Herbert Hoover: The Man and His Work

by Vernon L. Kellogg

results of food conservation as especially applied to wheat have already been referred to, but here we are especially concerned with the methods of governmental control as applied to this grain.

Hoover had learned in Belgium, and by his observation of the situation in England and Europe, that the poetic expression that bread is the staff of life becomes endowed with an intense practical significance to the food controllers and the peoples in bread-eating countries suffering from food-shortage. The loudest call of hungry people, their primary anxiety and the first care of the food-controlling authorities all converge on wheat. The dietetic régime for a semi-starving people is strong or weak, appeasing or dangerous, in proportion to the bread it contains. If the bread ration is normal or sufficient much repression can be used in the case of other foods. With bread there is life. The call of the Allies on America was for wheat above all else. More than one half of the normal dietary of France is composed of wheat bread. England normally uses less bread and more meat, but in the war time

she found she could lessen meat supply more safely than bread supply. It was for the possible lack of 75,000,000 bushels of wheat that Lord Rhondda saw the defeat of the Allies staring him in the face.

The government control of the American wheat as contrasted with its voluntary conservation, took many forms, touching it as grain, as flour, and as bread, as object of special stimulation for production, as prior commodity for transportation, and as export product. But curiously, that feature of its control for which the Food Administration has been most subject to ill-considered criticism is one for which the Food Administration has the least responsibility; this is the government-established "fair price" to the grower.

The Food Control Law as passed by Congress in August, 1917, contained a provision, guaranteeing a price of two dollars a bushel for the 1918 wheat crop. It was put in to stimulate production to insure the needed supply for the war period. And it was intended to benefit the farmer. On the basis of this the Government would presumably be able, by

proper regulation of the food handlers and commercial practices intermediate between the producer and consumer, both to assure the farmers of a good price and the consumer of not being driven to panic and revolt by an impossible cost of his daily bread. That such a regulation was absolutely and immediately necessary was obvious from the fact that at the very time the Food Administration was being organized unofficially along the lines of conservation propaganda in May, 1917, wheat was selling in Chicago at $3.25 a bushel and the consumer was paying for his bread on that basis, although the official estimate of the Department of Agriculture of the average price actually received by the farmer for his crop was but $1.44 a bushel.

Congress had provided a government guarantee only for the 1918 crop. At the time of the organization of the Food Administration the 1917 crop was on the point of coming to market. It seemed highly desirable for the sake of the farmers to insure their receipt of a fair price for this crop, also. Therefore the President appointed a committee composed of

representatives of leading farmers' and consumers' organizations together with a number of agricultural experts from the agricultural colleges of the country under the chairmanship of President H. H. Garfield of Williams College, later U. S. Fuel Administrator, to fix on a "fair price" for the 1917 crop. The Food Administrator, as publicly announced by President Wilson at the time, took "no part in the deliberations of the committee" nor "in any way intimated an opinion regarding that price."

The Committee in view of the fact that the price for 1918 wheat was already guaranteed at $2.00—it was later increased by the President to $2.26—and that any smaller price would undoubtedly lead to a considerable holding over of 1917 wheat for sale at the 1918 price and that a higher price would have been dangerously unfair to the consumers, especially the great body of working men, recommended a "fair price" of $2.20 a bushel for 1917 wheat. It was a price a little higher than that guaranteed by England to its farmers, about the same as that

adopted by Germany, and a little less than that guaranteed by France, so desperate that she was ready to pay anything for production, and was already forestalling the complaint of consumers by subsidizing the bread. The President adopted the price as recommended to him by the Committee, but there was no Congressional guarantee to back it up. So, with the fair price thus determined by an independent commission, the Food Administrator proceeded with plans for holding the price of wheat at this level and reflecting it to the farmer. The principal steps taken to effect this were: