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Herbert Hoover: The Man and His Work

by Vernon L. Kellogg · English · Gutenberg #29489 · 438,658 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Herbert Hoover: The Man and His Work

Author: Vernon L. Kellogg


        
Release date: July 22, 2009 [eBook #29489]

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by David Edwards, Jason Isbell and the Online
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HERBERT HOOVER: THE MAN AND HIS WORK ***




Produced by David Edwards, Jason Isbell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)





[Transcriber's Note:
The following inconsistent or typographical errors were corrected:

Page 27: to-day corrected to today
Page 63: type-writer corrected to typewriter
Page 67: Hooved corrected to Hoover
Page 85: Pekin corrected to Peking
Page 150: praccally corrected to practically
Page 169: frans corrected to francs
Page 331: progresively corrected to progressively
Page 364: necessary corrected to necessity
]

HERBERT HOOVER
THE MAN AND HIS WORK

BY
VERNON KELLOGG
AUTHOR OF "HEADQUARTERS NIGHTS," ETC.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK LONDON
1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

DEDICATED
TO MY COMPANIONS OF THE
C. R. B.



PREFACE


No man can have reached the position in the public eye, can have had
such influence in the councils of our own government and in the fate of
other governments, can have been so conspicuously effective in public
service as has Herbert Hoover, without exciting a wide public interest
in his personality, his fundamental attitude toward his great problems
and his methods of solving them. This American, who has had to live in
the whole world and yet has remained more truly and representatively
American than many of us who have never crossed an ocean or national
boundary line, is an object of absorbing interest today among the people
of his native land. He is hardly less interesting to millions in other
lands. He has carried the American point of view, the American manner,
the American qualities of heart and mind to the far corners of the
earth. He has no less revealed again, as other great Americans have done
before him, these American attributes to America itself.

Many questions are being asked about the life and experiences of this
man before he entered upon his outstanding public service and about the
details of his personal participation in the work of the great wartime
private and governmental organizations under his direction.

This book is the attempt of an observer, associate and friend to tell,
simply and straightforwardly, the personal story of the man and his work
up to the present.

V. K.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER PAGE

PREFACE vii

I. CHILDREN 1

II. THE CHILD AND BOY 10

III. THE UNIVERSITY 31

IV. THE YOUNG MINING ENGINEER 59

V. IN CHINA 80

VI. LONDON AND THE REST OF THE WORLD 102

VII. THE WAR: THE MAN AND HIS FIRST SERVICE 124

VIII. THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM; ORGANIZATION AND DIPLOMATIC
      DIFFICULTIES 140

IX. THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM; SCOPE AND METHODS 165

X. AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION; PRINCIPLES, CONSERVATION, CONTROL
      OF EXPORTS 199

XI. AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION; GENERAL REGULATION; CONTROL OF
      WHEAT AND PORK, ORGANIZATION IN THE STATES 225

XII. AMERICAN RELIEF ADMINISTRATION 256


      APPENDICES

        APPENDIX I 283

        APPENDIX II 291

        APPENDIX III 311

        APPENDIX IV 334





CHAPTER I

CHILDREN


It was a great day for the children of Warsaw. It was a great day for
their parents, too, and for all the people and for the Polish
Government. But it was especially the great day of the children. The man
whose name they all knew as well as their own, but whose face they had
never seen, and whose voice they had never heard, had come to Warsaw.
And they were all to see him and he was to see them.

He had not announced his coming, which was a strange and upsetting thing
for the government and military and city officials whose business it is
to arrange all the grand receptions and the brilliant parades for
visiting guests to whom the Government and all the people wish to do
honor. And there was no man in the world to whom the Poles could wish to
do more honor than to this uncrowned simple American citizen whose name
was for them the synonym of savior.

For what was their new freedom worth if they could not be alive to enjoy
it? And their being alive was to them all so plainly due to the heart
and brain and energy and achievement of this extraordinary American, who
sat always somewhere far away in Paris, and pulled the strings that
moved the diplomats and the money and the ships and the men who helped
him manage the details, and converted all of the activities of these men
and all of these things into food for Warsaw--and for all Poland. It was
food that the people of Warsaw and all Poland simply had to have to keep
alive, and it was food that they simply could not get for themselves.
They all knew that. The name of another great American spelled freedom
for them; the name Herbert Hoover spelled life to them.

So it was no wonder that the high officials of the Polish Government and
capital city were in a state of great excitement when the news suddenly
came that the man whom they had so often urged to come to Poland was
really moving swiftly on from Prague to Warsaw.

Ever since soon after Armistice Day he had sat in Paris, directing with
unremitting effort and absolute devotion the task of getting food to the
mouths of the hungry people of all the newly liberated but helpless
countries of Eastern Europe, and above all, to the children of these
countries, so that the coming generation, on whom the future of these
struggling peoples depended, should be kept alive and strong. And now he
was preparing to return to his own country and his own children to take
up again the course of his life as a simple American citizen at home.

But before going he wanted to see for himself, if only by the most
fleeting of glimpses, that the people of Poland and Bohemia and Servia
and all the rest were really being fed. And especially did he want to
see that the children were alive and strong.

When he came to Paris in November, 1918, at the request of the President
of the United States, to organize the relief of the newly liberated
peoples of Eastern Europe, terrible tales were brought to him of the
suffering and wholesale deaths of the children of these ravaged lands.
And when those of us who went to Poland for him in January, 1919, to
find out the exact condition and the actual food needs of the
twenty-five million freed people there, made our report to him, a single
unpremeditated sentence in this report seemed most to catch his eyes and
hold his attention. It did more: it wetted his eyes and led to a special
concentration of his efforts on behalf of the suffering children. This
sentence was: "We see very few children playing in the streets of
Warsaw." Why were they not playing? The answer was simple and
sufficient: The children of Warsaw were not strong enough to play in the
streets. They could not run; many could not walk; some could not even
stand up. Their weak little bodies were bones clothed with skin, but not
muscles. They simply could not play.

So in all the excitement of the few hours possible to the citizens of
Warsaw and the Government officials of Poland to make hurried
preparation to honor their guest and show him their gratitude, one thing
they decided to do, which was the best thing for the happiness of their
guest they could possibly have done. They decided to show him that the
children of Warsaw could now walk!

So seventy thousand boys and girls were summoned hastily from the
schools. They came with the very tin cups and pannikins from which they
had just had their special meal of the day, served at noon in all the
schools and special children's canteens, thanks to the charity of
America, as organized and directed by Hoover, and they carried their
little paper napkins, stamped with the flag of the United States, which
they could wave over their heads. And on an old race-track of Warsaw,
these thousands of restored children marched from mid-afternoon till
dark in happy, never-ending files past the grand stand where sat the man
who had saved them, surrounded by the heads of Government and the
notables of Warsaw.

They marched and marched and cheered and cheered, and waved their little
pans and cups and napkins. And all went by as decorously and in as
orderly a fashion as many thousands of happy cheering children could be
expected to, until suddenly from the grass an astonished rabbit leaped
out and started down the track. And then five thousand of these children
broke from the ranks and dashed madly after him, shouting and laughing.
And they caught him and brought him in triumph as a gift to their guest.
But they were astonished to see as they gave him their gift, that this
great strong man did just what you or I or any other human sort of human
being could not have helped doing under like circumstances. They saw him
cry. And they would not have understood, if he had tried to explain to
them that he cried because they had proved to him that they could run
and play. So he did not try. But the children of Warsaw had no need to
be sorry for him. For he cried because he was glad.

But the children of Warsaw were not the only children of Poland that
Hoover was interested in and wanted to see. His Polish family was a
large and scattered one; there were nearly a million children in it
altogether, and some of them were in Lodz and some in Cracow and others
in Brest-Litovsk and Bielostok and even in towns far out on the Eastern
frontier near the Polish-Bolshevist fighting lines. But of course he
could not visit all of them, and much less could he hope to visit all
the rest of his whole family in Eastern Europe. For while an especially
large part of it was in Poland, other parts were in Finland, Esthonia,
Latvia and Lithuania, and some of it was in Czecho-Slovakia and Austria,
and other parts were in Hungary, Roumania, and Jugo-Slavia. Altogether
this large and diverse family of Mr. Hoover's in Eastern Europe numbered
at least two and a half million hungry children. And it only asked for
his permission to be still larger. For at least a million more babies
and boys and girls thought they were unfairly excluded from it, because
they were sure that they were poor and weak and hungry enough to be
admitted, and being very hungry, and not being able to get enough food
any other way, was the test of admission to Mr. Hoover's family.

When the American Relief Administration, which was the organization
called into being under Hoover's direction in response to President
Wilson's appeal to Congress soon after the armistice, saw that its
general assistance to the new nations could probably be dispensed with
by the end of the summer of 1919, the director realized that some
special help for the children would still be needed. The task of seeing
that the underfed and weak children in all these countries of Eastern
Europe, extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea, received their
supplementary daily meals of specially fit and specially prepared food,
could not be suddenly dropped by the American workers. There could be no
confidence that the still unstable and struggling governments would be
able to carry it on successfully. But with the abolition of the blockade
and the incoming of the year's harvest, and with the growing possibility
of adequate financial help through government and bank loans, the
various new nations of Eastern Europe could be expected to arrange for
an adequate general supply of food for themselves without further
assistance from the American Relief Administration.

Just what the nature and methods of this assistance were, and how the
one hundred million dollars put into the hands of the Relief
Administration by Congress were made to serve as the basis for the
purchase and distribution to the hungry countries of over seven hundred
million dollars' worth of food, with the final return of almost all of
the original hundred million to the United States Government (if not in
actual cash, at least in the form of government obligations), will be
told in a later chapter. Also how it was arranged, without calling on
the United States Government for further advances, that the feeding of
the millions of hungry children of Eastern Europe could go on as it is
now actually going on every day under Hoover's direction, until the time
arrives, some time this summer, when it can be wholly taken over by the
new governments.

But just now I want to tell another story.




CHAPTER II

THE CHILD AND BOY


The account of Mr. Hoover's sympathetic interest in the child sufferers
from the Great War, and of his active and effective work on their
behalf, makes one wonder about his own childhood. He is not so old that
his childhood days could have been darkened by the one war which did
mean suffering to many American children, especially those of the South.
He was not born in the South, nor of parents actually afflicted by
poverty, and did not spend his early days in any of the comparatively
few places in America, such as the congested great city quarters and
industrial agglomerations of poor and ignorant foreign working-people,
where real child distress is common; so he certainly did not, as a
growing child, have his ears filled with tales of child suffering, or
with the actual crying of hungry children.

There was one outstanding fact, however, in his relations as a child to
the world and to the people most closely about him, which may have had
its influence in making him especially susceptible to the sight of child
misfortune. This is the fact that he, like many of his later wards in
Europe, was orphaned at an early age. But he was by no means a neglected
orphan. So I hardly think that his own personal experience as an orphan
is a sufficient explanation of the passionate interest in the special
fate of the children, which he displayed from the beginning of the war
to its end.

Nor can the explanation lie in the coldly reasoned conclusion that the
most valuable relief to a people so stricken by catastrophe that its
very existence as a human group is threatened, is to let whatever
mortality is unavoidable fall chiefly to the old and the adult infirm
for the sake of saving the next generation on which alone the future
existence of the group depends. This actual fact Hoover always clearly
saw; but the thing that those close to him saw quite as clearly was that
this alone accounted for but a small part of his intensive attention to
the children.

It is, then, neither any sad experience in his own life, nor any
sociologic or biologic understanding of the hard facts of human
existence and racial persistence, that does much to explain his
particular devotion to the health and comfort of the millions of
suffering children in Europe. The explanation lies simply, although
mysteriously, in his own personality. I say mysteriously, for, despite
all the wonderful new knowledge of heredity that we have gained since
the beginning of the twentieth century, the way by which any of us comes
to be just the sort of man he is is still mostly mystery. Herbert Hoover
is simply a kind of man who, when brought by circumstances face to face
with the distress of a people, is especially deeply touched by the
distress of the children, and is impelled by this to use all of his
intelligence and energy to relieve this distress. What we can know of
his inheritance and early environment may indeed reveal a little
something of why he is this kind of man. But it certainly will not
reveal the whole explanation.

Herbert Hoover, or, to give him for once his full name, Herbert Clark
Hoover, was born on August 10, 1874, in a small Quaker community of
Iowa which composed, at the time of his birth, most of the village of
West Branch in that state. That is, he usually says that he was born on
August 10, but sometimes he says that this important day was August 11.
He seems to slide his birthday back and forth to suit the convenience of
his family when they wish to celebrate it. He does this on the basis of
the fact that when, in the midst of the general family excitement in the
middle of the night of August 10-11, one of the busy Quaker aunts
present bethought herself, for the sake of getting things straight in
the family Bible, to say: "Oh, doctor, just how long ago was it that
baby was born?" she got the following answer, "Just as near an hour ago
as I can guess it." Thereupon she looked at the clock on the wall, and
the doctor looked at his watch, and both found it exactly one o'clock of
an important new morning!

Herbert's Quaker father, Jesse Clark Hoover, died in 1880, and his
Quaker mother, Hulda Minthorn, in 1884. The father had had the simple
education of a small Quaker college and was, at the time of Herbert's
birth, the "village blacksmith," to give him the convenient title used
by the town and country people about. But really he was of that
ambitious type of blacksmith, not uncommon in the Middle West, whose
shop not only does the repairing of the farm machines and household
appliances, but manufactures various homely metal things, and does a
little selling of agricultural implements on the side. Jesse Hoover's
mind was rather full of ideas about possible "improvements" on the
machines he repaired and sold. And his two sons, Herbert and Theodore,
and Herbert's two sons, Herbert, Jr., and Allan, are all rather given to
the same "inventiveness" about the home.

Hulda Randall Minthorn Hoover, Herbert's mother, was a woman of unusual
mental gifts. After her husband's death she gave much attention to
church work, and became a recognized "preacher" at Quaker meetings. In
this capacity she revealed so much power of expression and exhortation
that she was in much demand. Her death, in 1884, came from typhoid
fever. Those who knew her speak of her "personality." They say that she
had color and attractiveness, although she was unusually shy and
reserved. One can say exactly the same things of her son Herbert.

The immediate Hoover ancestry is Quaker. The more remote is Quaker mixed
with Dutch and French Huguenot. The Dutch name was spelled with an _e_
instead of the second _o_. All of Herbert's grandparents were Quakers,
and the Quaker records run back a long time. One of the family branches
runs into Canada, with the story of a migration there of a group of
refugees from the American colonies during the Revolution. These
emigrants came from prosperous farms in Pennsylvania, but while they
wanted to be free from England's control, they could not, as Quakers,
agree to fight for this freedom. So as the neighbors were inclined to be
a little "unpleasant" about this, and as Canada was just then offering
free farms to colonists, they packed up their movables and _trekked_
north.

Another Canadian branch, French Huguenot in origin, has traditions of
hurried removals from France into Holland before St. Bartholomew's
Night, and of later escapes into the same country. But all finally
decided that Europe anywhere was impossible, and hence they determined
on a wholesale emigration to Canada. Here by chance they settled down
side by side with the little Quaker group which had come from
Pennsylvania. Close association and intermarrying resulted in the
Quakerizing of the European Huguenots--their beliefs were essentially
similar, anyway--so in time all the descendants of this double Canadian
line were Quakers.

There were two other children in Jesse and Hulda Hoover's family: one a
boy, Theodore, three and a half years older than Herbert, and the other
a girl, Mary, who was very much younger. Theodore, like his younger
brother, became a mining engineer, and after a dozen years of
professional and business experience with mines all over the world--part
of the time in connection with mining interests directed by his
brother--is now the head of the graduate department of mining
engineering in Stanford University.

After the father's and mother's death, the three Hoover orphans came
under the kindly care of various Quaker aunts and uncles, and especially
at first of Grandmother Minthorn. This good grandmother took special
charge of little Mary, and pretty soon carried her with her out to
Oregon, where she had a son and daughter living. There had been a little
property left when the father died, enough to provide a very slender
income for each child. But if the dollars were few the kind relatives
were not, and the little Hoovers never suffered from hunger.

