Crimes and Mercies (25 page)

After Truman called on him a second time, in early 1946, Hoover again agreed to help. He began his world food relief effort by studying the world food situation from documents available in Washington that showed there was considerably more food on hand than the government had previously thought: the reduction, according to Secretary of War Robert Patterson,
*
was only 9 per cent per capita from pre-war. An amount of 1 per cent per capita at world population levels of the time meant a difference of enough food to increase rations from starvation levels of around 1,200 cpd to survival levels of around 2,000 for approximately fifty million people.
⁶
Hoover confirmed this in his report in the spring of 1946 when he said after a world-wide survey that by the methods he suggested, ‘over 90 per cent of the gap between supply and minimum needs of the famine areas would be met.’
⁷
The Patterson papers show conclusively that in US Cabinet discussions during one severe crisis, in early 1946, the best informed Americans, including President Truman, judged there had been enough food ever since the end of the German war to feed everyone – including Germans. The problem that Patterson encountered over and over again was what he called the problem of ‘priority’. Not shortage.
⁸

In the spring of 1946, Hoover continued the policy that had succeeded so well during and after the First World War, appealing to the voluntary generosity of the Americans because he believed passionately in the United States of America. He was convinced that the public opinion in the country normally expressed good-will. The function of government was never to tell people what to think; it was to do co-operatively what the people could not do so well individually.
**
In the First World
War, Hoover raised money for Belgian relief by private subscription as well as by accepting the accumulated savings of the Belgian people. After the war, he raced around the US ‘selling goodness’ at $1,000-a-plate dinners for Polish relief. He was openly critical of John Kenneth Galbraith and President Franklin Roosevelt for imposing price controls by law during the Second World War, because he had led voluntary price controls in the First, which had kept inflation lower than during 1939–46. Public opinion and the public will were everything to him: they could scarcely be wrong. In any case where he needed help for a great public benefit, he appealed to the innate charity in Everyman. He was never disappointed by the common man, only by statesmen.

Hoover broadcast an appeal to the American people in March 1946, just before leaving for a round-the-world mission by air to visit the heads of thirty-eight states to discuss ways to feed the starving. Hoover outlined the situation to the Americans, and concluded with the words: ‘I can only appeal to your pity and your mercy. I know that the heart of the American people will respond with kindliness and … compassion. Will you not take to your table an invisible guest?’
⁹

Hoover’s summation of the situation in early 1946 was brief and to the point. ‘The net result of our computations was that approximately 313,000,000 people were confronted with the problem of providing overseas [i.e. imports] food for some 1,400,000,000 hungry people in “deficit” countries.’ The major surplus countries to make up the shortfall were Canada, the USA, Australia and Argentina. There was a gap in the foreseeable future between the need for 26,000,000 tons of cereals and apparent supplies of around 15,000,000 tons. If the statistics were correct, Hoover estimated that very soon some 800,000,000 people would starve. Most would die.

The Cabinet meeting on 29 March 1946 to discuss the food problem, with Truman, Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson and Patterson, decided that ‘the real trouble was one of price, it being more profitable for the farmers today to feed
their grain to animals than to sell it as grain. The farmers were holding wheat in an expectation of a price rise.’
¹⁰
Truman was lifting price controls so American grain farmers could get a freemarket price, which could only be afforded by the richer nations, who were not starving. Later in the year, the Americans also solved the rail-car problem that had been allowed to delay shipments abroad. Patterson was vehement: ‘I am impressed by the fact that … the percentage of cars now used for grain has fallen 15 per cent below last year. Such a condition seems to me to be one which it is indefensible for this government to tolerate in the face of the imminent hunger confronting the populations of our occupied areas …’
¹¹

In his lengthy correspondence on the matter, Patterson constantly refers to lack of priority, misallocation of rail cars and so on, not to any production shortage. As we have seen, he told Secretary of State George C. Marshall that the occupation would fail if starvation conditions continued. He insisted that the famine had been foreseen, but little done to prevent it.
¹²

