records of the methods and results of the control lies the matter, all ready for the competent pen, for an epic of the wheat, the fit third part of the trilogy that Frank Norris began with "The Octopus" and "The Pit" and had, at the call of death, to leave unwritten.

Another phase of Hoover's food regulatory activity, concerning which there was, and still continues to be, much discussion, is that of his attempt to insure a stimulated production of hogs by a stabilized price which should well reward the grower and yet not lead to such an exorbitant cost to the consumer as would have been a dangerous hardship to our own people and an unfair hold-up of our associates in the war. Next to wheat, pork products were the American food supplies most necessary to the Allies.

Hogs are a corn product. The cost of production of hogs depends rather more upon the price of corn than upon any other factor. Investigation showed that owing to the violent fluctuations in demand for corn and hogs during the war, there had been five periods between the beginning of the war and September, 1917, in which it had been more profitable to sell corn than to feed it to swine at the price of hogs then prevailing, while there were only three periods when the reverse was true. In the preceding eight years there had been only two periods in which the direct sale of corn was more profitable than feeding it to swine.

The results of these periods of unprofitable feeding was to retard hog production, as the grower was discouraged from breeding during those periods. Hoover therefore decided that the maintenance of a proper relation between the price of corn and the price of hogs was the best method of assuring an increased production of pork. Furthermore, the violent fluctuations in the price of hogs tended to lift the price of the pork products to the consumer unduly, for at every new rise the stocks already in the warehouses over the whole country were marked up and the spread between the consumer and the producer thereby increased. A stabilization of the price of hogs was therefore as necessary for the protection of the consumer for the sake of a reduction of this spread as it was in the case of other foodstuffs.

In order that the swine growers should have an opportunity to participate in the determination of what method would be most fair and effective in establishing this stabilization and stimulating production, a committee of leading producers was asked to investigate the whole matter. This committee made a report late in October, 1917, which, after setting out the situation in detail and calling attention to the imperative need of a stimulation of production, declared that although hog production for the ten years ending 1916 had been maintained on a ratio of 11.66 bushels of corn to 100 pounds of hog, there had been but little profit to the grower on this basis and that it would be desirable for the sake of stimulation to pay at least the equivalent of 13.33 bushels of corn per hundred pounds of average hog and, if possible, as much as 14.33 pounds. On this latter ratio the committee believed that production could be increased fifteen per cent above the normal. The Committee added an expression of its belief that "the best emergency method of immediately stabilizing the market and preventing the premature marketing of light unfinished pigs and breeding stock would be to establish a minimum emergency price for good to select hogs of sixteen dollars a hundred pounds on the Chicago market."

As the Food Administrator had no power to fix prices by law, nor to guarantee a price for the producer backed by money in the U. S. Treasury as in the case of the wheat guarantee, the only means available to him to assure a stable minimum price for hogs was to come to an agreement with the principal buyers both of hogs and the prepared pork products that they would pay a price which would make this minimum possible. This was accomplished by Hoover, with the approval of the President, in the following way: The Allies agreed with the United States that their purchases of food supplies would be made through the Food Administration (as already explained earlier in this book). They then agreed with the Food Administrator that their orders for pork and pork products might be placed with the packers at prices which would enable the packers to buy the hogs offered them at not less than the minimum price agreed to between the Food Administrator and the producers. The orders for our Army and Navy, and for other large buyers, such as the Belgian Relief and Red Cross, were also placed through the Food Administration upon the same price basis. The packers then agreed with the Food Administration that if these orders were placed with them at the stated prices they would pay to the producer the minimum price announced by the Food Administration. The combined orders of these principal buyers called for from thirty to forty per cent of the pork and pork products produced in the United States, and the price paid by them would obviously determine the price for the whole amount.

With this power, derived solely by agreement, and not, as many of the producers seemed to understand, or rather, misunderstand, by governmental authority exercised, as in the case of wheat, to establish a government-backed guarantee, the Food Administrator announced on November 3, 1917, that:

The effect of Hoover's action to accomplish the imperatively needed stimulated production of hogs began to appear by the next July and from that time on was very marked, the production reaching an increase over normal of thirty percent. The price assured to the farmers by the Food Administration was maintained uniformly from November, 1917, to August, 1918. In October, however, a critical situation arose because, by reason of the growing peace talk, a sharp decline in the price of corn occurred and this decline spread fear among the growers that a similar reduction would take place in the price of hogs because of the fixed thirteen to one corn and hog ratio. A rapid marketing of hogs ensued which broke the price.

With the Armistice there was an immediate change of attitude on the part of the Allies who had been trying to build up reserves of pork products to use in times of possible increased difficulty of transportation. They now moved promptly toward a reduction of purchases. This made serious difficulties in maintaining the price to the producers during the months of December, January, and February. But Hoover's original assurance to the growers covered these months. It required most vigorous pressure on his part to compel the Allies to live up to their purchasing agreements. But he was finally successful in disposing of the material offered by the growers and thus was able to keep faith with them.