These relatives were not limited to Iowa, and the boy Herbert soon found
himself in a new and strange environment, surrounded by a different race
of human beings, whose red-brown skin and fantastic trappings greatly
excited his boyish wonder and imagination. For he was sent to live with
his Uncle Laban Miles, U. S. Government Indian Agent for the Osage tribe
in the Indian Territory, who was one of the many Quakers who had
dedicated their lives to the cause of the Indians at that time. Here
Herbert spent a happy six or eight months, playing with some little
cousins and learning to know the original Americans. For when other
pastimes palled there were always the strange and wonderful red people
to watch and wonder about.

But his life among the original Americans was interrupted by the
solicitous aunts and uncles, who, realizing that an abundance of
barbarians and a paucity of schools might not be the best of
surroundings for a child coming to its first years of understanding,
decided on bringing him back into a more civilized and Quakerish
environment; at least one less marked by tomahawks, bows and arrows, and
other tangible suggestions of a most un-Quakerish manner of life.

So he was sent back to Iowa, where he lived for two very happy years in
the home of Uncle Allan Hoover. To this uncle, and to his wife, Aunt
Millie, the impressionable boy became strongly attached. And there were
some energetic young cousins always on hand to play with. The older
brother Theodore, or Tad, was living at this time with another uncle, a
prosperous Iowa farmer, also much loved by both of the boys. He lived
near enough to permit frequent playings together of the two, and on
another farm, with Grandmother Minthorn, was still the baby sister Mary,
who was, however, too young to be much of a playmate for the brothers.
Indeed, the country all around bristled with the kindly uncles and aunts
and other relatives and playmates, all interested in making life
comfortable and happy for the little orphans.

There was also an especially attractive little black-eyed girl, Mildred
Brook, who lived on a near-by farm, who later went to the same Quaker
academy at Oskaloosa as Theodore, and is now Mrs. Theodore Hoover. In
those days she was known as "Mildred of the berry-patches," as all the
children for miles around associated her in their minds with the
luxuriant vines on the farm of her Uncle Bransome with whom she lived.
Her home was the children's Mecca in the berry season.

Herbert Hoover's memories of those days are filled with lively incidents
and boyish farm adventure. There was the young calf, mutual property of
himself and a cousin of like age, which was fitted out with a boy-made
harness and trained to work, eventually getting out of hand in a corn
field and dragging the single-shovel cultivator wildly across and along
rows of tender growing grain. Later the calf was restored to favor when
it was triumphantly attached to a boy-made sorghum mill, which actually
worked, and pressed out the sweet juice from the sorghum cane.

Winter had its special joys of skates and sled; spring came with
maple-sugaring, and summer with its long days filled with a thousand
enterprises. There were fish in the creek which you might catch if you
could sit still long enough, without too violent wiggling of the hook
when the float gave its first faint indications of a bite. It was two
miles to school, and most of the time the children had to walk. But that
was only good for them, and there was, of course, a good deal of
churchgoing and daily family prayers, but there were always convenient
laps for tired little heads--being in church was the necessary thing,
not being awake in church.

It was a joyous and wholesome two years, the kind that thousands of
Mississippi Valley farms have given to hundreds of thousands of American
little boys; the kind that gives them a good start in health and
happiness towards a sturdy and simple adolescent life. But the time had
come for young Herbert to learn new surroundings. For some reason,
apparently not clearly remembered now, it was decided by the consulting
uncles and aunts that young Herbert should go to Oregon, and join the
Hoover and Minthorn relatives there. Perhaps, even probably, it was
because of the presumably superior educational advantages of Oregon in
the existence of the Newberg Pacific Academy that led to the decision.
We may imagine that Herbert uttered no affirmative vote in the conclave
that decided on his departure from the Iowa farm, and when he once got
out to the superior place, he was less than ever in favor of the
proceeding. But the conscientious uncles and aunts were inexorable as
the Fates.

They meant to be the kindest of Fates, of course. They knew that they
knew so much better than the little boy what was best for him. And
probably they did. But this little pawn on the chessboard of life, moved
about with ever so excellent intention by firm and confident hands, must
have thought sometimes that he would have liked to have some little part
in deciding these moves. But if one starts as pawn, one must find the
way as pawn clear across the board to the king row before one can come
to the higher estate of the nobler pieces.

The actual going from Iowa to far-away Oregon was not so unbearable,
because of the excitement of the tremendous journey and the actual fun
of it. It was not made, to be sure, as Herbert would have preferred it,
in a long train of picturesque prairie schooners, drawn up in a circle
each night to repel attacking Indians, as his storybooks described all
transcontinental journeys; but in an overfull tourist-car on the
railroad. Herbert's most vivid memories of the week's journey are of the
wonderful lunch baskets and boxes filled with fried chicken, boiled
hams, roast meats, countless pies and layer-cakes, caraway-seed cookies,
and great red apples. Herbert Hoover had no food troubles in those
days!

Arrived in Oregon he found himself in the family of Uncle John Minthorn,
his mother's brother, a country doctor of Newberg, and the principal of
the superior educational institution. Uncle John did not live on a farm,
but on the edge of a small town, which was a mistake, according to
Herbert's way of looking at it. And the Pacific Academy of Newberg,
Oregon, could not be compared in interest with the district village
school of West Branch, Iowa.

After two or three years of life with Dr. John, young Herbert was handed
over to the care of a Grandfather Miles, for Dr. John decided to give up
country doctoring in order to go into the land business "down in Salem,"
the capital city. Therefore, as little Herbert's schooling in the
academy which he was attending all the time he was living with Dr. John,
could not be interrupted, he was placed in the home of this Grandfather
Miles on a farm just on the edge of the academy town.

Herbert's life with Grandfather Miles does not seem to have been a very
happy one, for the old gentleman did not believe in spoiling little
boys by too much kindness. There were many chores to do before and after
school, and little time for playing. And the chores just had to be done,
and not be forgotten as they sometimes were. Probably this strictness of
discipline was a good thing for the small boy. But, like other small
boys, he did not like it. So, also, like many other small boys, he
decided to run away.

Running away may not be the exclusive prerogative of young Americans,
but some way it is hard for me to picture European boys of fourteen
going off on their own. And yet perhaps they do. At any rate it is such
a favorite procedure with us that hardly one of us--I mean by us,
American males--has not had a try at it or connived at some neighbor's
son trying it. My own experience was only that of a conniver. A
schoolmate of thirteen, whose father believed in a more vigorous method
of correcting wayward sons than my father did, ran away from his house
to as far as our house. There my brother and I secreted him in a
clothes-closet for the nearly three hours of freedom that he enjoyed in
half-smothered state. Then the stern father came over, discovered him
and haled him away to proper discipline. I shall never forget the howls
of the captured fugitive, nor the triumphant and accusing remark to us,
shouted by the terrible capturer as he dragged off his victim: "Now ye
see what liars ye are!" For, of course, we had done our impotent best to
throw the hunter off the track. It was several days before I could lie
again without a violent trembling.

But Herbert Hoover ran away for keeps. He did not run away to ship
before the mast or to kill Indians. Nor did he run very far, only to
Portland and to Salem, which his geography had already taught him were
the principal city and capital, respectively, of the state of Oregon.
And he ran away with the full knowledge and even tolerance of his
relatives. But he went away to be independent, and to fit himself for
the special kind of college to which he had already decided to go. In
Salem he lived again with his Uncle John, helping in the real estate
business, but in Portland he lived entirely on his own.

That part of his reason for running away which was connected with
preparing for a college of his own choosing seems to have come about
because of a difference of opinion that had arisen between young Herbert
and his Quaker relatives with regard to the future course of his
education. They had taken it quite as a matter of course that from the
little Quaker academy in Newberg he would go to one of the reputable
Quaker colleges of the country. But Herbert had come to a different idea
about this matter of further education, and, as is characteristic of
him, this idea had led to a decision, and the decision was on the rapid
way to lead to action. In other words, Herbert had made up his mind that
he wanted to study science, and for that purpose wanted to fit himself
for and go to a modern scientific university. Also, he wanted to be,
just as soon as he possibly could, on an independent financial footing.
He probably did not express these wishes, in his boy's vocabulary, by
any such large mouthful of phrases; he probably said to himself, "I want
to earn my own living, and go to a university where I can learn
science."

Just what led him to the decision about the modern university and
science is not easy for the grown-up Herbert Hoover of today to tell.
But he is pretty sure that a large part of this determination came from
the casual visit of a man whom he had never seen before and has never
seen or heard of since, but who was an old friend of his father.

This man, on his way through the town to look at a mine he owned
somewhere in eastern Oregon, dropped off at Newberg so that he might see
the little son of his Iowa friend. He was a "mining man," and, from the
impression that Mr. Hoover still has of him, probably a mining engineer.
He stayed at the local hotel for two or three days, and saw what he
could of young Herbert between school-hours and chore-times. His
conversation was apparently mostly about the difference in the work and
achievements in the world of the man who had a profession and the one
who had not. It was illustrated, because the speaker was a miner, by
examples in the field of mining. The talk also was much about
engineering in general and about just what training it was necessary for
a boy to have in order to become a good engineer, with much emphasis
put on the part in this training which was to be got from a university.
He also explained the difference between a university and a small
academy-college.

And then the man went on to his mine. He invited the fascinated boy to
go with him for a little visit, but permission for this was not
obtained. The trails of this man and Herbert Hoover have never touched
again, and yet this stray mining engineer, whose name, even, we do not
know, almost certainly was more responsible than any other external
influence in determining Hoover's later education and adopted
profession.

In Portland Herbert got a job in a real estate office as useful
boy-of-all-work, including particularly the driving of prospective
purchasers about to see various alluring corner lots in town and
inviting farmsteads in the surrounding country. For his work he received
sufficient wages to pay for all of his very modest living. He had hoped
to go to the high school to prepare himself for college, but found that
he could not do this and earn his full wages at the same time. So as
the wages were a first necessity, he gave up his high-school plans and
devoted himself to study at nights and odd hours of the day. He
discovered a little back room in the real-estate office half filled with
old boxes and bags, of which no one else seemed to be aware, and this he
fitted up with a bed, a little table and a lamp, and made of it, with a
boy's enthusiasm--especially the enthusiasm of a boy who had known
Indians--a secret cave in which he lived in a mysterious and exciting
way. He slipped out to little restaurants and cheap boarding-places for
his meals.

He remembers once standing fascinated before a sign that read: "Table
d'hôte, 75 cents"; but after thinking twice of indulging in a single
great eating orgy, he decided that no human stomach, much less his own
small one, could possibly hold all the food that seventy-five cents
would pay for, and that therefore he could not get all of his money's
worth. So he went on to some fairer bargain.

There was a bank-vault just across the alley from his secret back room
in the real estate office, and many a night did young Herbert lie awake
in his cave hearing his imaginary bank-robbers mining their way into the
vault and escaping with much rich treasure. But mostly young Herbert
studied in that secret cave of his, and that he studied hard and to good
purpose is proved by the fact that in little more than two years he felt
himself ready to attempt the entrance examinations for college.




CHAPTER III

THE UNIVERSITY


For some time the newspapers had been full of accounts of the founding
and approaching opening of Stanford University at Palo Alto, California.
Soon after Leland Stanford, Jr., the only child of Senator and Mrs.
Leland Stanford, died in Rome in 1884, the Stanfords announced their
intention to found and endow with their great wealth a new university in
California. The romantic character of the founding and the picturesque
setting of the new university in the middle of a great ranch on the
shores of lower San Francisco Bay, with the foothills of the Santa Cruz
Mountains rising from its very campus, its generous provision for
students unable to meet the expenses of the older institutions of the
East, and the radical academic innovations and freedom of selection of
studies decided on by the Stanfords and David Starr Jordan, the eminent
scientific man selected to be the first president of the new
university--all this, together with the evident strong leaning of the
institution toward science, as revealed by the character of the
president, faculty and curriculum, combined to assure young Hoover that
this was the modern scientific university of his dream, just made to
order for him. It was exactly the place where he could become a mining
engineer like the wonderful man he had always remembered.

So when it was announced in the Portland papers that a professor from
Stanford would visit the city in the early summer of 1891, to hold
entrance examinations for the university, which was to open in the
autumn, Herbert decided to try the examinations. But when he came to
compare thoughtfully his store of knowledge with the published
requirements he would have to meet, he found that his self-preparation
had been rather one-sided. For in this preparation he had followed his
inclinations more than the prescribed schedules of college entrance
requirements. Why should one waste a lot of time, he had thought, and
be bored during the wasting, by studying grammar if one could already
talk intelligibly to people? And why should one not revel in complicated
problems of figures and geometrical designs that really took some hard
thinking to work out, if hard thinking was just what one liked to do?

So, much to his distress he found out, as the examinations went on, that
he was decidedly unprepared in some of the required lines such as
grammar, rhetoric, etc. And even in mathematics, his favorite study and
the one in which he made his best showing, he had not been able to
cover, in his limited time for study, the whole ground required for
college entrance. He seemed doomed to be refused the coveted certificate
of admission.

But the Fates worked for him. In the first place, Professor Swain, the
examining professor--now president of Swarthmore College--was the head
of Stanford's department of mathematics. In the second place, he was a
Quaker, and a man who liked the right sort of boys. And so a candidate
who was a little weak in the languages, but was strong in arithmetic
and geometry--and was a brave Quaker boy, besides--was not to be too
summarily turned down.

This kind and wise examiner has described to me, recently, how he was
first attracted to the young Quaker in the group of candidates before
him by his evident strength of will. "I observed," said President Swain,
"that he put his teeth together with great decision, and his whole face
and posture showed his determination to pass the examination at any
cost. He was evidently summoning every pound of energy he possessed to
answer correctly the questions before him. I was naturally interested in
him. On inquiry I learned that he had studied only two books of Plane
Geometry, and was trying to solve an original problem based on the
fourth book. While he was unable to do this, he did much better; for the
intelligence and superior will he revealed in the attempt convinced me
that such a boy needed only to be given a chance. So although he could
not pass all of the tests, I told him to come to my rooms at the hotel
after the examinations, as I would like to talk with him. He came
promptly at the appointed hour with a friend of his, the son of a banker
in Salem, Oregon. The two boys invited me and Mrs. Swain to stop at
Salem to visit them, which we did. I learned there that Herbert Hoover,
for that was the boy's name, was an industrious, thoughtful, ambitious
boy earning his own living while he studied."

All this was enough for the wise teacher. And an arrangement was
mutually agreed on between examiner and examined to the effect that if
young Hoover would work diligently for the rest of the summer on the
literary necessities of the situation, and come on early to Stanford for
a little special coaching, he might consider his probabilities for
admission to the university so high as to be reckoned a sure thing.

Well, it all turned out as desired by both candidate and examiner. And
Herbert Hoover was enrolled the following October among the first
students, the "pioneer class" of Stanford University, and was actually
the first Stanford student to inhabit the beautiful great new dormitory
called Encina Hall. It was not only his university of dreams come true,
but it was really to be the university of his graduation, the _alma
mater_ of a boy without any other mother. And it was the university of
which he was to become, in later successful years, a patron and trustee.
Stanford did much for Herbert Hoover; but so has he done much for
Stanford.

Any university means many things, for all their lives, to those who have
come timidly and wonderingly to its doors as boys and girls, and have
gone out on that final day of happy reward and tearful good-byes as men
and women eager to try themselves against the world outside of sheltered
school-rooms. And most of these things are to most persons who have
known them, things of pleasant and loving memory.

Stanford is like any other university in this relation to its graduates.
But there seems to be something unusually strong and yet at the same
time unusually intangible in the ties that bind its former students to
it. Perhaps the explanation lies as much in the special character of its
students, at least its pioneer ones, as in the special character of the
institution itself. The students who came to Stanford in its earlier
years came because it was different from other colleges, and because
they did this it is likely that they themselves were different from
other students. Like the restless, seeking pioneers that came over the
desert and mountains to the Pacific Coast to find a different life from
that of worn tradition and old ways, their descendants and the later
coming youth, who had mixed with them and been infected by their seeking
spirit, flocked to this institution that offered a different kind of
college atmosphere.