The American price policy was a great problem for the Canadians, as Prime Minister King pointed out in a ‘most important’ Cabinet meeting in Ottawa in September 1946. ‘The US are allowing the price of wheat to be sold to England to go from $1.50 to $2. Were we to do the same … altogether the result would very shortly be the bursting of the price ceiling with rapid inflation of prices.’
¹³

In early 1946, the Canadians still had rationing and price controls, and were generously giving away wheat or selling it below market value to those who needed it most.
¹⁴
In February 1946, Prime Minister King was told by Norman Robertson, his senior foreign affairs policy adviser, that ‘Though the war ended nearly six months ago, our food industry and Canadian consumers are still on a wartime basis. Thus we rationed meat when others [i.e. the Americans] were dropping controls. We cut our rice consumption in half. We slashed sugar and butter rations last year and took another big slice off butter consumption a few days ago. We have always lived up to our commitments. We are the
only country in the world which has done so.’ This was done because ‘the people of Canada will wish to make new efforts to help meet a world shortage and will expect the government to give advice and direction as to the form those efforts could most effectively take’.
¹⁵

The Americans, who in autumn of 1945 had promised to ship 225 million tons of wheat abroad, had vastly exceeded their target by June 1946.
¹⁶
Patterson was especially pleased by this achievement. He wrote a letter to Truman on 8 July 1946 outlining what the United States had done to relieve suffering around the world. It is an extraordinary document, showing the man in charge of the greatest war machine that had ever existed delighting in how he had used his enormous power to feed the starving.

He told Harry Truman that ‘It gives me a great deal of personal satisfaction to be able to say to you that … by the middle of this month we will have loaded and shipped the surprising total of 417,000,000 bushels [of wheat] which is 17,000,000 more than were ever committed by this government. It is all the more remarkable because the requirement presented to the US representative on the Combined Food Board a year ago was 225,000,000 bushels for the year and remained at that figure until late Fall of 1945. Thanks are due to you for the vigorous way in which you supported the [War] Department and its efforts and to [others including] Herbert Hoover …’ He was especially grateful to Col. Monroe Johnson and Captain Granville Conway, ‘without whose able handling of the transportation problem our job could not have been done.’
¹⁷

By the end of 1946, Hoover was proclaiming triumph over ‘the greatest famine in world history’. He claimed that hundreds of millions of lives had been saved in the first world-wide famine relief effort in human history. Only Germany was left out. For the rest, it was an amazing creative achievement, following on the most destructive war that mankind had ever known. How did he do it?

Hoover travelled 35,000 miles and visited twenty-two countries in the spring of 1946, arranging for food collection and
distribution. He travelled by a slow propeller-driven plane. He was seventy-two years old. He co-ordinated supplies, improved transport, borrowed from people in early-crop areas to feed others who repaid the loan after their own crops came in; he appealed directly via radio and print to Americans and Canadians to reduce consumption of luxury foods, he helped to reduce spoilage, he improved pricing policy, he humbled himself to beg in countries that had surplusses not yet reported, he reduced reserve supplies, always co-ordinating with the President’s team. Together, Truman, Anderson, Mackenzie King, Robertson, Hoover and Patterson vastly reduced the gap in supplies.
¹⁸
By the end of the year, the gap between need and production had vanished, although, as the situation in Germany showed, production did not necessarily fill the evident need.

Hoover’s unshakable commitment was essential to success. For instance, he flew to Argentina for talks with the dictator Juan Perón, overriding the strong objections of the US State Department. But Hoover knew that Perón had over 1.6 million tons of surplus food. He went to Perón’s inaugural dinner because ‘I was resolved … to eat even Argentine dirt if I could get the 1,600,000 tons.’
¹⁹
He ate the dirt, and Europe got the food.