Some criticism of the Food Administration because of this maintenance of prices was voiced by consumers. But two important things must be remembered in this connection. In the first place the stabilized price was established primarily for the sake of stimulating an imperatively needed increased production. In the second place the assurance of the Food Administration given to the growers in November, 1917, that it would do what it could to maintain the price for hogs farrowed in the spring of 1918 covered sales extending to the spring of 1919. No one knew that an armistice would come in November, 1918. The only safe plan was to try to insure a food supply for a reasonably long time in advance. To have broken the agreement with the producers when the armistice came would have caused many of them great, even ruinous losses. Besides it would have been a plain breach of faith. Hoover would not do it.

In March, 1919, the War Trade Board was no longer willing to continue its export restrictions. It was only by virtue of these that the Food Administration had any control of the situation. They were canceled and from that time on the market was uncontrolled. But by then, the major hog run was disposed of, and the Food Administration had acquitted itself of its obligation to the producers.

This is a long and dry story of pigs and corn and difficulty. But I think it well to tell it, even though it may be dull, because it seems to be so little known. Hoover's situation vis à vis pigs and producers and packers in those strenuous days of threatened collapse of an all-important food supply seems to be too little understood. And this little understanding has resulted in too much unfair criticism. Now let us turn to another story with more humans than hogs in it.

Hoover had said, in May, 1917, within a few days after the President had told him that he wanted him to administer the food of America, as a war measure: "I conceive that the essence of all special war administration falls into two phases: first, centralized and single responsibility; second, delegation of this responsibility to decentralized administration."

Then let us recall how soon after that we were all assuming some share in this "decentralized administration." If we had not all become Federal Food Administrators of states, or county, or city, or rural sub-food administrators, or even members of food conservation committees or members of honor ration leagues, we were all at least, household food administrators. We were all administering, in a new light and with a new aim, the food we bought or cooked or ate. Hoover, the centralized and responsible head, had decentralized food administration right down to each one of us.

This decentralization began with an organization of all the states. The general responsibility for this work was vested in a particular division of the Food Administration, directed by John W. Hallowell, a young engineer and business man who revealed a conspicuous capacity in this important position. As early as June, inquiry was made of Governors of the states and of other public officials and prominent men concerning desirable men who would be willing to volunteer their services in directing the work of the Food Administration within their state, as their part in the war work of the nation. Early in July as many as had been so far selected came to Washington for a first conference with Hoover, at which plans were made for proceeding with the work within the states immediately upon the passage of the Food Control Act. By August 10 when the Food Administration was formally established, Federal Food Administrators were already selected for about half the states. The rest were soon chosen. Frequent meetings were held in Washington.

At each successive conference with Hoover of these state administrators, who were able men, experienced in business administration or public service, their enthusiasm, their confidence in his leadership, their response to his national ideals, their personal devotion to him, grew. Hoover's relation to them recalled to me, with leapings of the heart, those earlier days in Brussels when the eager young men of the C. R. B. used to come rushing in from the provinces to group themselves around him and derive fresh inspiration and determination from their contact with him to see the job through and to see it through cleanly and fearlessly.

These Federal Food Administrators listened to Hoover in Washington as we listened to him in Belgium. He stirred their hearts and satisfied their minds. And they went back to their difficult tasks, with fresh conviction and renewed strength. And their tasks were truly difficult, their voluntarily assumed share of the decentralized administration was a serious one. But they, too, decentralized parts of the administration; they set up the district and county and city administrations. And they and their many helpers were the ones who carried food administration into every market and grocery store and bakery and home. The whole country, all the people, became a part of the United States Food Administration.

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hoover had already taken the position that the day of hate was passed. With the end of mutual slaughter and destruction came immediately the time for help. It was like that pitiful period after the battle when the bloody field is taken over by the stretcher-bearers, the Red Cross nurses, and the tireless surgeons. So Hoover had already clearly in mind that the hand of charity was going to be extended to the sufferers in Hungary and Austria and Germany as well as to the people who were suffering because of the ravages of the armies of these nations. Dr. Alonzo Taylor and I, whom he had sent early in December to Switzerland to get into close touch with the situation in Eastern and Central Europe, listened, for him, in Berne to the pitiful pleas of the representatives of starving Vienna. By January Hoover's missions were installed and at work in Trieste, Belgrade, Vienna, Prague, Buda-Pest, and Warsaw. In February Dr. Taylor and I were reporting the German situation from Berlin.

The attitude of the people in these countries was one of pathetic dependence on American aid and confidence that it would be forthcoming. The name of Hoover was already known all over Europe because of his Belgian work, and the swiftly-spread news that he was in charge of the new relief work acted like magic in restoring hope to these despairing millions.

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

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

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

"Yes, we are the Americans."

