Herbert Hoover: The Man and His Work

by Vernon L. Kellogg

THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM; SCOPE AND METHODS

I have dropped the thread of my tale. Our narrative of the organization of the Commission for Relief in Belgium had brought us only to the time when the Commission was actually ready to work, and we have leaped to the very end of those bitter hard four years. We must make a fresh start.

First, then, as to money. And to understand about the money it is necessary to understand the two-phased character of the relief of Belgium. There was the phase of ravitaillement, the constant provisioning of the whole land; and the phase of secours, the special care of the destitute and the ill and the children.

The ring of steel did not immediately make beggars of all the Belgians enclosed within it. Many of them still had money. But, as I have already said, the Germans would not allow any

of this money to go out. It could buy only what was in Belgium. And as Belgium could produce only about half the food it needed to keep its people alive, and only one fourth of the particular kind of foodstuffs that were necessary for bread, and as it was arranged, by control of the mills and bakeries, that these bread-grains should be evenly distributed among all the people, it meant that even though banker this or baron that might have money to buy much more, he could really buy, with all his money, only one fourth as much bread as he needed. There had to be, in other words, a constant bringing in of enough wheat and flour to supply three fourths of the bread-needs of the whole country, and another large fraction of the necessary fats and milk and rice and beans and other staples. This was the ravitaillement.

But even with the food thus brought in there were many persons, and as the days and months and years passed they increased to very many, who had no money to buy this food. They were the destitute, the families of the hundreds of thousands of men thrown out of work by the

destruction of the factories and the cessation of all manufacturing and commerce. And there were the Government employees, the artists, the lace-making women and girls, and a whole series of special kinds of wage-earners, with all wages suddenly stopped. To all these the food had to be given without pay. This was the secours.

To obtain the food from America and Argentina and India and wherever else it could be found a constant supply of money in huge amounts was necessary. Hoover realized from the beginning that no income from charity alone could provide it. His first great problem was to assure the Commission of means for the general ravitaillement. He solved the problem but it took time. In the meanwhile the pressure for immediate relief was strong. He began to buy on the credit of a philanthropic organization which had so far no other assets than the private means of its chairman and his friends.

The money, as finally arranged for, came from government subventions about equally divided between England and France, in the

form of loans to the Belgian Government, put into the hands of the Commission. Later when the United States came into the war, this country made all the advances. Altogether nearly a billion dollars were spent by the C. R. B. for supplies and their transportation, at an overhead expense of a little more than one half of one per cent. This low overhead is a record in the annals of large philanthropic undertaking, and is a measure of the voluntary service of the organization and of its able management.