Its low-arcaded quadrangle of mission buildings of yellow stone and
heavy red tiles, nestling under high hills that run back to mountains,
surrounded by wide grain fields flecked with rounded live-oaks and tall
strange eucalyptus trees, and neighbored by great barns and well-kept
paddocks and exercising tracks in which sleek trotting horses of famous
Palo Alto breeding lounged or trained, was a strange new setting for
studying Greek and Latin and mathematics and science.

"_Die Luft der Freiheit weht_" is the Stanford motto; and there was
truly no more likely place for the winds of freedom to blow than over
and through this college on a California ranch. And its founders did
well to find for its first head a man than whom no other American
scholar had given clearer indications of being anxious to break with
clogging scholastic tradition.

The university itself, so tenderly conceived as a memorial to a boy lost
to his parents, and so generously established as an opportunity for
other boys, some of whom, like the hero of our story, might have had
their parents lost to them, is an almost unique example of a great
educational institution maintained by the fortune of a single family.
All of the Stanford millions are returned today to the country in which
they were accumulated in the form of a great endowment and of the
beautiful halls in which thousands of students have found a free
training for independent existence and right citizenship. These students
wear the Stanford cardinal as a red badge of obligation, not anarchy. No
other college in the country had more of its sons and daughters, in
proportion to their total number, devoting themselves to their country's
service during the Great War. If Herbert Hoover was the most
distinguished of the serving sons of Stanford he was not more eager and
devoted than many others.

But we leave Our Hero waiting too long upon the threshold of his dream
university come true. It had been agreed, you remember, between young
Hoover and his friendly examiner in Portland that the candidate for
admission should come to the Stanford Farm--which is the students' name
for the campus, and which literally described it in those beginning
days--before the time of the opening of the university to be coached in
the two or three studies in which his preparation was deficient.

So he came down from the North a month before the announced time for
opening, a lonesome boy without any friends at Stanford except the good
Quaker professor of mathematics, and with all of his savings from the
"real estate business" tucked away in an inside pocket. They amounted
in grand total to about two hundred dollars.

It was less simple getting to Stanford in those first days than it is
now. There was not even a beginning then of the beautiful thriving town
of Palo Alto that stands today with convenient railway station, just at
the entrance to the long palm-lined avenue that runs straight up to the
main university quadrangle. It was all grain field then, part of the
great Hopkins estate, where now the college town welcomes the annually
incoming Freshmen, and offers them convenient lodging places of all
grades of comfort and quick trams and motor busses to the university.

Young Hoover had to get off at Menlo Park, the station for a few great
country houses of California railway and bonanza kings, which offered no
welcome for small boys with a few saved dollars in their inside pockets.
He had to find a casual hackman to carry him and his bag and trunk to
the university a couple of miles away. But even there he found no place
yet ready to house him. So someone advised him to go to Adelanta Villa,
a mile or more back from the university, in the hills, where a number
of the early arrivals among the men of the new faculty were living. And
there he did go, and found a warm and simple welcome and hospitality. He
was soon ensconced in the old mansion and doing odd jobs about the
establishment to help pay for his board and lodging.

Between jobs he was feverishly at work on the finishing touches for his
final entrance tests, and probably quite as feverishly worrying about
them. He felt pretty safe on everything but the requirements in English
composition. As a matter of fact, when he came to that fearful test he
ignominiously failed in it, and, indeed, did not finally get the
required credit in it until nearly ready to graduate! But he was passed
in enough of the entrance requirements to be given Freshman standing,
"conditioned in English," a phrase not unfamiliar to other college
students. He had, however, added something to his score by a Hooverian
_tour de force_.

Noting that a credit was offered in physiology, about which he knew
nothing technically, he reasoned that as everyone, of course, knew
already a little something about his insides and how they worked, one
ought to be able to find out a little more from some textbook, and that
the two littles might make enough for passing purposes. Thereupon with
that prompt and positive reaction to stimulus which has been
conspicuously characteristic of him all his life, he got a book, read it
hard all of the day and night before the examination--and passed in
physiology!

The story of Herbert Hoover's college life reveals no startling features
to distinguish it from the college careers of other thousands of boys,
endowed with intelligence, energy, and ambition, but not with money, and
hence forced to earn their living as they went along. Nevertheless it
does reveal many of the main characteristics that we know so well today.
For he did things all through those four years in the same way that he
does them today, promptly, positively, and quietly. They were mostly
already done before it was generally recognized that he was doing them.

His two hundred dollars could not last long even in a college of no
tuition fees and an unusually simple student life. He had to earn his
way all the time, and he earned it by hard work, directed, however, by
good brains. Many a story, most interesting but, unfortunately, mostly
untrue, has been told of his various expedients to earn the money
necessary for his board and lodging, clothes, and books. Not a few of
these stress his expertness as waiter in student dining-rooms.
Undoubtedly he would have been an expert waiter if he had been a waiter
at all. But he was not. A famous San Francisco chef has often been
quoted in interesting detail as to the "hash-slinging" cleverness of the
future American food controller in the dining-room which this chef
managed--by the way, just _after_ Hoover left college--in the great
Stanford dormitory in those early days. But, though interesting, these
details are mythical. As are also the accounts of the care he took of
professorial gardens, although that would have been an excellent
substitute for the outdoor exercise and play which he found little time
for in college except in geological field excursions and camps. Nor was
he ever nurse to the professorial babies, which also has been often
placed to his credit by imaginative story-tellers.

For at the very beginning of his college life Herbert Hoover and another
distinguished son of Stanford, known to the early students as Rex Wilbur
and to the present ones as Prex Wilbur--for he is now the university's
president--put their heads together and decided that if they had any
brains at all in those heads they would make them count in this little
matter of earning their way through college. And both of them did.

In most of the things that Herbert Hoover did as a college boy to earn
his needed money he revealed an unusual faculty for "organizing" and
"administering" which is precisely a faculty that as a man he has
revealed to the world in highest degree. He organized, at some profit to
himself, the system of collecting and distributing the laundry of the
college boys which had been done casually and unsatisfactorily by
various San José and San Francisco establishments. He acted also as
impresario, at a modest commission, for various lecturers and
musicians, developing an arrangement for bringing visiting stars from
San Francisco to the near-by university.

More important in its permanent influence on student activities was his
work in reorganizing the system of conducting general student body
affairs, especially the financial side of these affairs. In his Senior
year he had been made treasurer of the student body and on taking office
found little treasure and much confusion. Each of the many student
activities had its own separate being, its own officers and own
funds--or debts--and a dangerous freedom from general student control.
Hoover worked out a system by which all control was vested in the
officers of the general student body, and all funds passed into and out
of a general treasury. The Hoover system of student affairs management
prevails, in its essential features, in the university today.

In later years, as trustee of the university, he was the initiating
figure in reorganizing the handling of all the institution's many
million dollars worth of properties, and so his organizing genius is
evidenced today at Stanford both in the management of student
activities and in the handling of the financial affairs of the whole
university.

But the work that he did in his student days that paid him best, because
it brought him more than money, was that which he did partly for, and
partly at the recommendation of his "major" professor, Dr. John Casper
Branner, a great geologist and remarkable developer of geological
students.

Dr. Branner has been one of Stanford's greatest assets from the day of
its opening in all his successive capacities as professor,
vice-president, and president, and he still wields a benign influence on
the institution as resident professor and president emeritus. It was the
particular good fortune of young Hoover to find that his early decision
to become a mining engineer, like the wonderful man who had visited him
in Newberg, led him, when he came to the university, into the
class-rooms and laboratories of this kind and discerning scholar. Dr.
Branner quickly discovered "good material," something that he was always
looking for, in this industrious, intelligent, and ambitious Quaker
boy; and Herbert Hoover found in his major professor not only a teacher
but a friend, who, in both relations, has had a great influence, all for
the best, in his life. It is an interesting illumination of the
democracy of American education to note that while the professor became
the university's president the student became one of its trustees.

The first money-earning work that student Hoover did for Dr. Branner,
except for various little jobs about the laboratory or office, was a
summer's work on a large topographic model of Arkansas which that state
was having prepared by Dr. Branner after a new method devised by him.
Part of this summer was spent in the field in Arkansas and the rest of
it wrestling with the model in the basement of the professor's house.

Two summers were spent in work with the U. S. Geological Survey in the
California Sierras around Lake Tahoe and the American River under
Waldemar Lindgren, one of the greatest of American scientific mining
engineers. This work was on the relations of the famous Sierra placer
gold deposits to the original gold-bearing veins and lodes, and
resulted in tracing those comparatively recent placers back to the old
mountain slopes and valleys. It was a fascinating problem successfully
carried through. The young geologist's association with Lindgren, whose
standards of personal character and regard for the dignity and ethics of
his profession were of the highest, was a source of much valuable
education.

All this summer activity was of value to young Hoover not only for the
help it afforded him in his struggle for existence, and for the outdoor
exercise it involved, but for the practical experience in geological
work which it gave him to mix in with his lecture room and laboratory
acquisitions and to test them by. He seemed to have no difficulty in
getting all of this kind of work he had time to do. In fact, some of the
other students used to speak a little enviously and suggestively about
"Hoover's luck" in this connection. Dr. Branner happened to overhear
some remarks of this kind from a group around a laboratory table one day
and promptly broke out on them in his forcible manner.

"What do you mean," he said, "by talking about Hoover's luck? He has not
had luck; he has had reward. If you would work half as hard and half as
intelligently as he does you would have half his luck. If I tell any one
of you to go and do a thing for me I have to come around in half an hour
to see if you have done it. But I can tell Hoover to do a thing, and
never think of it again. I know it will be done. And he doesn't ask me
how to do it, either. If I told him to start to Kamchatka tomorrow to
bring me back a walrus tooth, I'd never hear of it again until he came
back with the tooth. And then I'd ask him how he had done it."

Dr. Branner was as kind to his boys as he was stern when sternness was
needed. Hoover came down with typhoid in his Junior year, just at a time
when his finances could not afford such an expensive luxury. So Dr.
Branner sent him to a hospital and saw that he was cared for by the best
of physicians and nurses and told him to forget about paying for it all
until after he had graduated. And that probably meant that the good
professor had to go for some time without buying books, which was what
he usually did with his extra money.

Another unfortunate illness was announced to the busy student by an
outbreak of little red spots on his body which were declared by the
college physician to be the result of poison oak. But they were not;
they meant measles, and measles needs prompt attention. Unfortunately
young Hoover's neglected case affected his eyes to such an extent that
for several years afterward he had to wear glasses. And out of this grew
the familiar Stanford tradition that Herbert Hoover ruined his eyes
while in college by over-much night work on his studies!

As a matter of fact Hoover was no college grind. He studied hard enough
at what he liked or thought important for his fitting to be a mining
engineer, but he did not dodge getting a few credits from well-known
"snap" courses, and he got through other required, but, to his mind,
superfluous ones without doing much more work on them than necessary. He
had a disconcerting habit of starting in on a course and then if he
found it uninteresting or unpromising as a contributor to the special
education he was interested in, of simply dropping out of the class
without consultation or permission. But he did dig hard into what he
thought really counted; his record in the geology department was an
unusually high one.

But with all his work and study he found time for some other kinds of
activity. At least the two Irwin boys, Will and Wallace, who were
Stanford's most ingenious disturbers of the peace in pioneer days, claim
that Hoover, in his quiet effective way, made a few contributions of his
own to the troubles of the faculty. But such contributions from others
were generally credited--or rather debited--to the more notorious
offenders, so that they had to suffer not alone for their own brilliant
inspirations but for those of other less conspicuous collaborators.
Wallace, for what seemed to the faculty sufficient reasons, was, as he
has himself phrased it, "graduated by request," while Will had his
Senior year encored by the faculty, so that it took him five years,
instead of the more conventional four, to graduate. In fact, I remember
that even as this fifth year was drawing near its close, the faculty
committee of discipline, of which I was a reluctant member, seriously
considered letting Will go in the same way that Wallace had gone. But
some of us argued that if we should let Will graduate in the more usual
way we should be rid of him soon anyway and without risking the bare
possibilities of doing him an injustice. President Jordan always
maintained that Will had good stuff in him, and he used his ameliorating
influence with the faculty committee. So Will Irwin is today one of
Stanford's best-known alumni.

Herbert Hoover's haunting trouble all through his college course was
that unpassed entrance requirement in English composition. Indeed, he
did not pass in it until about a week before he graduated, although he
tried it regularly every semester all through his four years. How he
finally got his passing mark has been told me by Mrs. Hoover. She knows
because she was there through most of the long agony.

After failing regularly at each semester's trial principally, he thinks
(and Mrs. Hoover is inclined to agree), because he always had to take
it under a particularly meticulous instructor, his predicament began to
worry even his professors in the geology department. It looked as if
their star student might not be allowed to graduate. Finally a date was
set by the English department for a last trial before the end of his
Senior year.

A day or two before this date the professor of paleontology, J. P.
Smith, famed not only for his erudition but for his especial kindness to
all geology students--especially if they did well in paleontology--came
to the worrying Senior with a paper that Hoover had written sometime
before on a paleontological subject, and said to him: "Look here, you
will never pass that examination in the state you are in. Take this
paper; it's fine. Copy it in your best hand; remember that handwriting
goes a long way with professors of English; look up every word in the
dictionary to be sure you have got the right one; then put in all the
punctuation marks you ever saw, and bring it back to me." Hoover did it.

Then Professor Smith disappeared with the paper in his study, but soon
came out with it, abundantly blue-penciled. "Now take it and re-copy it
with all these indicated changes, and bring it back again." Again the
interested Senior obeyed his mentor. Then the professor left the
laboratory with the paper in his hand. Hoover awaited his return with
ever-increasing interest. Pretty soon he came back with a cheerful
smile, handed Hoover the paper, and said: "Well, you've passed; although
you probably don't deserve it."

Professor Smith, it seems, had carried the paper, not to the fatal
instructor, but to the head of the English department and had said to
him: "See here; your instructor is holding up the best man we have from
graduating. Now look at this paper of Hoover's. Is there anything the
matter with it? Doesn't it make good sense? Isn't it well written? Isn't
it well punctuated?"

The English head glanced over it impatiently--he was translating Dante,
his dearest recreation, at the moment--and then roared out: "Well, it
looks all right. I suppose Instructor X has to live up to the rules, but
if the boy can do this well for you it's good enough for us." And with
his Dante pencil he wrote a large "Passed" across the paper.

Someway all this does not sound like an account of life at the
conventional university. Nor does Professor J. P. Smith, who used to
interrupt his lecture to wake up a dozing student with a sharp but
kindly "Here, Jack, wake up, this is an important point and I will
surely ask about it in examination," seem to be of the conventional type
of professor. And most Freshmen coming to Yale or Harvard would hesitate
a little before taking the advice of some workman about the campus to
go, with bag and trunk, in search of board and lodging to a house full
of professors.

But as I said at the beginning, Stanford was different. It is precisely
because it was, that Hoover's particular college experiences and
acquisitions were what I have tried to suggest, and not what you might
think they would be from your knowledge of other universities. And while
Stanford has converged somewhat with years toward the more usual
university type--colleges get more alike as they get older--it has still
an atmosphere peculiarly its own. But it was in the first days that
this atmosphere was so very distinctive. Its president and faculty and
students, all living closely together in the middle of a great ranch of
seven thousand acres of grain fields, horse paddocks, and hills where
jack rabbits roamed and coyotes howled, were thrown together into one
great family, whose members depended almost entirely on one another for
social life. And each department was a special smaller family within the
great one. Life was simple and direct and democratic. Real things
counted first and most; there was little sophistication. Work was the
order of the day; recreations were wholesome.

