Hoover found diplomacy his most frustrating job. With no diplomatic standing and representing no nation, he dealt directly with kings, prime ministers, foreign ministers, generals, and admirals, arguing how the undertaking was in the self-interest of both sides, who had diametrically opposing war aims. “Very soberly and sincerely I believe no one else could have done what he has done for Belgium,” journalist Edward Eyre Hunt wrote. “I believe no one else could have dealt, as he has done, as a private citizen, without title and without pretensions, with Kitchener, Lloyd George, the Kaiser, von Bethmann-Hollweg, von Bissing, Briand, Poincaré, and King Albert.”19 Initially, both Germany and Britain balked at the idea of feeding Belgium by carving a passage through their lines, considering Hoover at worst a spy for the other side and at best a half-baked idiot or a naïve do-gooder. The Germans argued that they could not abstain from torpedoing relief ships, lest they contain contraband. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty for Britain until forced to resign in disgrace after Gallipoli, was the most obstinate of the Britons. Declaring Hoover a spy, Churchill had foreign minister Sir Edward Grey investigate him. Grey found the charges groundless and, after long hearings, praised Hoover for his work. Nonetheless, Churchill, who called Hoover “an S.O.B.,” denied the CRB chairman the right to penetrate the blockade with supply ships. Hoover appealed over his head to Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, who granted consent.20
When timing was crucial, Hoover took the direct route rather than the more circuitous course. “If a thing was really necessary we did it first and asked permission afterwards,” he said. Often, he bought food in advance of securing funds. His audacity stunned those who did not know him. The impudent Hoover once told a British cabinet minister that he must have clearance papers immediately to ship food to Belgium. The minister replied the request was impertinent and impossible. “There is no time in the first place, and if there was there are no good wagons to be spared by the railways, no dock hands, and no steamers.” Hoover quietly interjected, “I have managed to get all of these things.” The minister signed the papers, commenting, “There have been—there are even now—men in the Tower of London for less than you have done.”21
At other times, when he needed an issue resolved promptly, Hoover often went directly to the person at or near the top, rather than working his way up the diplomatic ladder. David Lloyd George, chancellor of the exchequer at the beginning of the war, initially found some of Hoover’s requests brazen. When he rejected a crucial request by the CRB chairman, Hoover interrupted the eminent Briton. “For the next fifteen minutes he spoke without a break,” Lloyd George said, “just about the clearest expository utterance I have ever heard on any subject. He used not a word too much nor yet a word too few. By the time he had finished, I had come to realize not only the importance of his contentions, but what was more to the point, the practicality of granting his request. So I did the only thing possible under the circumstances, told him that I had never understood the question before, thanked him for helping me to understand it, and saw to it that things were arranged as he wanted them.”22
Ambassador Page was so impressed by Hoover’s determination and persuasive powers that he wrote President Wilson a glowing report about the chairman’s work. “The surplus food being near exhaustion in the United States and Canada, he now has begun on Argentina where the crop is just coming in,” Page revealed. “I introduced him to the Argentine minister the other day and the minister said to me afterwards, ‘Somehow I feel like doing what the man asked me to do.’”23
Hoover’s job required heart and grit. He navigated among the governments of warring nations, maintaining his poise and equanimity, yet pushing with unrelenting determination to obtain concessions that proved vital. He preferred to deal man-to-man with each official, treating all with meticulous respect while holding his own ground. Regardless of rank, he dealt with each on a level of equality. He had the audacity to challenge tough-minded men with cold logic tempered by warm human empathy. He was patient and possessed the tenacity to wear them down.
As Hoover’s accomplishments grew, so did his reputation. His diplomatic skill and audacity induced Ambassador Page to recommend him to Wilson for a position in the State Department.24 The CRB chairman was so respected in Britain that a representative of the government asked him to become a British citizen and accept appointment as minister of munitions, promising that a title of nobility would follow. “I’ll do what I can for you with pleasure,” Hoover responded, “but I’ll be damned if I’ll give up my American citizenship, not on your life!”25
While neither the Germans nor the British trusted each other, they both trusted Herbert Hoover.26 “Think of a man who could go from one war front to the other in the midst of the greatest war and greatest suspicion in history without question of any sort,” Ray Lyman Wilbur said. “His own signature was his passport.”27 Hoover conferred with German generals at their secret headquarters at Charleville and never leaked the location. At Berlin, he met with Reich Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg and visited the foreign minister, the underminister of state, the minister of the interior, and the president of the Reichsbank. Hoover found the German military men straightlaced and dead serious. German generals were decisive and kept their word. On the other hand, they were almost inhumanly methodical and humorless. They were easier to deal with than British civilians, however, who were subject to the caprices of politics and sometimes wavered, though British public opinion supported the work of the CRB.28
Hoover’s most hazardous diplomatic crisis occurred when General Traugott von Sauberzweig, the German military governor of Brussels, informed Hoover peremptorily that his country had decided to withdraw permission for the CRB to operate in Belgium. Then, in an epiphany of personal anguish, the general confessed his despair over public criticism of him for ordering the execution of Edith Cavell, an English nurse in Belgium, on grounds that she had spied for the enemy. Sauberzweig exclaimed that he had been “painted as a monster all over the world because of that Cavell woman.” Hoover responded that he would be considered a much greater monster if he ordered the starvation of millions of innocent civilians. Shaken, the general reconsidered, then wrote out a permit allowing the CRB to continue its work.29
Throughout the war, some Britons, especially military leaders, argued that the Germans, as the occupying army, were responsible for feeding Belgium. Hoover countered that the Germans would never deprive their own army—the more food they gave to the Belgians, the less they would have for themselves, and the sooner their army would collapse. They would let the Belgians starve first. Hoover pointed out that the British had gone to war ostensibly because Germany had violated Belgian neutrality. “It would be a cynical ending if the civil population of Belgium had become extinct in the process of rescue,” he told Lord Grey.30 To permit Belgium to starve would be to shame Britain in the eyes of the United States.
