not at all to the Western Allies that the Germans had signed the Armistice on the basis of Wilson’s ‘14 Points’ proposal, which included cessation of the blockade. The ‘14 Points’ were supposed to be the framework of the eventual peace treaty, so the Paris Peace Conference, which Hoover attended along with Wilson, should have merely worked out details which had already been agreed in principle with the Germans. But the blockade went on.
This was why the Russian prisoners began to starve, while the Allies wondered what to do about them. If they fed them, they were taking the pressure off the Germans. If the prisoners were allowed to return to Russia, they might be induced or pressed into the Red Army, which terrified the Western Allies. If the Allies did nothing, the men would die, long after the fighting had ended.
Hoover wrote to President Wilson in February 1919 to suggest a plan that might get round a legal restriction on American aid to the Russian prisoners, who were by then starving to death ‘wholesale, by neglect,’ as Hoover said.15 Because his relief funds were restricted by American law to charity, and because the subject of aid to the prisoners was already assigned to the Red Cross and the holding power (the nation imprisoning the soldiers) under international convention, it was not strictly legal for Hoover to send American aid. But Hoover pointed out to the President that the object of taking care of the prisoners ‘is to prevent them going back to Russia in the middle of the winter and joining in the Bolshevik army, and therefore is solely a military purpose.’ He wondered if it might be the duty of the American army to furnish supplies to save them from both starvation and bolshevism – in Hoover’s mind, the two were synonymous. The army had plenty of supplies, its communications were essential to their distribution, and no questions would be asked if the decision were taken. The food went and the lives were saved. This was the first in a long series of American mercies extended to the Soviets, despite their avowed purpose to overthrow American capitalism by violence.
Hoover did not help communists because he approved of their politics, but because it was wise. He was certain that communism was so stupid that it would ‘fall of its own weight’. In the meantime, he could demonstrate the vast superiority of capitalist democracy while preserving the lives of those who would soon see the light. Soon after the war he travelled around the USA raising money at lightning speed. He raised over one million dollars (about $17–22 million in 2007) in one evening from some of America’s richest men, who paid $1,000 per plate to hear him speak while they stared at the dinner of rice and potatoes that was all the children of Poland could expect for that whole day. He was mainly responsible for persuading the government to give Poland over $159,000,000 in grants and loans, which equals around two and a half to three billion dollars today. In 1920, the American Relief Administration (ARA), staffed largely by volunteers working for little or no pay, was feeding over one million Polish children every day at 7,650 stations. Hoover managed this with a minimum of government help, and great popular support. As he told US Secretary of War Robert Patterson in 1946, there was such popular approval for his measures in 1919 that there was no need to threaten the American people with the spectre of German food riots. In 1919 and in 1946, the popular reaction was the same: feed the starving. And Hoover was prepared to satisfy their desire.
When Hoover visited Poland in 1919, some 30,000 children paraded across a grassy sports field in Warsaw to cheer him. ‘They came with the very tin cups and pannikins from which they had had their special meal of the day … thanks to the charity of America organized and directed by Hoover, and they carried their little paper napkins, stamped with the flag of the United States, which they could wave over their heads … These thousands of restored children marched in happy never-ending files past the grandstand where sat the man who had saved them … They marched and marched and cheered and cheered … until suddenly an astonished rabbit leaped out of the grass and started down the track. And then five thousand of those children broke the ranks and dashed madly after him shouting and laughing …’16
Watching beside Hoover stood the head of the French Mission, General Henrys, a tough soldier who had survived the First World War, ‘with tears coursing down his face until finally, overcome, he left the stand. He said to Hoover in parting, “Il n’y a eu une revue d’honneur des soldats en toute histoire que je voudrais avoir plus que cette qu’est vous donnée aujourd’hui” [“There has never been a review of honour in all history which I would prefer for myself to that which has been given you today.”]’ Hoover himself wept for joy before that young crowd.17
In the work Hoover attacked so vigorously, and with such huge success, we see foreshadowed many of the problems that have beset us to this day. The vengeful Versailles peace terms, which he wished to make more reasonable, led directly to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler; the racial conflicts among Serbians, Bosnians and Croats that precipitated the First World War continued for decades; the cruelties and failures of Soviet Russia were only just ending; the communism that triumphed in China in 1949 continued to blight millions of lives; the allegations of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe foreshadowed Hitler and the fate of the European Jews, right down to reports of ‘a holocaust … in which six million human beings [Jews] are being whirled towards the grave by a cruel and relentless fate.’18 When he heard these reports of attacks on Jews in 1919, Hoover advised President Wilson to appoint a committee of investigation. Among the members recommended by Hoover was Henry C. Morgenthau, son of a US diplomat and philanthropist, and later Secretary of the Treasury, who helped prepare the report to Wilson ‘exposing falsity and creating a generally more wholesome atmosphere.’19
Hoover dealt with all these problems, foresaw the consequences and accurately predicted the outcomes. On the prime threat to Europe, bolshevism, he was particularly acute. In March 1919 he told the President, ‘… the Bolshevik has resorted to terror, bloodshed and murder to a degree long since abandoned even amongst reactionary tyrants. He has even to a greater degree relied upon criminal instinct to support his doctrines than even autocracy did. By enveloping into his doctrine the cry of the helpless and downtrodden, he has embraced a large degree of emotionalism and has thereby given an impulse to his propaganda comparable only to the impulse of large spiritual movements … I have no fear of their propaganda in the United States …’
Bolshevist propaganda did not move him because he knew that the system had inherent defects which would destroy it without any outside pressure. He told Wilson that, ‘Sooner or later the Bolshevik government will fall of its own weight or it will have swung sufficiently [to the] right to be absorbed in a properly representative government.’20 Hoover advocated ‘large financial and moral support of the Allied governments’ to help ‘establish a new government.’21 In every detail of his analysis of the Bolshevik problem and of its future, Hoover was absolutely correct; his prediction has come true to the letter. Only Stalinist cruelties such as the world had never imagined, the failure of Christian Russians to resist and the mistakes of the Europeans and North Americans kept the regime in power decades longer than Hoover anticipated.
He saw the world’s hope in his own country. He told Wilson that ‘It grows upon me daily that the United States is the one great moral reserve in the world today and that we cannot maintain that independence of action through which this reserve is to be maintained if we allow ourselves to be dragged into detailed European entanglements over a period of years. In my view, if the Allies can not be brought to adopt peace on the basis of the 14 Points, we should retire from Europe lock, stock and barrel, and we should lend to the whole world our economic and moral strength, or the world will swim in a sea of misery and disaster worse than the dark ages …’22
On Germany he was darkly prescient: ‘The blockade should be taken off … these people should be allowed to return to production not only to save themselves from starvation and misery but that there should be awakened in them some resolution for continued National life … the people are simply in a state of moral collapse … We have for the last month held that it is now too late to save the situation.’23 In the midst of terrific pressure to bring food to the starving, when another man might have acted unilaterally to save time, Hoover