The geology family was an especially close and happy one. Some of Dr.
Branner's former assistants and students had followed him out to
California. They were the older members of the family. Almost all of
them are now well-known geologists and mining engineers. So also are
many of his younger ones. The family went on long tramps and camps
together. The region about Stanford is singularly interesting from a
geologist's point of view; and in those days it was a _terra_ more or
less _incognita_. Everybody was discovering things. It was real live
geology. Lectures and recitations were illustrated, not by lantern
slides, but by views out of the window and revelations in the field.

And at the same time these young geologists learned real life; they had
come to know intimately real men and women, all fired with the
enthusiasm of a new venture, new opportunities, and a high ideal. With
all this, Herbert Hoover learned, in particular, one additional very
important thing. He learned that a certain unusual girl, beautiful,
intelligent, and unspoiled, a lover of outdoors, and, as proof of her
unusualness, a "major" student in geology, was the girl for him. Having
learned this he decided to marry her. And later, she decided that he had
decided right.

And so with all his experience at earning his living by organizing
anything needing organizing, and with his stores of geological lore
gained from lecture room and textbook and field work and close personal
association with his able and friendly professors, and, finally, with
the knowledge that he had already found exactly the right girl for him,
Herbert Hoover went out from Stanford, in 1895, with his Pioneer Class,
ready to open his oyster. But he had only himself to rely on in doing
it.




CHAPTER IV

THE YOUNG MINING ENGINEER


Herbert Hoover began his mining career very simply and practically by
taking his place as a real workman in a real mine, with no favors shown,
following in this the emphatic advice given by Dr. Branner to every
student graduating from his department. He went up into the mining
region near Grass Valley in the Sierras where he had already studied
with Waldemar Lindgren, and became a regular miner, a boy-man with pick
and shovel working long hours underground or sometimes on the surface
about the plant. But always he had his eyes wide open and always he was
learning. He preferred the underground work because he wanted first to
know more about the actual occurrence of the ore in the earth than about
the mill processes of extracting the mineral from it.

Here he worked for several months, and gradually rose to the position of
night shift-boss or gang foreman. But he began to realize that he was
exhausting the learning opportunities of this particular place and kind
of work, and so one night deep down in the mine, when for sudden lack of
ore-cars or power or some other essential, work was held up for the last
half hour of his shift, he went off into a warm corner, curled himself
up in a nice clean wheelbarrow and slept away the last half hour of his
pick and shovel experience.

He had decided to get into association, some way, with the best mining
engineer on the Coast. There was no question about who this was at that
time. It was Louis Janin in San Francisco. So he appeared at Mr. Janin's
office as a candidate for a job, any job so that it was a job under
Louis Janin.

But the famous engineer, well disposed as he was toward giving
intelligent, earnest young men who wanted to become mining engineers, a
chance, had to explain that not only was there no vacant place in his
staff but that a long waiting list would have to be gone through before
Hoover's turn could come. He added, as a joke, that he needed an
additional typist in his office, but of course----. The candidate for a
job interrupted. "All right, I'll take it. I can't come for a few days,
but I'll come next Tuesday, say." Janin was a little breathless at the
rapidity with which things seemed to get settled by this boyish, very
boyish, young man, but as they were apparently really settled he could
only say, "All right."

Now the reason that the new typewriter boy could not begin until next
Tuesday--this was on a Friday--was that he had in the meantime to learn
to write on a typewriter! Trivial matter, of course, in connection with
becoming a mining engineer, but apparently necessary. So learning what
make of machine he would have to use in the office, he stopped, on his
way to his room, at a typewriter shop, rented a machine of proper make,
and by Tuesday had learned to use it--after a fashion.

That kind of boy could not remain for long a typist in the office of a
discerning man like Louis. Perhaps certain idiosyncrasies of spelling
and a certain originality of execution on the machine helped bring about
a change of duties. But chiefly it was because of a better reason. This
reason was made especially clear by an incident connected with an
important mining case in which Janin was serving as expert for the side
represented by Judge Curtis Lindley, famous mining lawyer of San
Francisco. The papers which indicated the line of argument which Judge
Lindley and Mr. Janin were intending to follow came to Hoover's desk to
be copied. As he wrote he read with interest. The mine was in the Grass
Valley region that he knew so well. He not only copied but he remembered
and thought. The result was that when the typewriter boy delivered the
papers to the mining engineer they were accompanied by the casual
statement that the great expert and the learned attorney were all wrong
in the line of procedure they were preparing to take! And he proceeded
to explain why, first to Mr. Janin's indignant surprise but next to his
great interest, because the explanation involved the elucidation of
certain geologic facts not yet published to the world, which the
typewriter boy had himself helped to discover during his work in the
Grass Valley region.

The outcome was that Janin and his new boy went around together to Judge
Lindley's office where after due deliberation the line of argument was
altered. The further result was that the boy parted from his typewriter,
first to begin acting as assistant to various older staff men on trips
to various parts of the Coast for mine examinations, then to make minor
examinations alone, and finally to handle bigger ones. The letters from
the young mining engineer to the girl of the geology department, still
at Stanford, came now in swift succession from Nevada, Wyoming, and
Idaho, and then very soon after from Arizona and New Mexico. Little
mines did not require much time for examination and reports signed
"Hoover" came into Janin's office with bewildering rapidity. Janin liked
these reports; they not only showed geological and mining knowledge, but
they showed a shrewd business sense. The reporter seemed never to lose
the perspective of cost and organization possibilities in relation to
the probable mineral richness of the prospects. And the reports said
everything they had to say in very few and very clear words.

Herbert Hoover was not only moving fast; he was learning fast, and he
was rising fast in Janin's estimation. He had a regular salary or
guarantee now with a certain percentage of all the fees collected by
Janin's office from the properties he examined. What he was earning now
I do not know, but we may be sure it was considerably more than the
forty-five dollars a month which he had begun with as typewriter boy, a
few months before.

The work was not entirely limited to the examination of prospects and
mines. In one case at least it included actual mine development and
management. Mr. Janin had in some way taken over, temporarily--for such
work was not much to his liking: he preferred to be an expert consultant
rather than a mine manager--a small mine of much value but much
complication near Carlisle, New Mexico. This he turned over to his
enterprising assistant to look after.

It was Hoover's first experience of the kind, and it was made a rather
hectic one by conditions not technically a regular part of mining. The
town, or "camp," was a wild one with drunken Mexicans having
shooting-bees every pay day and the local jail established at the bottom
of an abandoned shaft, not too deep, into which the prisoners were let
down by windlass and bucket. It was an operation fairly safe if the
sheriff and his assistants were not too exhilarated to manage the
windlass properly, or the malefactors, too drunk to hang on to the
bucket. Otherwise, more or less regrettable incidents happened. Also, it
led to a rather puzzling situation when the sheriff had to take care of
his first woman prisoner, a negro lady of generous dimensions and much
volubility.

But the mine was well managed and Hoover acquired more merit with his
employer. And soon came the new chance which led to much bigger things.
It was now the spring of 1897, two years after Hoover's graduation, and
the time of the great West Australia mining boom. English companies were
sending out many engineers, old and young, to investigate and handle
mining properties in the new field, and were looking everywhere for
competent men. Janin was asked by one of these London firms to recommend
someone to them. He talked it over with Hoover, telling him that it
might be a great opportunity. It might, of course, not be; it would
depend on the prospect--and the man who handled it. Janin expressed his
entire confidence in the young man before him, and his belief that the
opportunity was greater than any the Pacific Coast then had to offer. He
would be more than glad to keep Hoover with him, but he wanted to be
fair to him and his future. The young man was all for giving hostages to
fortune, and so the recommendation, the offer, and the acceptance flew
by cable between San Francisco and London, and Hoover prepared to start
at once to England for instructions, as had been stipulated in the
offer.

Just before he started, however, Janin caused him some uneasiness by
saying, "Now look here, Hoover, I have cabled London swearing to your
full technical qualifications, and I am not afraid of your letting me
down on that. But these conservative Londoners have stipulated that you
should be thirty-five years old. I have wired that I was sorry to have
to tell them that you are not quite thirty-three. Don't forget that my
reputation depends on your looking thirty-three by the time you get to
London!" And Hoover had not yet reached his twenty-third birthday, and
looked at least two years younger even than that. He began growing a
beard on his way across the continent.

The London firm had stipulated, too, that their new man should be
unmarried. Hoover was still that, although he had begun to get impatient
about what seemed to him an unnecessary delay in carrying out his
decision already made in college. As a matter of fact, there was still
no definite engagement between him and the girl of the geology
department, but there was an informal understanding that some day there
might be a formal one. So Hoover appeared before the head of the great London house--perhaps
the greatest mining firm in the world at that time--without encumbering
wife and with the highest of recommendations, but with a singularly
youthful appearance for an experienced mining engineer of thirty-five.
In fact, the great man after staring hard at his new acquisition burst
out with English directness, "How remarkable you Americans are. You have
not yet learned to grow old, either individually or as a nation. Now
you, for example, do not look a day over twenty-five. How the devil do
you do it?"

The days were days of wonder for the homegrown young Quaker engineer.
Across America, across the ocean, then the stupendous metropolis of the
world and the great business men of the "city," with week-ends under the
wing of the big mining financier at beautiful English country houses
with people whose names spelled history. And then the P. and O. boat to
Marseilles, Naples, Port Said, Aden, and Colombo, and finally to be put
ashore in a basket on a rope cable over a very rough sea at Albany in
West Australia. There he was consigned, with the dozen other first-class
passengers, mining adventurers like himself, to quarantine in a tent
hospital on a sand spit out in the harbor with the thermometer never
registering below three figures, even at night.

And then he came to the Australian mine fields themselves in a desert
where the temperature can keep above one hundred degrees day and night
for three weeks together. Also there is wind, scorching wind carrying
scorching dust. And surface water discoverable only every fifty or sixty
miles. Of course one expects a desert to be hot and dry--that's why it
is a desert--but the West Australian desert rather overemphasizes the
necessities of the case. It is a deadly monotonous country although not
wholly bare; there is much low brush just high enough to hide you from
others only half a mile away; a place easy to get lost in, and hard to
get found in when once lost.

All of this desert was being prospected by thousands of men of a dozen
nationalities, all seeking and suffering, for gold. The railroad had got
in only as far as Coolgardie, but the prospectors were far beyond the
rail head. They carried their water bags with enough in them to keep
themselves and their horses alive between water holes. In the real "back
blocks" they could not carry enough for horses, so they used camels
with jangling bells and gaudy trappings of gay greens, orange, scarlet,
and vivid blues, making strange contrasts with the blue-gray bush. Along
the few main roads moved dusty stages, light, low, almost spring-less
three-seated vehicles, with thin sun-tops overhead and boxes and bags in
front, behind and underneath, and all swarmed about by pestilential
flies, millions of flies, sprung from nowhere to harass the thirsty,
weary travelers.

But only the agents and engineers rode in the stages; it cost too much
for the little prospectors, the "dry-washers," who carried their few
provisions and scanty outfit in packs on their backs, and tramped the
trails, stopping here and there to toss the dry soil into the air and
watch for the gold flakes to fall into the pan while the lighter earth
blew off in the wind.

In the camp were gathered a motley crew, mostly hard, reckless men, who
drank and bet their gold dust away as fast as they found it. But
everywhere they were finding gold, and all the time came new reports and
rumors of more farther on. The headquarters of Hoover's employers were
in Coolgardie when he arrived, but were soon moved on to Kalgoorlie,
following the railroad. The offices were in one of the three or four
stone, two-story buildings, which lifted themselves proudly above the
ruck of sweltering little toy-like houses of corrugated iron. Forty
thousand people were supposed to be living in this "camp" at one time,
buying water at two shillings six pence the gallon, which was
cheap--they were paying seven shillings in some other camps. At first it
was all brought by rail from the coastal plains four hundred miles away,
but when the mines began to get down they struck water at a few hundred
feet. But it was salt, and expensive condensing plants had to be set up,
which kept the price still high. Coolgardie once boasted of having the
"biggest condensing plant in the world," with rows on rows of enormous
cylindrical corrugated iron tanks lying on their sides, over acres of
ground, with all the pumps and boilers and steam pipes to keep these
tanks supplied. Water was cheap there, only twelve or fifteen shillings
the hundred gallons.

But out in the prospects and on the trails there was no such aqueous
luxury. There was no water for washing and little to drink. And that
little was mostly drunk as a terrible black tea, like lye, heated and
re-heated, with now a little more water added, now another handful of
leaves. I have a well-vouched-for story of an Australian girl who went
into this gold-paradise with her husband who was manager, at a large
salary, of one of the first mines. She used to take a cupful of water
and carefully wash the baby and afterward the little girl, and then
herself. After that it was saved for the husband to rinse the worst off
when he came home from the mine. But he could have an additional half
cup to finish with because he was so dirty. And they tried not to use
soap with it so that finally, after letting it settle, it could be added
to the horses' drinking water. It was not that the family could not
afford to pay for water, but there was simply no water to buy.

Into this cheerful hell came the young Quaker engineer, from the heaven
of California and the "city" offices of London where sat the big men
who were intent on having their share of the big things in West
Australia. He was to do his best for his particular big men, but how he
was to do it was mostly for him to find out. His firm had already
acquired interests in several promising properties. He was to help
develop these mines and perhaps to find new ones to be taken on. A
junior member of his firm was already on the ground when Hoover arrived,
but he remained only a few months. It was a long way to London and
Hoover could get few instructions. It was up to him. It was a hard life
with many opportunities to go wrong in any of many ways. But he kept his
brain clear, his body and soul clean, and just everlastingly worked.

There were all kinds of work to do, and all sorts of new things to learn
about mines and mining. The ore occurred in the rock in a manner
different from that in any other known gold field, so finding it and
getting it out, and then getting the mineral out of the strange new kind
of ore, required resourcefulness, "original research," as the scientists
say, and constructive imagination. And the technical problems of
discovering and manipulation once solved, there was still needed
organization, system, and administration to make the mine a paying one.

But all these things were exactly the young engineer's specialties. He
was from the beginning, as we already know, and conspicuously is today,
resourceful, original, capable of prompt decision, an organizer and
administrator. Although there were many trained engineers in West
Australia, there was no one to equal him in these specialties of his.
And very soon his firm's mines, which had so far had little benefit of
executive ability coupled with technical knowledge and originality,
began to pay and their stocks went up on the London market--which was
the criterion of success in the eyes of the men in the "city." About the
stock ratings Hoover knew little and perhaps cared less. He did care,
however, about making good mines out of bad ones. And that was exactly
what he was doing.

And very soon he did the other successful thing that the big men in
London hoped for and that he kept always working for. He uncovered the
big new mine. He had turned up several promising leads but their
development proved disappointing. But the "Sons of Gwalia" realized his
hopes from the beginning. It was out from Kalgoorlie four or five days
hard riding, near a smaller camp called Leonora. He went out and took
personal charge of the opening up and equipping of the whole mine and
plant, living in a little "tin" house and gathering about him a staff of
the best of the firm's assistants collected from all over the Colony. It
was hot, although the climbing mercury usually stopped at about one
hundred degrees. But that only further inflamed the enthusiasm of the
group. They had the real thing, and they had a real leader--a very
boyish looking boy of scant twenty-five. They forgot to watch the
thermometer. They were more interested in water and transportation and
labor and all the other things that are as necessary to a good mine as
the gold in the ore-veins.

Occasionally, however, they had some relaxation. For one thing, they
thought sometimes about food. One of the men had his wife with him, and
she imported chickens and later even ducks which never, however, set
web-foot in water. And they had a garden because they decided they were
so in need of green vegetables. They turned a little priceless water
from the condenser into the garden; but not enough for the vegetables
and too much for the accountant's books. After estimating that the one
undersized cabbage they raised cost them £65 worth of water, he
discouraged further gardening.

They had also a pet emu. So did the wife of the manager of another mine
near-by. They used to arrange to have the emus meet occasionally and
there was always a glorious fight. Once when they had got the lady's emu
over for a visit, one of the Australian boys thought it would look
amusing in trousers. So he took off his overalls and after immense
exertion got them on the legs of the creature, with the straps securely
fastened over its neck and back. But the great bird became so enraged
that the men could not safely get near enough to it to get off its
clothing, and even its mistress feared ever to approach it again. There
was also a pet goat named Sydney that ate several boxes of matches and
had to have its internal fires extinguished by the only available
liquid, which was the tinned butter that had yielded to the one hundred
and ten degrees. Sydney lived through the experience but had always
after that a delicate interior and was petted more than ever in
consequence. And there was a tennis court occasionally wetted down with
the beer that always went stale while they were saving it for state
occasions. It was all a happy, glorious time--because they had
discovered and were making one of the great mines of West Australia.