Hoover took a similar approach when negotiating with German officials, pointing out the importance of the goodwill of the United States, the most powerful of neutral nations. America could tip the balance in an interminable deadlock, drawing upon its unlimited manpower and natural resources. Alienating America might tempt its government to join the Allies, the Germans feared. The Germans knew the Americans would not enter the war on their side, but they hoped to keep the United States neutral. A neutral America was, in effect, an ally of Germany. Although most American trade was with Britain, the Germans feared American manpower more because a war of attrition would demoralize their troops and wear them down. In the long run, Hoover’s humanitarian arguments carried less weight than American public opinion and the military might behind it.31
In March 1915, Hoover was compelled to assume responsibility for feeding a portion of northern France, whose 2.5 million urban, industrialized people lived within a region about the size of Massachusetts. The Germans had invaded and seized the territory upon their penetration of France in 1914. The invade
rs were halted and compelled to retreat by the Battle of the Marne, but they held a portion of the area until 1918. Feeding northern France represented a different type of problem from feeding Belgium. The region had been denuded of able-bodied men, who had joined the military, and the remnants consisted primarily of women and children. Further, unlike Belgium, which had been defeated, France remained an active and formidable combatant. The general framework of CRB administration was preserved. American volunteers collaborated with a native French committee to distribute the food at a local level. The chief CRB official, Vernon Kellogg, a Stanford professor fluent in German and learned in German history and culture, resided at the German headquarters at Charleville, where he was closely monitored by the military. Although there was initial suspicion on the part of soldiers, most of them eventually supported the work of the CRB and sometimes even helped to distribute food.32
Hoover’s mission of mercy was unpopular among a minority. In particular, Lindon W. Bates, the director of the New York office of the CRB, lost his son aboard a ship torpedoed by a German submarine as the young man was crossing the Atlantic to work as a CRB volunteer. Bates expressed his anguish by blaming Hoover, accusing him of violating the Logan Act of 1799, which prohibited negotiation with foreign powers by individual Americans lacking diplomatic credentials. Bates leaked confidential CRB documents and circulated derogatory rumors about Hoover to isolationist senators and congressmen. He found a sympathizer in Henry Cabot Lodge, the powerful Massachusetts senator who hated the president and saw Hoover as a minion of Wilson, though Hoover was, in fact, a fellow Republican. Lodge launched an investigation, and a federal court considered indicting Hoover. Fearing publicity from such an episode could wreck fund-raising for Belgium in America, Hoover rushed home to defend himself. He summoned a press conference at which he received promises of supportive articles and editorials. Ambassador Page and Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane lined up an appointment with President Wilson for the embattled Hoover. Wilson, who detested Lodge, promised his support and appointed a committee of prominent businessmen who helped lend credibility to the CRB’s effort. Hoover next called upon Theodore Roosevelt at Oyster Bay, where the men enjoyed a warm meeting. Roosevelt said that Lodge worried excessively over anything that might involve the U.S. abroad, and agreed he would restrain the senator. The gist of Hoover’s argument was that he was not negotiating diplomatic agreements equivalent to treaties that would bind the United States. He did not presume to represent the United States; his actions were no more limited by statute than were those of the Red Cross. He represented a private, charitable organization performing humanitarian work. Further, the State Department had been thoroughly informed of his work all along and approved of it. Lodge was soon isolated in a sea of Hoover supporters that included the president, the cabinet, the press, public opinion, and Theodore Roosevelt, the most popular Republican. Lodge continued to grouse, but he dropped the matter formally, and Bates retired from the CRB to rest his jangled nerves.33
After his initial meeting with Wilson in 1915, Hoover kept in touch with the president via Colonel Edward House, his diminutive confidant. When House traveled to Europe during the war he often dined with Hoover at the Red House and used the CRB chairman as a sounding board for ideas he and Wilson had conceived to negotiate an end to the war. During House’s 1915 visit, Hoover told House bluntly that he considered their scheme naïve, arguing that both sides were embittered, demanded nothing less than total victory, and desired world domination and territorial acquisitions. House returned to Europe the following year and informed Hoover that he and the president had hammered out a second peace plan. They would publicize specific peace objectives advocated by the United States, fair to all sides. America would align with the group that accepted its plan. Hoover reiterated that the second scheme was equally naïve. The blockade and bombing of civilians had driven home the war to civilians and the mutual enmity defied compromise. Hoover, although he devoutly desired peace, pointed out that the pledge lacked credibility with the Germans. The American press and the Wilson administration itself had clearly indicated their preference for an Allied victory, and the Germans would not fall for the ruse.34
Wilson nonetheless continued to employ Hoover as a source of information throughout the war, praising him for his “extraordinary work” in Belgium.35 Hoover’s performance also won the admiration of other observers. “Mr. Hoover is a perfect wonder,” said Senator Frederic C. Walcott, “one of the most remarkable men I have ever met,” terming him “a perfect genius for organization.” Another associate of Hoover’s concluded, “The situation in Belgium to-day is so extraordinary that if Hoover lost heart or died, in a few days the Belgians who are dependent on him would feel the pinch.”36
The CRB was on an endless quest to raise money. The commission’s charter held its members primarily responsible for debts beyond money raised, and initially the money fountain seemed to trickle rather than gush.37 Private charity provided an initial bridge to solvency. Fund-raising drives were initiated in every state in America, in all British colonies throughout the world, in most Latin American nations, and in Japan. The most generous private donations were given by the British Empire. The CRB drummed up backing through newspaper and magazine support, dispatched public speakers, and sponsored charity dinners. Lou Hoover, a more eloquent public speaker than her husband, played a major role in fund-raising in America.38
Hoover campaigned diligently to attract large contributions from old associates. A New York engineering society donated $500,000, originally earmarked for constructing a new headquarters, to the CRB instead. Hoover’s mining friends in Australia sent $70,000. In 1915, many private American citizens gave donations amounting to thousands of dollars, yet per capita they gave less than Canada, Australia, or New Zealand prior to U.S. entry into the war. The 220,000 Belgians living in England donated $250,000 monthly. In October 1916, Hoover obtained the assistance of Pope Benedict XV, who issued a statement supporting the raising of money for the starving children of Belgium and authorized the Catholic clergy in America to solicit funds for their aid. It was not so much the amount of money contributed by the world’s people as their moral support that enabled the private relief drive to succeed. Without the pressure of world opinion, the subsidies from the Allied governments would not have been forthcoming. In addition to money, railroads and steamship lines delivered cargoes at or near cost, and groups of farmers, communities, even entire states delivered donations in kind, which included clothing and medicine as well as food, sometimes by the boxcar.39
It soon became evident that the CRB could not provision Belgium and northern France indefinitely purely on private donations. Hoover appealed to Lloyd George, who was noncommittal. After discussing the funding crisis with Asquith and Lord Eustace Percy, however, Lloyd George overruled the militarists and granted a $4.8 million monthly subsidy. Hoover next obtained an appointment with the French premier, who was also noncommittal. That evening, Hoover chatted with Maurice Homberg, president of a leading French bank, who asked the American for an estimate of the sum needed to supply northern France. Hoover told him it would take around $8 million. The following morning he received two checks totaling $7 million, and thereafter, money arrived regularly. Though officially anonymous, because the French were subsidizing their people under German occupation, both sides clearly understood the source. When the needs accelerated, both the British and the French upped the ante. Through public subsidies, private gifts, and the sale of food to employed, solvent Belgians, Hoover patched together enough to tide the CRB over through each crisis, though with a slim margin of error. After America entered the war in 1918, the U.S. government took over the responsibility of financing the CRB and thereafter the organization operated on sound footing.40
As events in Europe worsened, the United States moved inexorably toward war. Hoover returned to New York at the end of 1916 and managed the CRB from his office there. Unfortunately, America’s grip on
peace was rooted in quicksand. In January 1917, Germany declared a war zone around Britain that included unrestricted submarine warfare. On February 3, President Wilson severed relations and expelled the German ambassador. Realizing it was only a matter of time before the United States joined the Allies, Germany launched a massive offensive against Paris before the weight of American power could prove decisive. Earlier, Hoover had cautioned against entry into the conflict, but he shed his inhibitions as CRB vessels were sunk. In early March, he conferred with Wilson at the White House. A week earlier a telegram from German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann had been intercepted and decoded. It promised Mexico territory in the American Southwest if the Mexicans joined a successful war against the United States. On March 15, a revolution in Russia overthrew Czar Nicholas II and briefly installed a democratic government, providing a temporary impression that the war pitted democracy against autocracy. For his part, Hoover expected that a more convulsive, extreme leftist revolution would follow. With war imminent, he returned to Europe to consummate contingency plans already in place. When America entered the war, he would continue to direct CRB operations at Rotterdam. From there, the responsibility would pass to the remaining major neutrals, the Spanish and the Dutch, who would direct the CRB within Belgium and in northern France. Before Hoover departed, Wilson assigned him two secret tasks. Hoover was to determine what resources would be required by Britain and France to win the war; second, he was to survey the war economies of the Allies to determine whether therein lay any lessons for America. On April 6, America declared war. His missions, overt and covert, virtually completed, Hoover headed back to his homeland.41
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