What America did

by Florence Finch Kelly

So successful was the initial work of the collegiate section of the Food Administration that its activities were soon enlarged to include the schools also and several text-books were prepared for use in both high and lower grades that would show to the pupils the relation of food to the war and the part they might play in the winning of the conflict and would inculcate the ideal of service. The National Educational Association asked especially for such a text-book to be used by children below the high school grade and by means of an advisory committee coöperated with the Food Administration in its educational program in the schools. So important and enthusiastic was the work of the schools and colleges that a state director of their activities was appointed in each state to correlate their efforts with the other undertakings of the state food administrator and so make team-work for the production and conservation of food more thorough and efficient.

The central offices of the Food Administration in Washington expanded amazingly as the country leaped to its support and asked for instruction, advice and guidance. It began, a month or more after our entrance into the war, in two rooms, with a Food Administrator, whose office was informal and tentative until Congress in August authorized the program of food control, and two or three assistants. By the first of January it filled a huge structure holding over a thousand employees and in the following summer it crowded both this and another building of equal size. It finally had in its service nearly 8,000 employees and under its coördinating hand were the purchase and control of food-stuffs whose value amounted to $300,000,000 per month. To its staff came men and women of expert knowledge from all over the country, many of them giving voluntary service,—university professors who were specialists in food and other economic subjects, journalists, magazine editors, office experts, scientists whose specialties would throw light upon one or another phase of the food problem.

The Food Administration dealt with prices in the food trades, which were prevented from sky-rocketing above the levels caused by war conditions, and with speculation and profiteering by means of a system of licenses applying to all persons engaged in the importation, manufacture, storage and distribution of certain staple foods and including retailers doing more than $100,000 yearly business. The purpose of the system was to stabilize prices by limiting those charged to a reasonable amount over expense, by preventing the storing of food in large quantities in the hope of speculative profits on a rising market, by keeping all food commodities moving from producer to consumer with as little delay from unnecessary business transactions as possible and by limiting as far as practicable dealings in contracts for future delivery. Every licensee was required to make reports of his dealings once a month and none was allowed to keep on hand or under control food-commodity supplies for more than a certain term in advance, set, with some exceptions, at sixty days. Retailers doing less than $100,000 business annually were exempt from the licensing system but were forbidden by the Food Control Act to hoard or waste food or to charge excessive prices. In the neighborhood of 100,000 licenses were taken out and of all these only an insignificant percentage were ever found guilty of breaking the provisions of the law. Equally rare were attempts to break or evade the law by retail dealers. Nearly all of even these small numbers were brought back to right feeling and right action merely by confronting the violater with proof of his wrong doing. As punishment, if punishment was necessary, his license was revoked or suspended, or there was forced sale of his hoardings, or his place of business was closed for a period, or he was required to refund excess profits or to make a contribution to some patriotic organization. But the whole hearted desire to aid and coöperate with the Food Administration in its efforts to solve the food problem and meet the food necessities of the time was so nearly universal that the few exceptions were noteworthy chiefly because they were so few.

Under war conditions it was inevitable that prices for all food commodities should rise far above their level in pre-war years. But the control of the situation which was kept by the Food Administration and the carefully organized and consolidated buying of our own and other governments, enormous beyond comparison with any market situation in all the history of the world, reduced prices below what they were when we entered the war and kept them down to a level much lower than they would otherwise have reached. When we had been in the war for a year the Food Administration estimated that during that time the price of food commodities had decreased twelve per cent to the consumer and increased eighteen per cent to the producer. For instance, the price of flour, which reached a maximum in 1917 of $16.50 per barrel at the mill-door, at the end of April, 1918, stood at $10.50. Without the stabilizing influence of the Food Administration it would have mounted in that time, in the opinion of experts, to $40 or $50 per barrel.

The plea to conserve food met with enthusiastic response. In the spring of 1918, when there was dire need of more wheat for export, whole towns and counties, in some of the states, pledged themselves to use no wheat until the new crop should be available. A conference of 500 managers of first-class hotels and restaurants voluntarily gave their pledge to one another and to the Food Administration to use no wheat flour in their kitchens until the next harvest was ready. Households innumerable throughout the land did the same thing.

We entered the war with only 20,000,000 bushels of wheat available for export. The need grew sharp in England and France and Italy and we sent them 141,000,000 bushels, having saved 121,000,000 bushels out of what we would ordinarily have eaten ourselves. Because the armies and the peoples across the ocean needed sugar, the request was sent forth that individual consumption of sugar should be limited to three and later to two pounds of sugar per month. Its consumption was voluntarily reduced by about one-third. In four months in the summer of 1918 we saved and sent abroad, out of our usual consumption, 500,000 tons of sugar. Increased production and conservation were responsible for 1,600,000,000 more pounds of pork products ready for export in the fall of 1918 than were available the previous year, while for the three summer months of 1918 the records showed an increase of 190,000,000 pounds of dressed beef.

An illuminating instance of the temper of the people in general toward conservation is afforded by the reports of railway dining cars for two months in the autumn of 1917, in which they saved out of their ordinary consumption 468,000 pounds of meat, 238,000 pounds of wheat flour and 35,000 pounds of sugar. During that time hotels and restaurants reported savings of 17,700,000 pounds of meat, 8,000,000 pounds of flour and 2,000,000 pounds of sugar. That there was a very general attempt to lessen waste of food in cooking and eating was shown by the fact that nearly all cities reported a considerable decrease, amounting in most of them to from ten to thirteen per cent, in the amount of garbage collected.

Unloading Wheat Upon a Lighter at a French Port

Because at the very beginning of our participation in the war we recognized the value of food, mobilized our food forces, enlisting the whole nation in voluntary service, and kept their operation under control for efficient war use, we were able to pour into Europe the food without which the Allied armies could not have continued their necessary effort and the populations behind them retained their health and morale. In the years before the war the United States sent an average of between 5,000,000 and 6,000,000 tons of food to Europe each year. In the crop year of 1918 we doubled that amount, sending 11,820,000 tons, and were prepared in the following year to send between 15,000,000 and 20,000,000 tons. In the midst of these bountiful harvests there were no food cards and the only rationing that was necessary was that prescribed by the individual conscience. But that conscience, with the universal enthusiasm for increasing production, enabled us to send to Europe in 1918 an increase over 1917 of $504,000,000 in the value of meat and dairy products and of $170,000,000 in breadstuffs. Our total contribution in 1918 to the food needs of Europe amounted approximately to a value of $2,000,000,000.