Hoover was now twenty-four, and a man of large reputation in mining
circles in Australia and London, with a salary to correspond. He had
spent about twenty-four months in West Australia, although they ran over
all of one and parts of two other years, so that he is generally
credited with having remained there three years. And he could have gone
on among the Australian mines for as many years as he liked, for the big
men in London now fully realized that they had in this young American
engineer the unusual man, and that his only limit in Australia would be
the limit of the possible. But the new opportunity and the new
experience were calling.

Just about this time a young Chinaman of royal family in Peking had made
a successful _coup d'état_ and had formed a cabinet for the first time
in the history of China, and this cabinet decided, naturally also for
the first time in the history of China, to effect a coördinated control
of all the mines of the Empire. There was, therefore, established a
Department of Mines, with a wily old Chinaman, named Chang Yen Mow, at
its head. He understood that Chinamen knew little about mining, and
hence decided to find a foreigner to help him manage the mines of the
Empire. He also thought that a foreigner, thus attached as an official
to his department, could be of particular help to him in dealing with
other foreigners inclined to exploit Chinese mines more for their own
benefit than China's. This official was to be in a position much like
that of an undersecretary in a cabinet department, and was to be given
the title, in the Chinese equivalent, of "Director-General of Mines."
He was to have a salary appropriate to such a large title. With all this
decided, it only remained to find the proper foreigner, who should be a
man who knew much about mines and was honest. There was, as we know,
just such a man in Western Australia.




CHAPTER V

IN CHINA


When Chang Yen Mow, the new head of the new Department of Mines of the
new Chinese Government, began to look about for the foreigner who should
know much about mines and be honest, and who would therefore be a fit
man to occupy the new post of Director-General of Mines, he bethought
himself of an English group of mining men with whom he had once had some
business relations. The principal expert advisor of this group had been
the man who was now the head of the great London mining firm for which
Herbert Hoover was working, and working very successfully, in West
Australia. Chang applied to this group for a recommendation of a
suitable man for him. And this group in turn applied to the head of
Hoover's firm. Or, perhaps, Chang applied directly to the great London
mining man. The exact procedure, which is not very important, anyway, by
which the head of Hoover's firm came to have the opportunity of making
the recommendation, is a little obscure today. The important points in
the whole matter, however, which are not at all uncertain, are that he
did have it, and that he recommended Herbert Hoover, and that Chang Yen
Mow, acting on the recommendation, offered the place, through him, to
the youthful Quaker engineer, and, finally, that the competent and
confident boy of twenty-four, always ready for the newer, bigger thing,
promptly accepted it.

In two weeks after the cable offer and answer, a feverish fortnight
devoted to a rapid clearing up of things in Australia, Hoover was on his
way to London, to report personally to his employers about their own
affairs as well as to get some information about the new undertaking. He
wanted to find out before he got to China, if he could, something of
what would be expected of a Director-General of Mines of the Chinese
Empire. Perhaps he had in mind the possible necessity of "getting up" a
little special knowledge about Chinese mines and mining ways before he
tackled his new job, just as he had got up enough physiology in
thirty-six hours to help get him into Stanford University, and enough
typewriting in a week-end to fit him for entrance into Louis Janin's
office in San Francisco.

However, after two weeks in the metropolis, eight or nine days on the
Atlantic, two or three in New York, and five on the transcontinental
trains, he found himself again in California and ready to make from
there his second start to the far-away lands from which his loudest
calls seemed to come--ready, that is, except for one thing. He was now,
let us remember, at this beginning of the year 1899, not yet twenty-five
years old, not that by half a year, indeed, and a half year could mean,
as we have already seen, a great deal in his life. And he was a boy-man
with a record already behind him of achievement and a position already
in his hands of much responsibility and large salary. So he declared
that the time had now come for the carrying out of the decision he had
made in his college days of four years before. It was the little
matter, you will promptly guess, and guess correctly, of marrying the
girl of the geology department. He arrived in San Francisco the first of
February, 1899. He spent the next few days in Monterey, "the old Pacific
capital" of Stevenson's charming sketch, but of chief interest to Hoover
as the place where Lou Henry--that was her name--lived. And here they
were married at noon of Friday, February 10. At two o'clock they left
for San Francisco, and at noon the next day sailed for the empire of
China.

Into the sleepy, half Mexican, historic town on the curving sands of the
shores of the blue Bay of Monterey this swift, breathlessly swift, boy
engineer had come from distant Australia, by way of Marseilles and
London, had clutched up the beautiful daughter of the respected town
banker, and was now carrying her off to distant China, where she was to
live in all the state becoming the wife of the Director-General of Mines
of the Celestial Empire. It was a bit too much for the old Pacific
capital, which did not know--for it was not told--that the sudden
appearance of the meteor bridegroom had been preceded by many
astronomical warnings in the way of electric messages that came to the
prospective bride from Australia and London and New York. Anyway, it
wasn't quite fair to the town, which tries to maintain old Mexican
traditions, that go back to Spain, of a full assortment of festivities
incident to any proper marrying. But Monterey has long been reconciled
to this missed opportunity, and now reveals a just pride as the home
town of the woman who has played such an active rôle in the career of
her distinguished husband.

The hurrying couple, at least, had time for breath-taking--and
honeymoon--when once on board ship. For it is a month's voyaging from
San Francisco to China--or, at least, was then. They had for seat-mates
at table Frederick Palmer, the war correspondent, and wife, which was
the beginning of a friendship that still endures. And there were for
other interesting companions a secretary of our legation at Peking and
his wife, and a missionary pair who may or may not have survived the
Boxer massacres.

The work in China was at first rather simple. Mines, of course, there
were and had been for uncounted centuries. But what was needed by the
new Department was some sort of survey of the mineral resources and
mining possibilities of the Empire, and a tentative framing of a code of
mining laws, so that the new development of the mines of the country
which Chang hoped to initiate could be carried on to best advantage, and
in such a way that private enterprise could participate in it. For
centuries the mines had been Crown property and the ruler had simply let
them out directly, or through the viceroys, for either a stipulated
annual rental or for as much "squeeze" as could be wrung from the
lessees in any of several various ways. And there had to be some rental
or "squeeze" for each of the many officials that could get within arm's
length of the mining business. The tenure of the use of the mines by the
lessees was usually simply the period of the continued satisfaction of
the lessor.

All this had not made for any extensive new opening up of the country's
mineral resources, or for the scientific development of the mines
already long known. One could not afford to put much capital into
prospecting or into modernizing the mining methods when each improvement
simply meant either more rent or "squeeze," or the giving up of the
mine. So the ores were mined and the metals extracted from them by the
miners according to the methods of their ancestors as far back as
history or tradition went, and it was all done under a set of mining
laws as primitive as the mining methods themselves. There were enormous
possibilities of improvement. It would have been hard for any mining
engineer to do anything at all to the situation without improving it.
For Hoover, with his technical education in metallurgical processes, his
experience in handling various and difficult mining situations, and his
genius for organizing and systematizing, the opportunity was simply
unique. He plunged into the work of examining and planning and codifying
with the zest of a naturalist in an unexplored jungle. In the day time
he made his examination; at nights he studied the mining laws of all
time and all the world.

He built up a staff as rapidly as it could be put together and
correlated with the tasks before it. He had sent in advance for two or
three men he had worked with in America and for some of his most able
and dependable associates in West Australia, including Agnew, a mill
expert, and Newbery, a metallurgist, son of a famous geologist, both of
them devoted to "the Chief." That was Hoover's _sobriquet_ among his
early mining associates; just as it was later among the members of his
successive great war-time organizations. He has just naturally--not
artificially--always been "the Chief" among his co-workers and
associates.

His Caucasian staff of perhaps a dozen was greatly overshadowed in
number by his Chinese staff, composed chiefly of semitechnical
assistants, draftsmen, surveyors' assistants, interpreters, etc. A few
of the Chinese helpers had had foreign training; there was one from
Yale, for example, and another from Rose Polytechnic; the latter so
devoted to American baseball that he was greatly disappointed in the new
Director of Mines when he found he was not a baseball player. But he
thought better of him when he learned that he had at least managed his
college team. The staff had its headquarters in Tientsin, where were
also the principal laboratories for the mineralogists, assayers, and
chemists. Some of the men gave their time to the technical work, and
others were engaged in collecting and correlating everything that had
been published in the foreign languages about the geology and mines' of
China, while Chinese scholars hunted down and translated into English
all that had been printed in Chinese literature. But the Director and
most of his immediate experienced assistants were chiefly occupied with
the exploring expeditions into the interior and the examination of the
old mines and new prospects. Especially did some immediate attention
have to be given to the mines already being actually worked, for the
Minister let it be known that he expected the new Director to pay the
way of the Department as soon as possible from the increased proceeds of
the mines which were to arise from the magic touch of the foreign
experts.

These expeditions were elaborate affairs, contrasting strangely with
Hoover's earlier experiences in America and Australia. The Chinese
major-domo in charge insisted that the make-up and appearance of the
outfit should reflect the high estate of the Director of Mines, so that
every movement involved the organization of a veritable caravan of
ponies, mules, carts, men on foot, and sedan chairs carried by coolies.
These chairs were for the Director and his wife, who, however, would not
use them, preferring saddle horses. But the proud manager of the
expedition insisted that they be carried along, empty, to show the
admiring populace that even if the strange foreign potentates amazingly
preferred to ride in a rather common way on horseback they could at
least afford to have sedan chairs. Imagine a prospecting outfit in the
California Sierra or the West Australian bush with sedan chairs! And
there were cooks and valets and cot beds and folding chairs and mosquito
bed curtains and charcoal stoves and an array of pans and pots like
Oscar's in the Waldorf kitchens, and often a cavalry guard of
twenty-five or fifty men, superfluous but insistent and always hungry.
Whether the expedition found any mines or not it was at least an
impressive object lesson to the Celestial myriads that the new Imperial
Department of Mines knew how to hunt for them in proper style. When Mrs.
Hoover once remonstrated with one of the interpreters of the cavalcade
about such an unnecessary outfit, the answer was: "Mr. Hoover is such
expensive man to my country we cannot afford to let him die for want of
small things."

A similar state had to be lived up to in the Director's home in
Tientsin. The house was a large, four-square, wide-veranded affair, in
which a dozen to fifteen servants, carefully distinguished as "No. 1
Boy," "No. 2 Boy" and so on down the line, waited, according to their
own immemorial traditions, on the Director and his wife. These servants
had curious ways, and a curious language in the odd pidgin English that
enabled the door boy to announce that "the number one topside foreign
devil joss man have makee come," when the English Bishop called, and the
table boy to announce a dish of duckling as "one piecee duck pups," or
of chicken as "one piecee looster." The social scale among the few
foreign residents was very precisely defined, and the social life of the
foreign colony highly conventionalized, so that the unassuming,
practical-minded young engineer of the high title and social position
who was terribly bored--as he is today--by social rigmarole, and who was
thought rather queer by the conventional-minded small diplomats and
miscellaneous foreign residents because, as one of them put it, "he
always seems to be _thinking_," was glad to be out of all this as much
as possible and on the road, even if it had to be with the ludicrous
caravan of state. Sometimes even all the attempted comfort and
superfluous luxury of the caravan did not prevent the expedition from
having serious hardships and running into real danger. An expedition
across the great Gobi desert that lasted for thirty-nine days was
successfully accomplished only after hard battling with heat, hunger and
thirst, and even with hostile natives.

Some of the results expected from this imported miner were rather
startling. For instance, age-long rumor had it that the Emperor's
hunting park at Jehol overlay immensely valuable gold deposits. The
Minister intimated to the Director that he would like to know the real
facts about this as soon as possible. As the park lay in a
little-explored region of southern Manchuria and was a place of much
historical as well as geological interest, the Director decided to make
a personal examination of it. After the expedition had been out several
days, he was told that on the next they would come in sight of the Great
Royal Park. Accordingly on the next day the guide of the caravan took
him, with one or two of the Caucasian members of his staff and an
interpreter, off from the road the grand retinue was following, and by
winding paths up to a hill top which commanded a superb prospect.

"There," said the interpreter, with a wave of his hand toward the
stretching prospect of beautiful valleys, low broad hills and mountain
side, "there is the Hunting Park of Jehol." Then, turning complacently
to the Director of Mines, he asked, simply: "Is there gold beneath it?"
And interpreter and guide, and later, even more important officials,
were stupefied to learn that the wonderful imported man who knew all
about gold could not say offhand, from his vantage point, miles away,
whether there was gold under the Park or not. And, more disturbing
still, that he probably could not say anything about it at all without
actually tramping over the sacred soil and perhaps sacrilegiously
digging into it.

Such occasionally necessary confessions of incompetence made a little
trouble, but only a little. However much the under men lacked knowledge
about minerals and mines and how to find out about them, the head of the
Department, Chang, knew enough to know that if his young Director
confessed inability to meet certain demands it was because there was
more wrong with the demands than with the engineer. But the real fly in
the ointment soon began to make itself visible. It was not a
disillusionment on the part of the Chinese officials in connection with
their foreign expert, but a disillusionment on his part in regard to his
real position and opportunities for accomplishing something for China.
He began more and more clearly to realize that he could investigate and
advise as much as he liked but that he could really do, in his
understanding of doing, comparatively little. The modern West cannot
make over the immemorial East in a day or even a year.

Gradually the young engineer came to realize that while his examinations
and reports were all very welcome, and whatever he could suggest for
improvement in technical detail, resulting in immediate greater output
of the mines already working, was gladly accepted, there was no
willingness to accept advice leading to changes in administrative and
general organization matters. And to the modern engineer efficiency in
these matters is as much a part of successful mining as skilled digging
and good metallurgy. Suggestions looking toward getting more work out of
the men, or cutting down the payrolls by removing the thirty per cent of
the names on them that seemed to have no bodily attachments, were
frowned on. These things interfered with "squeeze," and "squeeze" was a
traditional part of Chinese mining. Foreign advisors and helpers were
all very well when they found gold, but not so well when they found
graft. A crisis was visible in the offing. But this particular crisis
did not arrive, for another larger and more serious one came more
swiftly on and arrived almost unheralded. It was the Boxer Uprising.

The outbreak found Hoover at Tientsin having but recently returned from
Pekin with Mrs. Hoover, and both just recovering from severe attacks of
influenza. If opportunity for thorough organizing of the mines of China
had failed him he now had full scope for organizing a military defense
of his home and wife and his many employees, foreign and native, for
Tientsin, for a month, was the scene of hot fighting. It was a besieged
household in a beleaguered city. Hoover could have gotten out with his
wife and few Caucasian assistants at the beginning of the trouble, but
he would not desert his few hundred Chinese helpers and their
families--and his wife would not desert him. So they staid on together
through all the rifle and shell fire and conflagrations of the Tientsin
siege, building and defending barricades of rice and sugar sacks,
organizing food and water supplies, and cheerfully "carrying on" in the
face of certain death, and worse, if the outnumbering fanatic Boxers
happened to win.

But there were occasional lighter incidents amid the many grave ones of
the fighting weeks. Mrs. Hoover tells one, her favorite story of those
days, in something like the following words. "We had a cow, famous and
influential in the community, which cow was the mother of a promising
calf. One day the cow was stolen and Mr. Hoover set out to find her.
With three or four friends and half a dozen attendant Chinese boys he
took out the tiny calf one night and by the light of a lantern led the
little orphan, bleating for its mother, about the streets of the town.
Finally, as they passed in front of the barracks of the German
contingent of the international defending army, there came, from within,
an answering moo, and Mr. Hoover, addressing the sentry, demanded his
cow. The sentry made no move to comply, but, summoning all his
_Wörterbuch_ English, countered with the inquiry: 'Is that the calf of
the cow inside?' Upon receiving an affirmative reply to his Ollendorff
question, he calmly declared, 'Also, then, calf outside must join itself
to cow inside.' And thereupon by aid of a suggestive manipulation of his
bayonet, he confiscated the calf, and sent Mr. Hoover home
empty-handed."

