Herbert Hoover, ‘Napoleon of Mercy’-A Pionnering Effort in Global Philanthropy: George Nash See note please
http://online.wsj.com/articles/george-h-nash-herbert-hoover-napoleon-of-mercy-1413586667
A century ago, a pioneering effort in global philanthropy whose legacy lives on.
PLEASE ALSO READ ABOUT HOOVER’S EFFORTS TO RESCUE EUROPEAN JEWS….
EX-PRESIDENTS AND THE JEWS: CARTER VS. HOOVER by Rafael Medoff
EX-PRESIDENTS AND THE JEWS: CARTER VS. HOOVER by Rafael Medoff
The world has grown accustomed to international organizations devoted to saving civilians in the midst of armed strife and social upheaval. Groups including Doctors Without Borders, World Vision and CARE are well-known and world-renowned. Almost forgotten is the American whose achievements a century ago set an example for these and many other philanthropic efforts: Herbert Hoover, the 31st president of the United States.
In August 1914 Hoover was living in London. He was a highly successful mining engineer with business interests on every continent except Antarctica—but he was also restless, confiding to a friend that he wished to “get in the big game” of public life. He had his opportunity when, just days before his 40th birthday, Great Britain declared war on imperial Germany. “If my judgment of the situation is right,” Hoover wrote to a friend, “we are on the verge of seven years of considerable privation.”
In the early weeks of World War I, Hoover and other leading Americans in London organized emergency relief assistance for more than 100,000 American travelers fleeing the continent of Europe for England and safe passage home. His efficient leadership impressed the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, Walter Hines Page. Page, along with others, soon tapped him for a far greater mission of mercy.
ENLARGE At the outset of the war, an invading German army overran neutral Belgium, whose civilian population confronted a catastrophe. Mostly dependent on imported food, they were trapped between a hostile occupier and a British naval blockade of its German enemy. More than seven million Belgians faced starvation unless sustenance could somehow be obtained from the outside world.
With the approval of Amb. Page and the acquiescence of the warring British and German governments, Hoover established on Oct. 22, 1914, a neutral entity called the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) to purchase, transport and deliver food to the beleaguered Belgians. All of its initial volunteers were Americans.
As the clash of giant armies degenerated into a gruesome stalemate, Hoover’s ad hoc relief agency—in cooperation with a group of Belgians known as the Comité National de Secours et d’Alimentation—turned into an elaborate, voluntary enterprise without precedent in human history: an organized rescue of an entire nation from starvation.
During the next five years, the CRB delivered nearly five million metric tons of supplies for the relief of more than nine million civilians in Belgium and German-occupied northern France. Hoover, working without pay, became an international hero, the embodiment of a new force in global politics: American benevolence.
When the U.S. entered the war in April 1917, Hoover, a Republican, left day-to-day supervision of the CRB to others and joined the Democratic administration of President Woodrow Wilson as U.S. food administrator. At the war’s end in November 1918, Wilson dispatched him to Europe to take charge of food distribution to an exhausted continent. As head of the American Relief Administration (ARA), he orchestrated the disbursement of food to tens of millions of hungry people in more than 20 nations, including (between 1921 and 1923) famine-plagued Soviet Russia. In the process, he helped to quell the threat of Communist revolutions in central Europe.
Between 1914 and 1923, the CRB, the U.S. Food Administration, the ARA, and numerous other governments and private organizations delivered nearly 34 million metric tons of food to the nations afflicted by World War I and its consequences. In today’s currency, the value of this aid exceeded $60 billion.
Hoover’s far-flung operations involved much more than keeping a step ahead of famine. He arranged for teams of technical advisers to help the nascent governments of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Austria improve agriculture, reorganize transportation systems and reform currencies. Hoover aided in reopening the vital Danube River basin for peacetime commerce. In Silesia his agents strove to resolve labor disputes and increase the mining of coal.
Acclaimed by admirers as a “Master of Emergencies” and “Napoleon of Mercy,” in September 1919 Hoover came home to stay. With hundreds of fellow alumni of his aid programs, he created in the 1920s a network of private institutions to heal the wounds of the war. His entrance into the “big game” of public life would lead him to a cabinet position as secretary of commerce in the Warren Harding administration and ultimately to the presidency in 1929.
His humanitarian efforts did not end in the 1920s. During World War II, Hoover established nongovernmental relief agencies in the U.S. to assist the distressed civilian populations of Poland, Finland and other war-ravaged lands. Shortly after the war, he was a catalyst for the creation of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, or Unicef. One of his associates in the CRB during World War I, Maurice Pate, became Unicef’s first executive director. Pate later declared that it was Hoover who “originally had the idea” of setting up the fund “in the framework of the United Nations.”
Between 1959 and 1964, as Hoover neared 90, he published a history of the American-led “enterprises in compassion” that had dispensed food relief to millions in the era of the two world wars. He titled his four-volume work “An American Epic.” He worried that the public’s consciousness of this extraordinary saga was disappearing.
One hundred years after the outbreak of World War I, it seems at times that his fears have been realized. Few Americans today view Hoover as a “Master of Emergencies,” and instead associate him with the Great Depression that struck during his presidency. Yet the work of the Commission for Relief in Belgium and its successors was more than a minor episode in a long ago war. It was a pioneering effort in global philanthropy, with a vision and a legacy that affect us still.
Mr. Nash, a historian and presidential biographer, is author of several books about the life of Herbert Hoover.
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