Crimes and Mercies. James Bacque
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moved by the anticipation of emotions that must come from a negative reply on Asquith’s part.4
Churchill was so annoyed at Hoover’s enterprise that he actually went to the Foreign Office to file charges of corruption against Hoover, alleging that he was spying for the Germans. The Foreign Minister Lord Grey referred the charges to a Judge of King’s bench; Hoover was not only exonerated but eulogized by the judge.5
For years Hoover struggled until finally he was granted the extraordinary privilege of addressing the British Cabinet on 18 April 1917.6 That Hoover should have been invited to address the Cabinet which directed the affairs of the British Empire was in itself astonishing. The war was at a critical stage, the Allies were losing, the British were bankrupt, and he was now asking them for money for the children. But the Allies had been saying that they were fighting the war for the very ideals Hoover advocated. With Hoover, the British were arguing about the whole point of the war as it had been advertised to their troops.
The results were astounding. According to David Lloyd George, a most eloquent man himself, Hoover’s talk was ‘virtually the clearest exposition he had ever heard on any subject.’ Hoover stood before the Cabinet table, one hand in his pocket, the other gesturing slightly as ‘he spoke flawlessly, with not a word too few or too many.’7 He said that the Allies were in the war to preserve the rights of small democracies such as Belgium. Victory would be empty if many Belgians starved to death because of the Allied blockade. He begged the ministers to show a magnanimity that ‘would outlast all the bitterness of this war.’ The Cabinet agreed, setting up an International Food Board in conjunction with the Canadians and Americans, and also inviting France and Italy to participate. Lloyd George had encouraged the Cabinet’s approval, saying, ‘I am convinced. You have my permission.’8
The reasons that Hoover advanced for saving the Belgians were known in those days as ‘sentimental’, because they were thought to originate in trivial emotions found mainly in the ‘weaker sex’. For many aggressive empire-builders like Churchill, to act on them was ‘ill-advised’. Hoover observed that Churchill believed that the ‘incidental starvation of women and children was justified if it contributed to the earlier ending of the war by victory.’9 The whole Belgian relief program was ‘indeed full of sentiment,’ as Hoover said.10 But the Cabinet turned the sentiment to cash for Hoover, pledging not only passage for the ships, but also the substantial sum of one million pounds per month in donations to the ‘Hoover Fund’.11 Secretly, the French government also put up money for Hoover’s relief ships.12
The triumph belonged not to Hoover alone: he had dozens of devoted helpers, who obeyed his instructions to the letter and cheerfully nicknamed him ‘Chief’. The Commission for Relief in Belgium was ‘a piratical state organized for benevolence’ according to one British official. The Commission had its own flag, a fleet of ships and its own communications system; it negotiated agreements like treaties with European states, it raised and spent huge sums of money, it sent emissaries across battle-lines with what amounted to a passport, and when the members thought they might be spied upon, they communicated in their own private language or code: American slang.13 Without realizing it, Hoover had more or less invented the idea of universal ‘human rights’. This idea, so familiar to us, was unknown round that Cabinet table,14 although an act ex gratia to save lives was not rejected unless it was tinged with bolshevism or impinged on some imperial interest.
That was one stage in the birth of a great saviour. Hoover was a wealthy man with a fascinating career when war broke out. But the Quaker faith of his Canadian mother and American father made him immediately sympathetic to the North Americans stranded in Europe by the outbreak of war in 1914. Hoover abandoned his profitable business to pour his money and organizing skills into arranging transportation, loans, visas, permits, communications and lodging for the many Americans – still then at peace – who wanted to get out of Europe. In those few weeks of 1914, a passion was born in Hoover that never failed him, or the starving millions who later turned to him when everyone else had failed.
Next came the Poles. They asked him for help to bring in food after the invasion by Germany in 1914. Hoover set up a committee of generous Americans, including many expert on the Polish situation. They collected money and goods, made arrangements for foreign credits and for foreign governments to permit the supplies to travel, and then they sent them.
Hoover proved himself so reliable, energetic, honest, discreet, well-organized, imaginative, common-sensible and well-intentioned during this and the Belgian relief campaigns, that by 1918 the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, was relying on him not only to organize food and relief but also for advice on the political consequences of relief. For instance, after the end of the First World War, millions of Russian prisoners were still in prison camps in Germany. Until the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ended the Russo-German war in 1918, the Russians had also held many German prisoners. Both sides treated the prisoners relatively well so long as this hostage system was in effect, but with the return of the German prisoners under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the system collapsed, and the Russians still imprisoned in Germany began to starve. After the Armistice ended the fighting in the west in November 1918, the Allies kept up their sea blockade which deprived the Germans both of food imported by sea and of the means to earn cash by overseas trade to buy food. Now German women and children began to starve, which was the purpose of the Western Allies, who wanted to keep up the pressure on the Germans to sign a peace treaty. It mattered not at all to the Western Allies that the Germans had signed the Armistice on the basis of Wilson’s ‘14 Points’ proposal, which included cessation of the blockade. The ‘14 Points’ were supposed to be the framework of the eventual peace treaty, so the Paris Peace Conference, which Hoover attended along with Wilson, should have merely worked out details which had already been agreed in principle with the Germans. But the blockade went on.
This was why the Russian prisoners began to starve, while the Allies wondered what to do about them. If they fed them, they were taking the pressure off the Germans. If the prisoners were allowed to return to Russia, they might be induced or pressed into the Red Army, which terrified the Western Allies. If the Allies did nothing, the men would die, long after the fighting had ended.
Hoover wrote to President Wilson in February 1919 to suggest a plan that might get round a legal restriction on American aid to the Russian prisoners, who were by then starving to death ‘wholesale, by neglect,’ as Hoover said.15 Because his relief funds were restricted by American law to charity, and because the subject of aid to the prisoners was already assigned to the Red Cross and the holding power (the nation imprisoning the soldiers) under international convention, it was not strictly legal for Hoover to send American aid. But Hoover pointed out to the President that the object of taking care of the prisoners ‘is to prevent them going back to Russia in the middle of the winter and joining in the Bolshevik army, and therefore is solely a military purpose.’ He wondered if it might be the duty of the American army to furnish supplies to save them from both starvation and bolshevism – in Hoover’s mind, the two were synonymous. The army had plenty of supplies, its communications were essential to their distribution, and no questions would be asked if the decision were taken. The food went and the lives were saved. This was the first in a long series of American mercies extended to the Soviets, despite their avowed purpose to overthrow American capitalism by violence.
Hoover did not help communists because he approved of their politics, but because it was wise. He was certain that communism was so stupid that it would ‘fall of its own weight’. In the meantime, he could demonstrate the vast superiority of capitalist democracy while preserving the lives of those who would soon see the light. Soon after the war he travelled around the USA raising money at lightning speed. He raised over one million dollars (about $17–22 million in 2007) in one evening from some of America’s richest men, who paid $1,000 per plate to hear him speak while they stared at the dinner of rice and potatoes that was all the children of Poland could expect for that whole day. He was mainly responsible for persuading the government to give Poland over $159,000,000 in grants and loans, which equals around two and a half to three billion dollars today. In 1920, the American Relief Administration (ARA), staffed largely by volunteers working for little or no pay, was feeding over one million Polish