As one of the precursors of the Boxer affair Chang Yen Mow got into the
bad graces of the government, gave up his position and was forced to
flee from Pekin and take refuge in Tientsin. Even here he was dragged
out of his palace and stood up before a firing squad, and escaped with
his life only through vigorous interference by his Director of Mines.
Because he thought that he might save from probable confiscation a
valuable coal mining property at Tongshan about eighty miles from
Tientsin, he desired to transfer this property outright to Hoover's name
for the protection of the foreign title. Hoover refused this, but did
undertake to go to Europe on a contract with Chang to enlist the aid of
the Belgian and British bondholders of the Company to protect the
property. These men rescued and reorganized the Company, dispatched
their own financial agents to China, and appointed Hoover chief engineer
to superintend the real development of the great property.

The wily old Celestial finding, after all, that China was not to be
partitioned by the powers that had defended it against the Boxers, and
that private property was not to be confiscated, now proposed to break
his contract so eagerly made. And there seemed to be no hope that the
curious course of Chinese law would ever compel him to recognize his
previous agreements. But there was something in the persistent,
indomitable pressure of the quiet but firm young Belgian agent, named de
Wouters, who had come back with Hoover, and of the young American, which
did finally compel the old Chinaman, after much trouble and delay, to
live up to his contract.

Years later the situation, with kaleidoscopic picturesqueness, took on
another hue, and Hoover found himself defending Chang's interests from
the overzealous attempts of some of the foreign owners to get more out
of the mines than was their fair share. In making the original
contracts it had been agreed to have a Chinese board with a Chinese
chairman, as well as a foreign board. This led to much difficulty and
some of the Europeans declared that the young American had been much at
fault in consenting to an arrangement which left so much share in the
control to the Chinese, and they repudiated this arrangement. Hoover and
de Wouters had a long hard struggle in getting justice for old Chang,
but just as their persistence had earlier held Chang up to his
agreements for the sake of the European owners of the undertaking, so
now, directed in the opposite direction, it succeeded in getting justice
for Chang and his Chinese group.

The affair brought him into business relations with another Belgian
named Emile Francqui, of keen mind and great personal force, who, with
de Wouters, were, strangely enough, later to be chief and first
assistant executives, respectively, of the Great Belgian Comité National
during the long hard days of the German Occupation. It was with these
men among all the Belgians that Hoover was to have most to do in
connection with his work as initiator and director of the Commission for
Relief in Belgium.

But we are now, in the story of Herbert Hoover, only in the year 1900,
and the Belgian Relief did not begin until 1914. And Hoover was still to
have many experiences as engineer and man of affairs, before he was to
meet his Belgian acquaintances again under the dramatic conditions
produced by the World War.

He had now his opportunity really to do something in China in line with
his own ideas of doing things in connection with mines, and not with
those of Chinese mining tradition. As consulting engineer, and later
general manager of the "Chinese Engineering and Mining Company" he
attacked the job of making Chang's great Tongshan coal properties a
going concern. This job involved building railways, handling a fleet of
ocean-going steamers, developing large cement works, and superintending
altogether the work of about 20,000 employees. A special one among the
undertakings of the twelve months or more given to this enterprise was
the building of Ching Wang Tow harbor to give his coal a proper sea
outlet. Altogether it was a "mining" job of all the variety and hugeness
of extent that the twenty-seven-year-old miner and organizer found most
to his liking. And despite obstacles and complications due both to his
Chinese and Caucasian company associates he did it successfully, enjoyed
it immensely, and got from it much education and experience. But he was
ready after about a year of it to turn his attention to the rest of the
world.




CHAPTER VI

LONDON AND THE REST OF THE WORLD


In 1902, now twenty-eight years old, Herbert Hoover returned to London
as a junior partner in the great English firm with which he had been
earlier associated as its star field man in West Australia. But, though
with an actual headquarters office in London, he was mostly anywhere
else in the world but there. He was still the firm's chief engineer and
principal field expert and upon him fell much of the responsibility of
the firm's actual mining operations in the field as distinguished from
its financial operations in the "city." He probably spent little more
than a tenth of his time in London, and this was also true in his later
career when he had given up his connection with the firm and was wholly
"on his own" as independent consulting engineer and mine-organizer. And
this explains what has often puzzled many of the people who came to know
him and his household in London. He and it were so little "English."
His home in London seemed always to be a bit of transplanted America,
and, in particular, a bit of transplanted California. As a matter of
fact, in all his years of London connections there was hardly one that
did not see him and his family in America including an inevitable stay
in California. He maintained offices in New York and San Francisco and
had no slightest temptation, much less desire, ever to become an
expatriate.

But this is getting ahead of the story. There is one outstanding
happening in his London experience that insistently demands telling. It
is the happening that meant for him the greatest setback in his
otherwise almost monotonously successful career. And yet, although this
happening meant temporary financial ruin for him, it was, in its way,
only another success, a success of revealing significance to those who
would like to know the real man that Herbert Hoover is.

After one of his returns to London, and in the absence of the head of
the firm in China, he discovered a defalcation of staggering
proportions. A man connected with the firm had lost in speculation over
a million dollars obtained from friends and clients of the firm, by the
issuance and sale of false stock. Technically the operations of the
defaulter were of such a character that the firm could not be held
legally liable. But the junior partner swept the technicalities aside
with a single gesture. He announced that they would make good all of the
obligations incurred by the defaulter. This meant the immediate loss of
his own personal fortune, and it meant a serious difference of opinion
with the absent head of the firm, whose frantic cables came, however,
too late to overrule the decision of the junior partner.

There ensued a long bitter struggle, most of it falling on the junior
partner with the Quaker conscience, to make good the losses without
actually putting the firm out of business. For going on with the
business was essential to the making good. It was a gruelling four
years' struggle, but with success at the end of it. And then the
American engineer, now grown forever out of youth to the man who had
experienced the down as well as the up in life, gave up his connection
with the firm and launched on that career of independent and
self-responsible activity which has been his ever since. This was in
1908. Hoover was now thirty-four years old and probably the leading
consulting mining engineer in the world.

His work soon took him back to Australia, the land of his first notable
success, but this time into South Australia instead of West Australia.
Here he took personal charge of a large constructive undertaking in
connection with the rehabilitation of the famous Broken Hill Mines.
These mines were in the inhospitable wastes of the Great Stony Desert,
four or five hundred miles north of Adelaide, the port city. The living
and working conditions in the desert were a little worse than awful, but
by his technical and organizing ability he brought to life the two or
three abandoned mines which constituted the Broken Hills properties,
and, adding to them some adjoining lower grade mines, converted the
whole group from a state of great but unrealized possibilities into one
of highly profitable actualities. An important factor in this
achievement was his origination and successful development of a process
for extracting the zinc from ores that had already been treated for the
other metals and then cast aside as worthless residues. There were
fourteen million tons of these residues on the Broken Hills dumps and
from them he derived large returns for the company that he had organized
to purchase the property.

He also introduced new metallurgical processes for the profitable
handling of the low-grade sulphide ores that constituted most of the
mineral body of the mines. Indeed, this work in South Australia did much
to help prove to him what has long been one of his cardinal beliefs,
namely, that the safe backbone of mining lies in the handling of large
bodies of low-grade ores. When such great ore-bodies are given the
benefit of proper metallurgical processes and large organizing and
intelligent building up of exterior plants, mining leaves the realms of
speculation and becomes a certain and stable business operation.

All this successful work in South Australia occupied but seven months.
Back in London again he gathered about him a remarkable staff of skilled
young mining engineers, mostly Americans. There were thirty-five or
forty of them, indeed, not on salary or fixed appointment, but men eager
to attach themselves to him for the sake of working with him or for him
in connection with the ever-increasing number of his large enterprises
in the way of reorganization and rehabilitation of mines scattered all
over the world. He became the managing director or chief consulting
engineer of a score of mining companies, and the simple association of
his name with a mining enterprise gave investors and other engineers a
perfect confidence in its success and its honest handling.

Two of his largest undertakings were in Russia, one at Kyshtim, in the
Urals, the other at Irtish on the Siberian plains near Manchuria. The
Kyshtim property was a great but run-down historic establishment, on an
estate of an area almost equal to that of all Belgium. One hundred and
seventy thousand people lived on the estate, all dependent on the
mining establishment for their support. The ores were of iron and
copper, but the mines were so far from anywhere that not only did these
ores have to be smelted at the mine mouths, but factories had to be
erected to manufacture the metal into products capable of compact
transportation. When Hoover took over the bankrupt properties he found
himself not only with mining and manufacturing problems to solve, but
with what was practically a relief problem to face. For the underpaid
workmen and their unfortunate families were in a state of great misery.
He succeeded not only in modernizing and rehabilitating the material
part of the great establishment, but at the same time in rescuing and
revivifying a suffering laboring population of helpless Russians.

The Irtish properties were near the Manchurian border, a thousand miles
up the Irtish River from Omsk, a mere remote bleak spot on the wild,
bare Siberian steppes. But at this spot lay extensive deposits of zinc,
iron, lead, copper and coal, all together. He had first of all to build
350 miles of railroad to make the spot at all accessible. And the actual
"mining" operations included everything from digging out and smelting
the ores to manufacturing all sorts of things from metal door-knobs to
steel rails and even steamboats to ply on the Irtish River. He put a
large sum of English, Canadian and American money--including much of his
own--into the work of building up a great establishment which was just
on a paying basis when the war broke out. It is all now in the hands of
the Bolsheviki, with a most dubious outlook for the recovery of any of
the money put into it.

Other large operations under his direction were in Colorado, Mexico,
Korea, the Malay Straits Settlement, South Africa, and India (Burma).
The Burma undertaking has been, in its outcome at least, and, indeed, in
many other respects, Hoover's greatest victory in mining engineering and
organization. It is today the greatest silver-lead mine in the world,
although it started from as near to nothing as a mine could be and yet
be called a mine. It took him and his associates five years to
transform some deserted works in the heart of a jungle into the foremost
producer of its kind in all the world. This mine is far away in the
north of Burma, almost on the Chinese border. They had first to build
eighty miles of railroad through the jungle and over two ranges of
mountains, a sufficient feat of engineering in itself, and then to
create and organize at the end of this line everything pertaining to a
great mining plant. Thirty thousand men were employed in establishing
the mine.

Altogether Hoover and his associates had in their employment, in the
various mining undertakings under way in 1914, about 175,000 men, and
the annual mineral output of the mines being handled by them was worth
as much as the total annual output of all the mines in California. And
practically all of these successful mines had been made out of
unsuccessful ones. For Hoover really developed a new profession in
connection with mining; a profession of making good mines out of bad
ones, of making bankrupt mining concerns solvent, not by manipulation on
the stock exchange but by work in the earth, in the mills, in the mine
offices. He works with materials, not pieces of paper. It takes him from
three to five years to bring a dead mine to life; the mine must have
mineral in it, to be sure, to start with, but he does all the rest. That
little matter of having mineral in it is the whole thing, you may think.
But if you do, you must think again. The history of mining is more a
history of how mines with mineral in them have not succeeded in becoming
mines where the mineral could be profitably got out of them, than of how
such mines have succeeded. A successful mine is infinitely more than a
hole in the ground with mineral at its bottom. It is railroads and
steamers, mills, housing for men, men themselves, organization, system,
skill, brains, all-around human capacity. Herbert Hoover is a great
miner because he is--I say it bluntly and not from any blind
hero-worship--a great man.

If he is, he can do more than mine greatly; he can do other things
greatly. Well, he can, and he has done them. We come to that part of his
story now, the part that begins when the World War began, when the
world saw with amazement that grew into ever greater amazement an
unknown miner, that is, unknown except to other miners, calmly do things
that only great men can do. But we who know now the story of the boy and
the man of the years before the war are not so much amazed. We know that
he is the kind of man, who had had the kind of experience, the kind of
world education, who with opportunity can do things the world calls
great and be the great man. But just for a few minutes before we begin
with August, 1914, the time when Herbert Hoover began a new chapter in
his work because the world had begun a new epoch in its history, let us
have a glimpse of this man outside of his mines and his offices. Let us
see him in his home, with his family, with his books if he has any, and
with his friends of whom he has many.

His two children, Herbert and Allan, were born in 1903 and 1907
respectively. Living first in apartments, the Hoovers felt that they and
the boys and the dog Rags needed more room, or perhaps, better,
different kind of room, room for an energetic family of Americans to
grow up in Western American fashion, as far as this could be compassed
in London. And so they found, farther west, in a short street just off
Kensington High Street and close to Kensington Gardens, a roomy old
house with a garden with real trees in it and some grass and
flower-beds. It had been built long before by somebody who liked room,
and then rebuilt, or at least made over and added to, by Montin Conway,
the Alpinist and author. For generations it had been called "The Red
House," a name that became in the succeeding years more and more widely
known to Americans living in, coming to, or passing through London, for
it became a well-known house of American foregathering.

I knew it first in 1912 when I was doing some work in the British Museum
Library. The bedroom to which my wife and I were shown was inhabited
already by a happy and very vocal family of little Javanese seed birds
and green parrakeets, a part of the boys' menagerie which had to find
refuge from the other animals already housed in their adjoining rooms.
Out in the garden there were pigeons fluttering in and out of a cote,
and hens solemnly inspecting the newly-seeded flower-beds. A big silver
Persian cat, and a smaller yellow Siamese one regularly attended
breakfasts, and Rags irregularly attended everything. The cats were Mr.
Hoover's favorites. He liked to have one on his lap as he talked.

There were bookshelves in all of the rooms, and I noted that the owner,
however many the guests had been, or long the evening, never went up to
bed without a book in his hand. I came later to know how fixed this
night-reading habit had become, for in the Belgian relief years when we
had frequently to cross the perilous North Sea together on our way from
Thames-mouth to Holland or back in one of the little Dutch boats which
used to run across twice a week until most of the boats had been blown
up by floating mines, Hoover used always to fix an electric pocket lamp
or a stub of a candle to the edge of his bunk and read for a while after
turning in. He has had little time for reading in daytime, but yet he
has read enormously. It is this night-reading that explains it.

The shelves in "The Red House" contained many books about geology and
mining and metallurgy. But they contained many others as well.
Especially were they burdened with books on economics and political
science. And they bore lighter loads of stories. Sherlock Holmes was
there _in extenso_. The books on civics and economics and theories of
finance were well thumbed and some of them margined with roughly
penciled notes. I should say they had been studied. A frequent evening
visitor, who came by preference when there had been no guests at dinner,
was a well-known brilliant student of finance and economics, formerly
editor of the best-known English financial weekly and now editor of a
very liberal, not to say radical, weekly of his own. He and Hoover held
long disquisition together, each having clear-cut ideas of his own and
glad to try them out on the keen intelligence of the other. As a mere
biologist, whose little knowledge was more of the domestic economy of
the four and six-footed inhabitants of earth than of the social science
and politics of the bipedal lords of creation, my rôle was chiefly that
of fascinated listener.

Although he likes books and even likes writing, Hoover makes no claims
to authorship himself. Nevertheless he has found time to put something
of his knowledge, based on firsthand experience of the fundamentals and
details of mining geology, and mining methods and organization, into a
book which, under the title of _Principles of Mining_, has been a
well-known text for students of mining engineering since its appearance
in 1909. The book is a condensation of a course of lectures given by the
author partly in Stanford and partly in Columbia University. Although it
contains an unusual amount of original matter and old knowledge
originally treated for the kind of book it professes to be, namely a
compact manual of approved mining practice, the author's preface is a
model of modest appraisement of his work. One of its paragraphs simply
demands quotation:

     "The bulk of the material presented [in this book] is the common
     heritage of the profession, and if any may think there is
     insufficient reference to previous writers, let him endeavor to
     find to whom the origin of our methods should be credited. The
     science has grown by small contributions of experience since, or
     before, those unnamed Egyptian engineers, whose works prove their
     knowledge of many fundamentals of mine engineering six thousand
     eight hundred years ago. If I have contributed one sentence to the
     accumulated knowledge of a thousand generations of engineers or
     have thrown one new ray of light on the work, I shall have done my
     share."

