The remedy offered by supply and demand was one which would only bring on another and worse illness. But Hoover realized and declared over and over again that even a necessary interference with the law of supply and demand was at best an evil. But it was less of an evil, under the circumstances, than not to interfere with it to some degree. These were not normal but abnormal times, and regulation by supply and demand is primarily a process for normal times. And it is a process that requires time to do its remedial work, and there was no time.
But Hoover did not and does not believe in price-fixing or immediate government control of commerce where they can be avoided. In
his statement before the Senate Committee on Agriculture in June, 1917, he said:
"The food administrations of Europe and the powers that they possess are of the nature of dictatorship, but happily ours is not their plight.... The tendency there has been for the government to take over the functions of the middleman, first with one commodity and then with another, until in the extreme case of Germany practically all food commodities are taken directly by the government from the producers and allotted by an iron-clad system of ticket distribution to the consumer. The whole of the great distributing agencies, and the financial system which revolved around them, have been suspended for the war or destroyed for good. That is the system which is dictatorship, and which, so far as I can see, this country need never approach.
"In distinction from this, our conception of the problem in the United States is that we should assemble the voluntary effort of the people, of the men who represent the great trades; that we should, in effect, undertake with their coöperation the regulation of the distributing machinery of the country in such a manner that we may restore its function as nearly as may
be to a pre-war basis, and thus eliminate, so far as may be, the evils and failures which have sprung up. And, at the same time, we propose to mobilize the spirit of self-denial and self-sacrifice in this country in order that we may reduce our national waste and our national expenditure."
The primary basis of the commodity control, that is the control of the manufacture, wholesale selling, storage, and distribution of foodstuffs lay in the licensing provisions of the Food Control law. Any handler of foods, not an immediate producer or a retailer whose gross sales did not exceed $100,000 a year, could be forced to carry on his business under license, and authority was provided to issue regulations prescribing just, reasonable, non-discriminatory and fair storage charges, commissions, profits, and practices. This license control was the Food Administration's principal means of enforcing provisions against all wasteful, unjust, and unreasonable charges and procedures.
But it was far from easy to determine all at once either what trades and commodities should
be taken under control or what kind and degree of control should be exercised. As Hoover said to the Senate Committee on Agriculture, using a metaphor springing from his engineering experience:
"It is impossible, in constructing routes and bridges through the forest of speculation and difficulty to describe in advance the route and detail of these roads and bridges which we must push forward from day to day into the unknown."