Herbert Hoover: The Man and His Work

by Vernon L. Kellogg

Each time he came to Brussels all of us came in from the provinces and occupied France and gathered about him while he told us the news of the outside world, and how things were going in the New York and London offices. And

then he would talk to us as a brother in the fraternity and exhort us to forget our difficulties and our irritations and play the game well and honestly for the sake of humanity and the honor of America. After the group talks he would listen to the personal troubles, and advise and help each man in his turn. People sometimes ask me why Hoover has such a strong personal hold on all his helpers. The men of the C. R. B. know why.

The Belgian relief and the American food administration and the later and still continuing American relief of Eastern Europe have been called, sometimes, in an apparently critical attitude, "one man" organizations. If by that is meant that there was one man in each of them who was looked up to with limitless admiration, relied on with absolute confidence, and served with entire devotion by all the other men in them, the attribution is correct. No man in any of these organizations—and Hoover gathered about him the best he could get—but recognized him as the natural leader. He was the "one man," not by virtue of any official or artificial rank but by sheer personal

superiority in both constructive administrative capacity and effective practical action.

Whenever Hoover came, he tried to keep his presence unknown except to us and Minister Whitlock and the heads of the Belgian organization and the German Government with whom he had to deal. He would not go, if he could help it, to the soup lines and children's canteens. Like many another man of great strength, he is a man of great sensitiveness. He cannot see suffering without suffering himself. And he dislikes thanks. The Belgians were often puzzled, sometimes hurt, by his avoidance of their heart-felt expression of gratitude. Mr. Whitlock was always there and had to be always accessible. So they could thank him and thank America through him. But they rarely had opportunity to thank Hoover.

I remember, though, how their ingenuity baffled him once. He had slipped in quietly, as usual, at dusk one evening by our courier automobile from the Dutch border. But someone passed the word around that night. And all the next day, and for the remaining few

days of his stay there went on a silent greeting and thanking of the Commission's chief by thousands and thousands of visiting cards and messages that drifted like snowflakes through the door of the Director's house; engraved cards with warm words of thanks from the nobility and wealthy of Brussels; plainer, printed ones from the middle class folk, and bits of writing paper with pen or pencil-scrawled sentences on them of gratitude and blessing from the "little people." My wife would heap the day's bringing on a table before him each evening and he would finger them over curiously—and try to smile.

When the Armistice had come the Belgian Government tried to thank him. He would accept no decorations. But once again Belgian ingenuity conquered. One day just after the cessation of the fighting he was visiting the King and Queen at La Panne in their simple cottage in that little bit of Belgium that the Germans never reached. After luncheon the members of the Cabinet appeared; they had come by motors from Le Havre. And before them all the King created a new order, without

ribbon or button or medal, and made Hoover its only member. He was simply but solemnly ordained "Citizen of the Belgian Nation, and Friend of the Belgian People."

I have spoken only of Belgium. But of the ten million in the occupied regions for whom Hoover waged his fight against starvation, two and a half million were in occupied France. Over in that territory things were harder both for natives and Americans than in Belgium. Under the rigorous control of a brutal and suspicious operating army both French and Americans worked under the most difficult conditions that could be imposed and yet allow the relief to go on at all.