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

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

Similarly from Trieste the food trains began moving north while there still remained countless details of arrangement to settle. I was in Vienna when the first train of American relief food came in from the South. The Italians were also attempting to send in some supplies, but so far all the trains which had started north had been blocked at some border point. The American train was in charge of two snappy doughboys, a corporal and a private. When it reached the point of blockade the corporal was told that he could go no farther. He asked why, but only got for answer a curt statement that trains were not moving just now. "But this one is," he replied, and called to his private: "Let me have my gun." With revolver in hand he instructed the engineer to pull out. And the train went on. When I asked him in Vienna if he had worried any at the border about the customs and military regulations of the governments concerned which he was disregarding, he answered with a cheerful smile: "Not a worry; Mr. Hoover's representative at Trieste told me to take the train through and it was up to me to take her, wasn't it? These wop kings and generals don't count with me. I'm working for Hoover."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But if the situation was most complex and hopeless in the south, it was far from simple or hopeful in the north. Poland, the smaller Baltic states and Finland were all in desperate plight and their new governments were all aghast at the magnitude of the problem before them. To add to the difficulties of general disorganization of peoples, lack of the necessities of life, and helplessness of governments, there was ever continuing war. Armistice meant something real on the West and Austro-Italian fronts, but it meant little to Eastern Europe. There was a score of very lively little wars going on at once over there: Poland alone was fighting with four different adversaries, one at each corner of her land.

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

Its agents were working continuously among their peoples; there were everywhere the sinister signs of the possibility of a swift removal of the frontiers of Bolshevism from their Eastern to their Western borders. In Paris the eminent statesmen and famous generals of the Peace Conference and the Supreme Council sat and debated. They sent out occasional ultimata ordering the cessation of fighting, the retirement from a far advanced frontier, and what not else. Inter-Allied Economic and Military Missions came and looked on and conferred and returned. But nobody stopped fighting, and the conferences settled nothing. The Allies were not in a position—this need be no secret now—to send adequate forces to enforce their ultimata. An Inter-Allied Military Mission of four generals of America, Great Britain, France and Italy started by special train from Cracow to Lemberg to convey personally an ultimatum to the Ruthenians and Poles ordering them to stop fighting. The train was shelled by the Ruthenians east of Przemsyl, and the generals came back. Eastern Europe expected the great powers to do something about this, but nothing happened, and the discount on ultimata became still more marked.

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

As already stated, Hoover's food ships had left America for Southern and Northern European ports before Hoover's men had even got into the countries to be fed. As a consequence, food deliveries closely followed food investigations. That counted with the people. One of Hoover's rules was that food could only go into regions where it could be safeguarded and controlled. That counted against Bolshevism. Shrewd Bela Kun was able to play a winning game in Hungary against the Peace Conference and Supreme Councils at Paris, but he was out-played by soft-voiced, square-jawed Captain "Tommy" Gregory, Hoover's general director for Southeast Europe, and it was this same California lawyer in khaki, turned food man, who, when the communist Kun had passed and the pendulum had swung as dangerously far in the other direction, allowing the audacious Hapsburg, Archduke Joseph, to slip into power, had done most to unseat him.

Gregory had been able to commandeer all the former military wires in the Austro-Hungarian countries for use in the relief work. So he was able to keep Hoover advised of all the news, not only promptly, but in good Americanese. His laconic but fully descriptive message to Paris announcing the Archduke's passing read: "August 24th, Archie went through the hoop at 8 P. M. today."

Relief in Eastern Europe was spelled by Hoover with a capital R and several additional letters. It really spelled Rehabilitation. It meant, in addition to sending in food, straightening out transportation, getting coal mines going, and the starting up of direct exchange of commodities among the unevenly supplied countries. There was some surplus wheat in the Banat, some surplus coal in Czecho-Slovakia, some extra locomotives in Vienna. So under the arbitrage of himself and his lieutenants there was set up a wholesale international bartering, a curious reversion to the primitive ways of early human society.

This exchange of needed goods by barter solved in some degree the impossible financial situation, gave the people an incentive to work, and helped reduce political inflammation. It was practical statesmanship meeting things as they were and not as they might more desirably be, but were not. I say again, and many men in the governments of Eastern Europe, and even in the councils in Paris[1] have said, that Hoover saved Eastern Europe from anarchy, and held active Bolshevism to its original frontiers. That meant saving Western Europe, too.

Then Hoover came back to America to be an American private citizen again. That is what he is today. He is still carrying on two great charities in Eastern Europe: the daily feeding of millions of under-nourished children, and the making possible, through his American Relief Warehouses, for anyone in America to help any relatives or friends anywhere in Eastern Europe by direct food gifts. But he is doing it as private citizen. The story of Hoover—as far as I can write it today—is that of an American who saw a particular kind of service he could render his country and Europe and humanity in a great crisis. He rendered it, and thus most truly helped make the world safe for Democracy and human ideals. It would only be fair to add to his Belgian citation the larger one of American Citizen of the World and Friend of All the People. But he would only be embarrassed if anyone attempted to do it now. We can safely leave the matter to History.