Herbert Hoover: The Man and His Work

by Vernon L. Kellogg

Hoover's experience in Belgium and Northern France had taught him how necessary was the special care of the children. All the war-ravaged countries have lost a material part of their present generation. In some of them the drainage of human life and strength approaches that of Germany after the Thirty Years War and of France after the Napoleonic wars. If they are not to suffer a racial deterioration the coming generation must be nursed to strength. The children, then, who are the immediately coming generation and the producers of the ones to follow, must be particularly cared for. That is what Hoover gave special attention to from the beginning of his relief work and it is what he is now still giving most of his time and energy to.

For the general re-provisioning of the peo

ples of Eastern and Central Europe all of the various countries supplied were called on to pay for the food at cost, plus transportation, to the extent of their possibilities. Gold, if they had it—all of Germany's supply was paid for in gold—paper money at current exchange, government promissory notes, and commodities which could be sold to other countries, made up the payments. The charity was in making loans, providing the food, getting ships and barges and trains and coal for its transportation, selling it at cost, and giving the service of several hundred active, intelligent, and sympathetic Americans, mostly young and khaki-clothed, and a lesser group of Allied officers, all devoted to getting the food where it was needed and seeing that it was fairly distributed.

It is impossible to depict the utter bewilderment and helplessness of the governments of the liberated nations of Eastern Europe at the beginning of the armistice period. Nor is it possible to explain adequately the enormous difficulties they faced in any attempt at organizing, controlling, and caring for their peoples.

With uncertain boundaries—for the demarcation of these they were waiting on a hardly less bewildered group of eminent gentlemen in Paris; with a financial and economic situation presenting such appalling features of demoralization that they could only be realized one at a time; with their people clamoring for the immediately necessary food, fuel and clothing, and demanding a swift realization of all the benefits that their new freedom was to bring them; and with an ever more menacing whistling wind of terror blowing over them from the East—with all this, how the responsible men of the governments which rapidly succeeded each other in these countries retained any persistent vestiges of sanity is beyond the comprehension of those of us who viewed the scene at close range.

For a single but sufficient illustration let us take the situation in the split apart fragments of the former great Austro-Hungarian Empire, which now constitute all or parts of German Austria, Hungary, Czecho-Slovakia, Jugo-Slavia and Roumania. For all these regions (except Roumania) Vienna had for years

been the center of political authority and chief economic control. In Vienna were many of the land-owners, most of the heads of the great industries, and the directors of the transportation system. It was the financial and market center, the hub of a vast, intricate, and delicate orb-web of economic organization. But the people and the goods of the various separated regions, except German Austria, the smallest, weakest, and most afflicted one of them all, were cut off from it and all were cut off from each other. The final political boundaries were not yet fixed, to be sure, but actual military frontiers were already established with all their limitations on inter-communication and their disregard of personal needs. Shut up within their frontiers these regions found themselves varyingly with or without money—if they had any it was of ever-decreasing purchasing power—with or without food, fuel, and raw materials for industry; and with lesser or larger numbers of locomotives and railway cars, mostly lesser. But of everything the distribution bore no calculated relation to the needs of the industry and commerce or even to the

actual necessities of the people for the preservation of health and life.

Vienna, itself, "die lustige schöne Stadt Wien" was, as it still is today and for long will be, the saddest great capital in Europe. Reduced from its position of being the governing, spending, and singing and dancing capital of an empire of fifty-five million people—it never was a producing capital—to be the capital of a small, helpless nation of scant seven million people concentrated in a region unable to meet even their needs of food and coal—Vienna represents the pathetic extreme of the cataclysmic results of War.

But if the situation was most complex and hopeless in the south, it was far from simple or hopeful in the north. Poland, the smaller Baltic states and Finland were all in desperate plight and their new governments were all aghast at the magnitude of the problem before them. To add to the difficulties of general disorganization of peoples, lack of the necessities of life, and helplessness of governments, there was ever continuing war. Armistice meant something real on the West and Austro-Ital