Prime Minister King invited Hoover to Ottawa to make a speech at the end of his world tour in June 1946. Hoover was generous in his praise of the Canadian people: ‘To Canada flows the gratitude of hundreds of millions of human beings who have been saved from starvation through the efforts of this great Commonwealth of the north.’ He described the crisis, and then explained how it had been met. ‘In these two months since those estimates, the world has developed even further additions to world supplies. The Latin American states have greatly reduced their import requirements during the crisis months.’ But he warned that the children were going to suffer terribly even if they did not die. ‘Millions of mothers are today watching their children wilt before their eyes.’ The proof was in annual mortality rates that in some cities were as high as 200%% per year. Children’s TB cases in Kiel in 1946 climbed to 70 per cent more
than in the previous years. Hoover called for a renewed effort to save the children.
²⁰

King wrote in his diary that Hoover told him in confidence that in certain areas, not including Germany, he ‘had found the reports about starvation much exaggerated. When he got down to discuss with technical officers the actual situation, he found it in many countries quite different from that which the politicians had been stating it was.’
²¹
This did not reduce the importance of the work, but it certainly made Hoover’s task easier, both because some people had actually more food than he had been told, and because the rich had more surplus.

The situation in Germany was in fact worse than press reports indicated. A year after the war had ended, the Canadian Military Mission in Berlin sent a telegram to External Affairs in Ottawa saying that they had spoken to the British Food and Agricultural Division that morning, who reported that no imports had been programmed beyond the month of May. The date of the telegram was 9 May 1946.

‘Bread and potatoes constitute nearly two-thirds of civilian ration,’ said the Canadian telegram. ‘British zone was consequently faced with the prospect of being reduced from slightly over 1,000 to about 450 calories [per day]. There was therefore justification for statement that famine was just around the corner.’
²²

Patterson prompted Truman to turn to Hoover once again at the end of 1946. After a talk with Hoover in December, Patterson noted for his files, ‘I said that … he had been of great value to us in obtaining sufficient food for the United States zone in Germany earlier in the year; that we had difficult problems relative to food at the present time, as to getting an adequate supply to maintain a 1,550 ration in Germany and Austria because of transportation troubles, as to the possibility of raising the 1,550 ration to 1,800, this being primarily a fiscal matter … I stated that we would be going to Congress next month for additional funds to support the army food programs in the occupied areas.’
²³

When Truman’s third call to Hoover came, in January 1947,
Hoover was ready. He was well aware that he might be loaded with much responsibility and little authority, so he refused Truman’s first offer by returning the President’s letter with amendments giving him the right to investigate the effects of American policy on Germany. This was the first time that such a mandate had been asked of the powerful Executive branch. Truman sent Hoover’s letter to the State Department, the same department that had authorized the illegal, secret and unilateral denunciation of the Geneva Convention,
²⁴
which was supposed to have the force of constitutional law in the US, as we have seen. The Department had also resisted Hoover’s snooping before.

If there was not absolute dread in the State Department at the thought of the energetic, truthful and compassionate Hoover poking into this sordid affair, they had more
sang froid
than it is reasonable to assume. One likely reason that Truman at first resisted Hoover’s request was that the State Department advised him to do so. Truman sent back to Hoover an equivocal version of the requested mandate. That was enough for Hoover: he would interpret the mandate as broadly as possible. Thus began a mission that extended a mercy while it investigated a crime. He brought back to the US thousands of pages of army and US Military Government documents relative to the effect of American policy on Germany, all of them still in the Hoover Institution archives in Stanford, California.
*

Hoover and travelling US diplomat Will Clayton met in January 1947 to discuss the disaster in the British–American zone of Germany, where industrial production had been forced down to 28 per cent of 1938 output. Food production in France and the UK had actually dropped in the preceding year, partly because of the fall in German industrial production which in turn was caused in part by the destruction of German factories and machines, and partly because of the cutbacks in fuel production.