Herbert Hoover: The Man and His Work

by Vernon L. Kellogg

I have given this account of the organization and status of the Commission in so much detail because it reveals its imposing official appearance which was of inestimable value to it in carrying on its running diplomatic difficulties all through the war. The official patronage of the three neutral governments, American, Spanish and Dutch, gave us great strength in facing the repeated assaults on our existence and the constant interference with our work by

German officials and officers. I have earlier used the phrase "satisfactory conclusion of diplomatic arrangements." There never was, in the whole history of the Commission, any satisfactory conclusion of such arrangements; there were sufficiently satisfactory conditions to enable the work to go on effectively but there was always serious diplomatic difficulty. Ministers Whitlock and Villalobar, our "protecting Ministers" in Brussels, had to bear much of the brunt of the difficulties, but the Commission itself grew to have almost the diplomatic standing of an independent nation, its chairman and the successive resident directors in Brussels acting constantly as unofficial but accepted intermediaries between the Allies and the Germans.

The "C. R. B." was organized. It had its imposing list of diplomatic personages. It had a chairman and secretary and treasurer and all the rest. But to feed the clamoring Belgians it had to have food. To have food it had to have money, much money, and with this money food in large quantity had to be obtained in a world already being ransacked by the purchasing agents of France and England

seeking the stocks that these countries knew would soon be necessary to meet the growing demands of their armies and civilians drawn from production into the great game of destruction. Once obtained, the food had to be transported overseas and through the mine-strewn Channel to Rotterdam, the nearest open port of Belgium, and thence by canals and railways into the starving country and its use there absolutely restricted to the civil population. Finally, the feeding of Belgium had to begin immediately and arrangements had to be made to keep it up indefinitely. The war was not to be a short one; that was already plain. It was up to Hoover to get busy, very busy.

The first officials of the C. R. B. and all the men who came into it later, agree on one thing. We relied confidently on our chairman to organize, to drive, to make the impossible things possible. We did our best to carry out what it was our task to do. If we had ideas and suggestions they were welcomed by him. If good they were adopted. But principally we worked as we were told for a man who worked harder than any of us, and who

planned most of the work for himself and all of us.

He had the vision. He saw from the first that the relief of Belgium would be a large job; it proved to be a gigantic one. He saw that all America would have to be behind us; indeed that the whole humanitarian world would have to back us up, not merely in funds but in moral support. For the military logic of the situation was only half with us; it was half against us. The British Admiralty, trying to blockade Germany completely, saw in the feeding of ten million Belgians and French in German-occupied territory a relief to the occupiers who would, by the accepted rules of the game, have to feed these people from their own food supplies. The fact that the Germans declared from the first that they never would do this and in every test proved that they would not, was hard to drive home to the Admiralty and to many amateur English strategists safely far from the sufferings of the hungering Belgians.

On the other hand other influential governmental officials, notably the Prime Minister

and the heads of the Foreign Office, saw in the Allied help for these people the only means to prevent them from saving their lives in the one other way possible to them, that is, by working for the Germans. Fathers of families, however patriotic, cannot see their wives and children starve to death when rescue is possible. And the Germans offered this rescue to them all the time. Never a day in all the four years when German placards offering food and money for their work did not stare in the faces the five hundred thousand idle skilled Belgian workmen and the other hundreds of thousands of unskilled ones shut up in the country.

Germany, also, had two opinions about Belgian relief. There were zu Reventlow and his great party of jingoes who cried from beginning to end: Kick out these American spies; make an end of this soft-heartedness. Here we have ten million Allied hostages in our hands. Let us say to England and France and the refugee Belgian cabinet at Le Havre: Your people may eat what they now have; it will last them a month or two; then they shall not have