Wilson. Whenever he thought he was nearing the fringes of his power, he warned Wilson that he could not cope with the problem he had been given without further powers. He then pointed out the consequences of inaction and advised as to the solution. Very often President Wilson took his advice without checking it with anyone else. He often wrote on the bottom of Hoover’s letters ‘Approved, Woodrow Wilson.’24 According to Henry L. Stimson, who had a brilliant career in American government in the 1930s and ’40s, ‘Hoover has the greatest capacity for assimilating and organizing material of any man I ever knew.’25
In all this, Hoover was personally disinterested; in all this he always saw clearly the interests of the unfortunate and downtrodden. In all this he was first a humanitarian, without ever ceasing to be gladly American; in fact, his feeling for the United States was founded partly on the ability of the United States to rise above its own preoccupations to succour the world.
Because of his supranational goals, he saved millions of people while other leaders – especially those at the Paris Peace Conference – had no idea what to do after the crash except to glue the wings back on. They believed they were practical, realistic men, but according to one brilliant British observer at the conference, A. J. Balfour, the chief Allied leaders were ‘three all-powerful, all-ignorant men sitting there and partitioning continents with only a child to take notes’.26 The ‘system’ they devised was as crude as a stone axe, truce pinned in place by the threat of slaughter. It lasted only as long as fear was stronger than resentment. Hoover saw the consequences of their decisions, he described them clearly, and he acted successfully on his views, within his own mandate. He could do so because he saw before anyone else that in those days, it was in the national interest to rise above national interest.
In 1923, Hoover received the thanks of three of the highest officials in Soviet Russia for his relief work. In a letter dated from the Kremlin, Moscow, July 10, 1923, L. Kamenev, Acting President of the Council of People’s Commissars, and N. Gorbunov and L. Fotieva, also members, wrote:
Unselfishly, the ARA [American Relief Administration] came to the aid of the people and organized on a broad scale the supply and distribution of food products and other articles of prime necessity.
Due to the enormous and entirely disinterested efforts of the ARA, millions of people of all ages were saved from death, and entire districts and even cities were saved from the horrible catastrophe which threatened them.
Now when the famine is over and the colossal work of the ARA comes to a close, the Soviet of People’s Commissars, in the name of the millions of people saved and in the name of all the working people of Soviet Russia and the Federated Republics, count it a duty to express before the whole world its deepest thanks to this organization, to its leader, Herbert Hoover, to its representative in Russia, Colonel Haskell, and to all its workers, and to declare that the people inhabiting the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics will never forget the help given them by the American people, through the ARA, seeing in it a pledge of the future friendship of the two nations.27
And indeed, that friendship continues today. In the 1990s, they were still in need of food, and we in the West joined with the Americans in sending it to them. Now, in 2007, we understand that Hoover in 1920 spoke the truth when others were dumb. In those days so long ago and so different from now, he was an accurate prophet. Yet he was simply carrying out one of the basic Christian precepts of Western society, to forgive your enemy, and do good to those who hurt you. One could say there was no prescience at all. The ideas of Hoover, as Gandhi said of his own ideas, are as old as the hills and so endure.
In 1919, Hoover was in Brussels to attend a conference to present to the Germans a formula he had devised for solving the blockade problem. A British Admiral, Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, was the head of the British delegation. He saw Hoover in the hotel lobby one day, and said brusquely, ‘Young man, I don’t see why you Americans want to feed these Germans.’ To which Hoover immediately replied, ‘Old man, I don’t see why you British want to starve women and children after they are licked.’28
From Brussels Hoover went on to Paris, where he helped President Wilson negotiate the details of the German peace treaty. He was still struggling against his nemesis, Winston Churchill, who energetically advocated continuation of the blockade in the House of Commons: ‘Germany is very near starvation,’ Hoover believed, ‘… [there is] the great danger of a collapse of the entire structure of German social and national life under the pressure of hunger and malnutrition. Now is therefore the time to settle.’29 Churchill was opposed not only by Hoover and Wilson, but even by his former ally, Francesco Nitti, Prime Minister of Italy, who said, ‘It will remain forever a terrible precedent in modern history that against all pledges, all precedents and all traditions, the representatives of Germany were never even heard; nothing was left to them but to sign a treaty at a moment when famine and exhaustion and threat of revolution made it impossible not to sign it …’30
Hoover protested to the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, who immediately criticized him for failing to send in the food. Hoover let him have it, in ‘a torrent that he ought to remember even in his grave,’ slamming the British and French officials who were obstructing his relief work. To the Prime Minister’s face, Hoover denounced the ‘grasping attitude of your trickster minions.’ The British navy was even preventing the German fishing boats from going out to catch fish. Hundreds of thousands of tons of food were lying on the docks at Rotterdam waiting to go up-river to Germany, while Germans starved.
As Hoover dryly noted after, Lloyd George was an overworked but a reasonable man.31 Lloyd George later quoted Hoover’s words in a speech of his own, demanding that the French in particular cease their obstructionism, otherwise they ‘would rank with Lenin and Trotsky among those who had spread bolshevism in Europe.’32
Somewhere between half a million and a million Germans starved after the war. These deaths were largely caused by the British blockade, or so the Germans believed. But they also had been deceived by their own Kaiser. Early in the planning for the war, the Kaiser’s Cabinet, foreseeing a food shortage, decided that to preserve the potato crop essential to feed the population, the harvest should be stored not in clamps* in the field as was the custom, but in the basements of schools and other public buildings across the nation, to reduce the losses caused by rain, frost and animals. So in 1914 and in 1915, the potatoes were stored in basements. The basements were too warm, and the potatoes rotted, spreading a disease known as phytophthora infestans (the terrible plant destroyer). The cure for this was known, copper sulphate, invented in Germany several decades before. But Germany’s supply of copper was scarcely enough for munitions. The Cabinet decided for the munitions. Uncontrolled, the disease infected seed potatoes, spreading devastation across the countryside. Civilians began to starve en masse, and soldiers home on leave in 1917 and 1918 saw their relatives dying. They began to doubt their leaders, and the war.
The doubt spread through the army like the terrible destroyer through the fields. In the summer of 1918, the collapse of the soldiers’ morale caused General Erich Ludendorff to advise the Kaiser to make peace.
The mass deaths from starvation became part of the culture of resentment fomented and exploited by Hitler, as the communists had done. Most Germans came to believe that the army had not been defeated at the front in 1918, as Hitler repeatedly said in his speeches during his campaigns for power from 1919 onwards. Largely victorious during the war, holding enormous tracts of enemy territory at the Armistice in 1918, the army, and corporal Hitler with it, felt betrayed by ‘plutocrats, Jews, profiteers and communists’ on the home front. It can scarcely be believed that the people who eventually voted for Hitler were indifferent to the memory of their own hunger and those who caused it, or to the deaths of millions of people, and those who starved them.
So, although Hoover was right to criticize the British for attempting