In the latter chapters of the book Hoover, having devoted the earlier
chapters to technical methods, treats of the administrative and
financial phases of mining. The last chapter is devoted to the
"character, training, and obligations of the mining engineering
profession" in which he sets up a standard of professional ethics for
the engineer of the very highest degree and reveals clearly his own
genuinely philanthropic attitude toward his fellow men. In the
discussion of mining administration there is a concise but illuminating
treatment of the subject of labor unions. After discussing contract work
and bonus systems he says:

     "There is another phase of the labor question which must be
     considered, and that is the general relations of employer and
     employed. As corporations have grown, so likewise have the labor
     unions. In general, they are normal and proper antidotes for
     unlimited capitalistic organization.

     "Labor unions usually pass through two phases. First, the inertia
     of the unorganized labor is too often stirred only by demagogic
     means. After organization through these and other agencies, the
     lack of balance in the leaders often makes for injustice in
     demands, and for violence to obtain them and disregard of
     agreements entered upon. As time goes on, men become educated in
     regard to the rights of their employers and to the reflection of
     these rights in ultimate benefit to labor itself. Then the men, as
     well as the intelligent employer, endeavor to safeguard both
     interests. When this stage arrives, violence disappears in favor of
     negotiation on economic principles, and the unions achieve their
     greatest real gains. Given a union with leaders who can control the
     members, and who are disposed to approach differences in a
     business spirit, there are few sounder positions for the employer,
     for agreements honorably carried out dismiss the constant
     harassments of possible strikes. Such unions exist in dozens of
     trades in this country, and they are entitled to greater
     recognition. The time when the employer could ride roughshod over
     his labor is disappearing with the doctrine of _laissez faire_ on
     which it was founded. The sooner the fact is recognized, the better
     for the employer. The sooner some miners' unions develop from the
     first into the second stage, the more speedily will their
     organizations secure general respect and influence.

     "The crying need of labor unions, and of some employers as well, is
     education on a fundamental of economics too long disregarded by all
     classes and especially by the academic economist. When the latter
     abandon the theory that wages are the result of supply and demand,
     and recognize that in these days of international flow of labor,
     commodities and capital, the real controlling factor in wages is
     efficiency, then such an educational campaign may become possible.
     Then will the employer and employee find a common ground on which
     each can benefit. There lives no engineer who has not seen
     insensate dispute as to wages where the real difficulty was
     inefficiency. No administrator begrudges a division with his men
     of the increased profit arising from increased efficiency. But
     every administrator begrudges the wage level demanded by labor
     unions whose policy is decreased efficiency in the false belief
     that they are providing for more labor."

Three years before publishing the _Principles of Mining_ Hoover had
collaborated with a a group of authors in the production of a book
called _Economics of Mining_. And three years later, that is in 1912, he
privately published, in sumptuous form, with scrupulously exact
reproduction of all of its many curious old woodcuts, an English
translation of Agricola's "De Re Metallica," the first great treatise on
mining and metallurgy, originally published in Latin in 1556, only one
hundred years after Gutenberg had printed his first book. "De Re
Metallica" was the standard manual of mining and metallurgy for 180
years. Georgius Agricola, the author, was really one Georg Bauer, a
German of Saxony, who, following the custom of his time used for
pen-name the literal Latin equivalents of the words of his German name.

This translation, with its copious added notes of editorial commentary,
was the joint work of Hoover and his wife--it was Mrs. Hoover, indeed,
who began it--and occupied most of their spare time, especially their
evenings--and sometimes nights!--and Sundays, through nearly five years.
They had been for some time collecting and delving in old books on China
and the Far East and ancient treatises on early mining and metallurgical
processes, and had accumulated an unusual collection of such books,
ransacking the old bookshops of the world in their quest. In 1902, Mrs.
Hoover while looking up some geology in the British Museum Library,
stumbled again on Agricola, which she had forgotten since the days she
was in Dr. Branner's laboratory. By invoking the services of one of
their friends among the old book dealers the Hoovers soon owned a copy.
Caught especially by the many curious and only half understandable
pictures in it they began to translate bits from it here and there,
especially the explanations of the pictures, and in a little while they
were lost. Nothing would satisfy them short of making a complete
translation. It became an obsession; it was at first their recreation;
then because it went very slowly it seemed likely to become their life
avocation.

They found an early German translation, which, however, helped them
little. The translator had apparently known little of mining and not too
much of Latin. They went to Saxony, to the home of Agricola, hoping to
get clues to the difficult things in the book by seeing the region and
mines which had been under his eyes while writing it, and finding
traditions of the mining methods of his time. But it was as if a sponge
had been passed over Agricola and his days. Fire had swept over the
towns he had known and all the ancient records were gone. The towns,
rebuilt, and the mines of which he had written were there, but of him
and of the ancient methods he wrote about there was hardly record or
even tradition. They went to Freiberg, where has long existed the
greatest German school of mines, the greatest mining school in the
world, indeed, until the American schools were developed--probably the
Germans would not admit even this qualification--and there they found no
more to help them than in Agricola's own towns. In fact, the Freiberg
professors seemed rather irritated by the advent of these searchers for
ancient mining history, for, as the savants explained, the Freiberg
methods and machines were all the most modern in the world; there were
"no left-overs, no worn-out rubbish of those inefficient ages" around
Germany's great school of mines.

So the Hoovers were little rewarded by their pilgrimage to Germany for
help in their attempt to resuscitate the Saxon Agricola. But they kept
on mining in the big tome and finally, in the fifth year of their
devoted spare-time labors they had before them a completed translation.




CHAPTER VII

THE WAR: THE MAN AND HIS FIRST SERVICE


From the first day of the World War Herbert Hoover has been a world
figure. But much of what he has done and how he has done it is still
only hazily known, for all the general public familiarity with his name
as head of the Belgian relief work, American food administrator, and,
finally, director-general of the American and Allied relief work in
Europe after the armistice. The public knows of him as the initiator and
head of great organizations with heart in them, which were successfully
managed on sound business principles. But it does not yet know the
special character of Hoover's own personal participation in them, his
original and resourceful contributions to their success, and the
formidable obstacles which he had constantly to overcome in making this
success possible. There was little that "just happened" which
contributed to this success; that which did just happen usually happened
wrong. Things came off because ideals were realized by practical method,
decision, and driving power. I should like to be able to give the people
of America a revealing glimpse, by outline and incident, of all this.
And I should like, too, to be able to make clear the pure Americanism of
this man; to disclose the basis of belief in the soundness of the
American heart and the practical possibilities of American democracy on
which Hoover banked in determining his methods and daring his decisions.
This belief was the easier to hold inasmuch as he has himself the
soundness of character, the fundamental conviction of democracy, and the
true philanthropy that he attributes to the average American. He is his
own American model.

To call Herbert Hoover "English" as a cheap form of derogation, is to
reveal a surprising paucity of invention in criticism. It is also unfair
to about as American an American as can be found. The translation of
Agricola, an account of which closed our last chapter, stretched over
the long time that it did, not alone because Mr. and Mrs. Hoover could
give only their spare hours to it, but also because they could turn to
it only while they were in London where the needed reference books were
available. And their presence in London was so discontinuous that their
translating work was much more marked by interruption than continuity.
The constant returns to America where there were the New York and San
Francisco offices to be looked after personally, and the many trips to
the mining properties scattered over the world, limited Hoover's London
days to a comparatively small number in each year. A London office was,
to be sure, necessary between 1902 and 1914 because of the advantage to
a world miner of being close to affairs in the world's center of mining
interests. And it was also necessary during Belgian relief days because
of its unequaled accessibility, by persons or cable, from all the vital
points in the complex international structure of the relief
organization. But in all this period of London connection, except in the
Belgian relief period, Hoover was a familiar figure in mining circles
in both New York and San Francisco, and although rarely able to cast his
vote in America he maintained a lively interest in American major
governmental affairs.

Hoover kept up, too, an active interest in the development of his _alma
mater_, Stanford University, and especially in its geology and mining
engineering department. In 1908 he was asked to join its faculty, and
delivered a course of lectures on the principles of mining, which
attracted such favorable comment that he repeated it shortly after in
condensed form in Columbia University. On the basis of his experience as
a university student of mining, and as a successful mine expert and
operator, and as an employer of many other university graduates from
universities and technical schools Hoover has formed definite
conclusions as to what the distinctive character of professional
university training for prospective mining engineers should be. It
differs from a widely held view.

He believes that the collegiate training should be less practical than
fundamental. The attempts, more common a decade ago than now perhaps,
to convert schools of mining and departments of mining geology into
shops and artificial mines, do not meet with favor in his eyes.
Vocational, or professional, training in universities should leave most
of the actual practice to be gained in actual experience and work after
graduation. If the student is well-grounded in the fundamental science
of mining and metallurgy, in geology and chemistry and physics and
mechanics, he can quickly pick up the routine methods of practice. And
he can do more. He can understand their _raison d'être_, and he can
modify and adapt them to the varying conditions under which they must be
applied. He can, in addition, if he has any originality of mind at all,
devise new methods, discover new facts of mining geology--the interior
of the earth is by no means a read book as yet--and add not only his
normal quota of additional wealth to the world, as a routine worker, but
an increment of as yet unrealized possibilities, as an original
investigator. In Hoover's own choice of assistants he has selected among
men fresh from the universities or technical schools those who have had
thoroughly scientific, as contrasted with much technical, or so-called
practical, training.

His interest in universities and university administration and methods
has always been intense. It has been reciprocated, if his honorary
degrees from a dozen American colleges and universities can be assumed
to be evidence of this. In 1912 he was made a trustee of Stanford and
from the beginning of this trusteeship until now he has taken an active
part in the university management, giving it the full benefit of his
constructive service. His most recent activity in this connection has
concerned itself with the needed increase and standardization of faculty
salaries so that for each grade of faculty position there is assured at
least a living minimum of salary. He was the originating figure and
principal donor of the Stanford Union, a general club-house for students
and faculty, which adds materially to the comfort of home-wandering
alumni and to the democratic life of the University. In all the great
University plant there was no place for a common social meeting-ground
for faculty, alumni, and undergraduates. The Union provided it. If
Stanford did much for Hoover in the days when he was one of its
students, he has loyally repaid his obligation.

But all of these accounts of Hoover's various activities still leave
unanswered many questions concerning the more intimate personal
characteristics of the man to whom the World War came in August, 1914,
with its special call for service. He was then just forty years old,
known to mining engineers everywhere and to the alumni and faculty and
friends of Stanford University and to a limited group of business
acquaintances and personal friends, but with a name then unknown to the
world at large. Today no name is more widely known. Today millions of
Europeans call him blessed; millions of Americans call him great. My own
belief is that he and his work did more to save Europe from complete
anarchy after the war than any other influence exerted on its people
from the outside, and that without it there was no other sufficient
influence either outside or inside which would have prevented this
anarchy.

Hoover's kinds of work are many, but his recreations are few. His chief
form of exercise--if it is exercise--is motoring. He does not play
outdoor games; no golf, tennis, but little walking. He has no system of
kicking his legs about in bed or going through calisthenics on rising.
And yet he keeps in very good physical condition, at least he keeps in
sufficiently good condition to do several men's days' work every day. He
has a theory about this which he practices, and which he occasionally
explains briefly to those who remonstrate with him about his neglect of
exercise. "You have to take exercise," he says, "because you overeat. I
do not overeat, and therefore I do not need exercise." It sounds very
simple and conclusive; and it seems to work--in his case.

He likes social life, but not society life. He enjoys company but he
wants it to mean something. He has little small talk but plenty of
significant talk. He saves time by cutting out frills, both business and
social. His directness of mental approach to any subject is expressed in
his whole manner: his immediate attack in conversation on the essence
of the matter, his few words, his quick decisions. He can make these
decisions quickly because he has clear policies to guide him. I recall
being asked by him to come to breakfast one morning at Stanford after he
had been elected trustee, to talk over the matter of faculty standards.
His first question to the two or three of us who were there was: What is
the figure below which a professor of a given grade (assistant,
associate, or full professor) cannot maintain himself here on a basis
which will not lower his efficiency in his work or his dignity in the
community? We finally agreed on certain figures. "Well," said Hoover,
"that must be the minimum salary of the grade."

He knows what he wants to do, and goes straight forward toward doing it;
but if difficulty too great intervenes--it really has to be very
great--he withdraws for a fresh start and tries another path. I always
think of him as outside of a circle in the center of which is his goal.
He strikes the circle at one spot; if he can get through, well and good.
If not he draws away, moves a little around the circumference and
strikes again. This resourcefulness and fertility of method are
conspicuous characteristics of him. To that degree he is "diplomatic."
But if there is only one way he fights to the extreme along that way.
And those of us who have lived through the difficult, the almost
impossible, days of Belgian relief, food administration, and general
European after-the-war relief, with him, have come to an almost
superstitious belief in his capacity to do anything possible to human
power.

He has a great gift of lucid exposition. His successful argument with
Lloyd George, who began a conference with him on the Belgian relief work
strongly opposed to it on grounds of its alleged military disadvantages
to the Allies, and closed it by the abrupt statement: "I am convinced;
you have my permission," is a conspicuous example, among many, of his
way of winning adherence to his plans, on a basis of good grounds and
lucid and effective presentation of them. He has no voice for speaking
to great audiences, no flowers of rhetoric or familiar platitudes for
professional oratory, but there is no more effective living speaker to
small groups or conferences around the council table. He is clear and
convincing in speech because he is clear and precise in thinking. He is
fertile in plan and constructive in method because he has creative
imagination.

The first of his war calls to service came just as he was preparing to
return to America from London where he had brought his family from
California to spend the school vacation of 1914. Their return passage
was engaged for the middle of August. But the war came on, and with it
his first relief undertaking. It was only the trivial matter--trivial in
comparison with his later undertakings--of helping seventy thousand
American travelers, stranded at the outbreak of the war, to get home.
These people, rich and poor alike, found themselves penniless and
helpless because of the sudden moratorium. Letters of credit, travelers'
checks, drafts, all were mere printed paper. They needed real money,
hotel rooms, steamer passages, and advice. And there was nobody in
London, not even the benevolent and most willing but in this respect
powerless American ambassador who could help them. At least there
seemed none until Hoover transferred the "relief" which had
automatically congested about his private offices in the "city" during
the first two days to larger headquarters in the Hotel Savoy. He
gathered together all his available money and that of American friends
and opened a unique bank which had no depositors and took in no money,
but continuously gave it out against personal checks signed by unknown
but American-looking people on unknown banks in Walla Walla and Fresno
and Grand Rapids and Dubuque and Emporia and New Bedford. And he found
rooms in hotels and passage on steamers, first-class, second-class or
steerage, as happened to be possible. Now on all these checks and
promises to pay, just $250 failed to be realized by the man who took a
risk on American honesty to the extent of several hundred thousand
dollars.

Some of the incidents of this "relief" were pathetic, and some were
comic. One day the banker and his staff, which was composed of his wife
and their friends, were startled by the apparition in the front office
of a group of American plains Indians, Blackfeet and Sioux, all in the
most Fenimore Cooperish of full Indian dress, feathers and skins,
war-paint and tomahawks. They had been part of a Wild West show and
menagerie caught by the war's outbreak in Austria, and had, after
incredible experiences, made their way out, dropping animals and baggage
as they progressed, until they had with them only what they had on,
which in order to save the most valuable part of their portable
furniture, was their most elaborate costumes. They had got to London,
but to do it they had used up the last penny and the last thing they
could sell or pawn except their clothes, which they had to wear to cover
their red skins. Hoover's American bank saw these original Americans
off, with joyful whoopings of gratitude, for Wyoming.

