One Summer: America, 1927

in Brussels, Hoover recoiled. ‘Don’t you ever let me see one of these again,’ he seethed. To those who knew him he seemed to have no feelings at all. One acquaintance noted how Hoover talked of his relief work in Europe without emotion. ‘Not once did he show the slightest feeling or convey to me a picture of the tragedies that went on,’ the friend related in wonder.
    Hoover was also extremely intolerant of anything that seemed likely to diminish his eminence. When a Saturday Evening Post article suggested – incorrectly – that the New York office of the Commission for Relief in Belgium was actually the most importantand productive part of the operation and that the real leader of the CRB was its American head, Lindon Bates, Hoover reacted with a certain wildness. He dashed off a long letter asserting that the article contained ‘46 absolute untruths and 36 half-truths’, and carefully addressed each contentious point in turn. He ordered the New York office to cease putting out press releases and to clear all announcements in advance through Hoover’s office in London, thus severely hampering its ability to generate donations.
    Belgium was just the beginning for Hoover. Solving crises became his role in life. When America joined the war, President Woodrow Wilson called Hoover home and asked him to become national food administrator, looking after every aspect of wartime American food production, to make sure that plenty was grown, every citizen amply fed, and profiteering rooted out. Hoover coined the slogan ‘Food Will Win the War’ and promoted it so effectively that millions were left with the impression that it was Hoover more than anyone else who secured America’s triumph. At war’s end, he was sent back to Europe to save millions from starvation again as head of the American Relief Administration. The challenge was bigger than ever. Hoover was responsible for the well-being of 400 million people. He oversaw relief operations in more than thirty countries. In Germany alone, the ARA ran 35,000 feeding centres, which collectively provided 300 million meals to people who would not otherwise have eaten.
    Austria was in an especially parlous state when Hoover arrived. ‘The peacemakers had done their best to make Austria a foodless nation,’ Hoover noted drily in his memoirs. (For a man who had no sense of humour in his personal life, his writing was often bitingly ironic.) Hoover estimated that Austria needed $100 million of food aid to hold out until the next harvest, but it couldn’t raise even a small portion of that. The United States was unable to assist because US law prohibited lending to enemy states, even after they had ceased being enemies. To get around this, Hoover arranged for America to lend $45 million to Britain, France and Italy, andfor them to lend the money on to Austria on the understanding that it be used to buy American food. This cleverly averted starvation while helping American farmers dispose of surplus crops, but caused understandable dismay among the three allied nations when Congress subsequently insisted that they repay the loan after Austria defaulted. The allies pointed out that they had only borrowed the money in a technical sense and hadn’t benefited from the arrangement, whereas American farmers had been enriched by $45 million. Congress, unmoved, insisted on payment. Such actions fed America’s prosperity, but did nothing to enhance its popularity or prestige abroad.
    None of this rebounded on Hoover, who seemed to enjoy a permanent immunity from blame. In fact, closer investigation shows that Hoover was not as heroic and noble as most of his contemporaries thought him. An investigative reporter named John Hamill, in a book called The Strange Career of Mr Hoover Under Two Flags , claimed that Hoover profited personally, and substantially, from the Belgian food relief programme. That charge was never proved – possibly, it must be said, because it was baseless – but another, even graver charge was true. During the war as part of his business operations Hoover illegally bought chemicals from Germany. This was an exceedingly grave offence in wartime. Remarkably, he did so not because the chemicals were unavailable in Britain, but simply because the German ones were cheaper. He saw no moral inconsistency in supporting the German economy even as Germany was trying to kill the sons and brothers of the people he worked and lived with. It is extraordinary to