But the work was not limited to lending the barely necessary funds to
those who wished to borrow. He raised a charitable fund among these same
friends for caring for the really destitute ones until other relief
could come. This came in the shape of the American Government's "ship of
gold," the battle-ship _Tennessee_, sent over to the rescue. Hoover was
then asked by Ambassador Page and the Army officers in charge of the
London consignment of this gold to persuade his volunteer committee to
continue their labors during its distribution. With this money available
all who were able to produce proof of American citizenship could be
given whatever was necessary to enable them to reach their own country.

And then came the next insistent call for help. And in listening to it,
and, with swift decision, undertaking to respond to it, Herbert Hoover
launched himself, without in any degree realizing it, on a career of
public service and corresponding abnegation of private business and
self-interest, that was to last all through the war and through the
armistice period, and is today still going on. In all this period of war
and after-war service he has received no salary from government or
relief organizations but, on the contrary, has given up a large income
as expert mining engineer and director of mining companies. In addition,
he has paid out a large sum for personal expenses incurred in
connection with the work.

The call was for the relief of Belgium. I know the story of Hoover in
his relation to the relief of Belgium very well because I became one of
his helpers in it soon after the war began and remained in it until the
end. But it is a hard story to tell; there is too much of it. My special
duties were of a kind to keep me constantly in touch with "the Chief,"
and I was able to realize, as only a few others were, the load of
nerve-racking responsibility and herculean labor carried by him behind
the more open scene of the public money-gathering, food-buying and
transporting, and daily feeding of the ten million imprisoned people of
occupied Belgium and France. In the relief of these helpless peoples
Hoover put, perhaps for the first time, certainly for the first time on
any such enormous scale and with such outstanding success, philanthropy
on a basis of what dear old Horace Fletcher, shut up with us in Belgium
during the Occupation, would permit to be referred to by no other phrase
than the somewhat hackneyed one of "engineering efficiency," unless we
would use a new word for it which he coined. In fact he used the new
word "Hooverizing" as a synonym for efficiency with a heart in it, two
years before it became familiar in America with another meaning. And I
prefer his meaning of the word to that of the food-saving meaning with
which we became familiar in Food Administration days.




CHAPTER VIII

THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM; ORGANIZATION AND DIPLOMATIC DIFFICULTIES


Despite the general popular knowledge that there was a relief of Belgium
and that Hoover was its organizer and directing head, there still seems
to be, if I may judge by the questions often asked me, no very wide
knowledge of just why there had to be such relief of Belgium and how
Herbert Hoover came to undertake it. A fairly full answer to these
queries makes a proper introduction to any account, however brief, of
his participation in this extraordinary part of the history of the war.

The World War began, as we all most vividly remember, with the
successful, although briefly but most importantly delayed invasion of
Belgium. And this invasion resulted in producing very promptly not only
a situation appalling in its immediate realization, but one of even
more terrifying possibilities for the near future. For through the haze
of the smoke-clouds from burning towns and above the rattle of the
machine guns in Dinant and Louvain could be seen the hovering specter of
starvation and heard the wailing of hungry children. And how the specter
was to be made to pass and the children to hush their cries was soon the
problem of all problems for Belgium.

Within ten weeks after the first shots of the War all of Belgium except
that dreary little stretch of sand and swamp in the northwestern corner
of it that for over four years was all of the Kingdom of Belgium under
the rule of King Albert, was not only in the hands of a brutal enemy but
was enclosed and shut away from the rest of the world by a rigid ring of
steel. Not only did the Germans maintain a ring of bayonets and
electrified wire fence--this latter along the Belgian-Dutch
frontier--around it, but the Allies, recognizing that for all practical
purposes, Occupied Belgium was now German territory, had to include it
in their blockade of the German coast. Thus no persons or supplies could
pass in or out of Belgium except under extraordinary circumstances,
such as a special permission from both Germany and Allies or a daring
and almost impossible blockade-running.

Now Belgium is not, as America is, self-sustaining as to food. If an
enemy could completely blockade us, we could go on living indefinitely
on the food we produce. But Belgium could not; nor could England or
France or Italy. Belgium is not primarily an agricultural country,
despite the fact that what agriculture it does have is the most
intensive and highly developed in Europe. It is an industrial country,
the most highly industrialized in Europe, with only one sixth of its
people supporting themselves by agriculture. It depends upon constant
importations for fifty per cent of its general food needs and
seventy-five per cent of its needed food-grains.

The ring of steel about Belgium, then, if not promptly broken, plainly
meant starvation. The imprisoned Belgians saw, with the passing days,
their little piles of stored food supplies get lower. They had
immediately begun rationing themselves. The Government and cities had
taken possession of such small food stocks as had not been seized by the
Germans for their armies, and were treating them as a common supply for
all the people. They distributed this food as well as they could during
a reign of terror with all railways and motors controlled by their
conquerors. They lived in those first weeks on little food but much
hope. For were not their powerful protectors, the French and English,
very quickly going to drive the invaders back and out of their country?
But it soon became apparent that it was the Allied armies that were
being driven not only out of Belgium but farther and farther back into
France. So the Allies could do nothing, and the Germans would do nothing
to help them. Indeed, everything the Germans did was to make matters
worse. There was only one hope; they must have food from outside
sources, and to do this they must have recourse to some powerful neutral
help.

Belgium, and particularly Brussels, has always had its American colony.
And it was to these Americans that Belgium turned for help. Many members
of the colony left as soon after the war began as they could, but some,
headed by Minister Brand Whitlock, remained. When the Belgian court left
Brussels for Antwerp, and later for Le Havre, part of the diplomatic
corps followed it, but a smaller part stayed in Brussels to occupy for
the rest of the war a most peculiar position. Mr. Whitlock elected to
stay. It was a fortunate election for the Belgians. Also it meant many
things, most of them interesting, for the sympathetic Minister.

When the American expatriates in Belgium who wished to leave after the
war began, applied to Minister Whitlock for help to become repatriates,
he called to his assistance certain American engineers and business men
then resident in Brussels, notably Messrs. Daniel Heineman, Millard
Shaler, and William Hulse. He also had the very effective help of his
First Secretary of Legation, Mr. Hugh Gibson, now our Minister to
Poland. These men were able to arrange the financial difficulties of the
fleeing Americans despite closed banks, disappearing currency, and
general financial paralysis. When this was finished they readily turned
to the work of helping the Belgians, the more readily because they were
the right sort of Americans.

Their first effort, in coöperation with the burgomaster of Brussels and
a group of Brussels business men, was the formation of a Central
Committee of Assistance and Provisioning, under the patronage of the
Ministers of the United States and Spain (Mr. Whitlock and the Marques
de Villalobar). This committee was first active in the internal measures
for relief already referred to, but soon finding that the shipping about
over the land of the rapidly disappearing food stocks of the country and
the special assistance of the destitute and out-of-work--the destruction
of factories and the cessation of the incoming of raw materials had
already thrown tens of thousands of men out of employment--must be
replaced by a more radical relief, this committee resolved to approach
the Germans for permission to attempt to bring in food supplies from
outside the country.

Burgomaster Max had already written on September 7 to Major General
Luettwitz, the German Military Governor of Brussels, asking for
permission to import foodstuffs through the Holland-Belgium border, and
the city authorities of Charleroi had also begun negotiation with the
German authorities in their province (Hainaut) to the same end, but
little attention had been paid to these requests. Therefore the
Americans of the committee decided, as neutrals, to take up personally
with the German military authorities the matter of arranging imports.

A general permission for the importation of foodstuffs into Belgium by
way of the Dutch frontier was finally obtained from the German
authorities in Belgium, together with their guarantee that all such
imported food would be entirely free from requisition by the German
army. Also, a special permission was accorded to Mr. Shaler to go to
Holland, and, if necessary, to England to try to arrange for obtaining
and transporting to Belgium certain kinds and quantities of foodstuffs.
But no money could be sent out of Belgium to pay for them, except a
first small amount which Mr. Shaler was allowed to take with him.

In Holland, Mr. Shaler found the Dutch government quite willing to allow
foodstuffs to pass through Holland for Belgium, but it asked him to try
to arrange to find the supplies in England. Holland already saw that she
would need to hold all of her food supplies for her own people. So
Shaler went on to England. Here he tried to interest influential
Americans in Belgium's great need, and, through Edgar Rickard, an
American engineer, he was introduced to Herbert Hoover.

This brings us to Hoover's connection with the relief of Belgium. But
there was necessary certain official governmental interest on the part
of America and the Allies before anybody could really do much of
anything. Hoover therefore introduced Shaler to Dr. Page, the American
Ambassador, a man of heart, decision, and prompt action. This was on
October 7. A few days before, on September 29, to be exact, Shaler
together with Hugh Gibson, the Secretary of the American Legation in
Brussels who had followed Shaler to London, had seen Count Lalaing, the
Belgian minister to England, and explained to him the situation inside
of Belgium. They also handed him a memorandum pointing out that there
was needed a permit from the British Government allowing the immediate
exportation of about 2,500 tons of wheat, rice, beans, and peas to
Belgium. Mr. Shaler had brought with him from Brussels money provided by
the Belgian _Comité Central_ sufficient to purchase about half this
amount of foodstuffs.

The Belgian Minister transmitted the request for a permit to the British
Government on October 1. On October 6 he received a reply which he, in
turn, transmitted to the American Ambassador in London, Mr. Page. This
reply from the British Government gave permission to export foodstuffs
from England through Holland into Belgium, under the German guarantees
that had previously been obtained by Mr. Heineman's committee, on the
condition that the American Ambassador in London, or Americans
representing him, would ship the foodstuffs from England, consigned to
the American Minister in Brussels; that each sack of grain should be
plainly marked accordingly, and that the foodstuffs should be
distributed under American control solely to the Belgian civil
population.

On October 7, the day that Hoover had taken Shaler to the American
Embassy and they had talked matters over with Mr. Page, the Ambassador
cabled to Washington outlining the British Government's authorization
and suggesting that, if the American Government was in accord with the
whole matter as far as it had gone, it should secure the approval of the
German Government. After a lapse of four or five days, Ambassador Page
received a reply from Washington in which it was stated that the
American Government had taken the matter up with Berlin on October 8.

After an exchange of telegrams between Brussels, London, Washington, and
Berlin, Ambassador Page was informed on October 18 by Ambassador Gerard,
then American Ambassador in Berlin, that the German Government agreed to
the arrangement, and the following day confirmation of this was received
from Washington.

Sometime during the course of these negotiations Ambassador Page and the
Belgian authorities formally asked Hoover to take on the task of
organizing the relief work, if the diplomatic arrangements came to a
satisfactory conclusion. His sympathetic and successful work in looking
after the stranded Americans, all done under the appreciative eyes of
the American Ambassador, had recommended him as the logical head of the
new and larger humanitarian effort. Hoover had agreed, and his first
formal step, taken on October 10, in organizing the work, was to enlist
the existing American Relief Committee, whose work was then practically
over, in the new undertaking. He amalgamated its principal membership
with the Americans in Brussels, and on October 13, issued in the name of
this committee an appeal to the American people to consolidate all
Belgian relief funds and place them in the hands of the committee for
disposal. At the same time Minister Whitlock cabled an appeal to
President Wilson to call on America for aid in the relief of Belgium.

Between October 10 and 16 it was determined by Ambassador Page and Mr.
Hoover that it was desirable to set up a wholly new neutral
organization. Hoover enlisted the support of Messrs. John B. White,
Millard Hunsiker, Edgar Rickard, J. F. Lucey, and Clarence Graff, all
American engineers and business men then in London, and these men,
together with Messrs. Shaler and Hugh Gibson, thereupon organized, and
on October 22 formally launched, "The American Commission for Relief in
Belgium," with Hoover as its active head, with the title of chairman,
Ambassador Page and Ministers Van Dyke and Whitlock, in The Hague and
Brussels, respectively, were the organization's honorary chairmen. A few
days afterward, at the suggestion of Minister Whitlock, Señor Don Merry
del Val, the Spanish Ambassador in London, and Marques de Villalobar,
the Spanish Minister in Brussels, both of whom had been consulted in the
arrangements in Belgium and London, were added to the list of honorary
chairmen. And, a little later, there were added the names of Mr. Gerard,
the American Ambassador at Berlin, Mr. Sharp, our Ambassador at Paris,
and Jongkeer de Weede, the Dutch Minister to the Belgian Government at
Le Havre where it had taken refuge. At the same time the name of the
Commission was modified by dropping from it the word "American" in
deference to the official connection of the Spanish diplomats with it.
The new organization thus became styled "The Commission for Relief in
Belgium," which remained its official title through its existence. This
name was promptly reduced, in practical use by its members, with
characteristic American brevity, to "C. R. B.," which, pronounced
"tsay-er-bay," was also soon the one most widely used in Belgium and
Occupied France by Belgian, French, and Germans alike.

I have given this account of the organization and status of the
Commission in so much detail because it reveals its imposing official
appearance which was of inestimable value to it in carrying on its
running diplomatic difficulties all through the war. The official
patronage of the three neutral governments, American, Spanish and Dutch,
gave us great strength in facing the repeated assaults on our existence
and the constant interference with our work by German officials and
officers. I have earlier used the phrase "satisfactory conclusion of
diplomatic arrangements." There never was, in the whole history of the
Commission, any satisfactory conclusion of such arrangements; there were
sufficiently satisfactory conditions to enable the work to go on
effectively but there was always serious diplomatic difficulty.
Ministers Whitlock and Villalobar, our "protecting Ministers" in
Brussels, had to bear much of the brunt of the difficulties, but the
Commission itself grew to have almost the diplomatic standing of an
independent nation, its chairman and the successive resident directors
in Brussels acting constantly as unofficial but accepted intermediaries
between the Allies and the Germans.

The "C. R. B." was organized. It had its imposing list of diplomatic
personages. It had a chairman and secretary and treasurer and all the
rest. But to feed the clamoring Belgians it had to have food. To have
food it had to have money, much money, and with this money food in large
quantity had to be obtained in a world already being ransacked by the
purchasing agents of France and England seeking the stocks that these
countries knew would soon be necessary to meet the growing demands of
their armies and civilians drawn from production into the great game of
destruction. Once obtained, the food had to be transported overseas and
through the mine-strewn Channel to Rotterdam, the nearest open port of
Belgium, and thence by canals and railways into the starving country and
its use there absolutely restricted to the civil population. Finally,
the feeding of Belgium had to begin immediately and arrangements had to
be made to keep it up indefinitely. The war was not to be a short one;
that was already plain. It was up to Hoover to get busy, very busy.

The first officials of the C. R. B. and all the men who came into it
later, agree on one thing. We relied confidently on our chairman to
organize, to drive, to make the impossible things possible. We did our
best to carry out what it was our task to do. If we had ideas and
suggestions they were welcomed by him. If good they were adopted. But
principally we worked as we were told for a man who worked harder than
any of us, and who planned most of the work for himself and all of us.

He had the vision. He saw from the first that the relief of Belgium
would be a large job; it proved to be a gigantic one. He saw that all
America would have to be behind us; indeed that the whole humanitarian
world would have to back us up, not merely in funds but in moral
support. For the military logic of the situation was only half with us;
it was half against us. The British Admiralty, trying to blockade
Germany completely, saw in the feeding of ten million Belgians and
French in German-occupied territory a relief to the occupiers who would,
by the accepted rules of the game, have to feed these people from their
own food supplies. The fact that the Germans declared from the first
that they never would do this and in every test proved that they would
not, was hard to drive home to the Admiralty and to many amateur English
strategists safely far from the sufferings of the hungering Belgians.

On the other hand other influential governmental officials, notably the
Prime Minister and the heads of the Foreign Office, saw in the Allied
help for these people the only means to prevent them from saving their
lives in the one other way possible to them, that is, by working for the
Germans. Fathers of families, however patriotic, cannot see their wives
and children starve to death when rescue is possible. And the Germans
offered this rescue to them all the time. Never a day in all the four
years when German placards offering food and money for their work did
not stare in the faces the five hundred thousand idle skilled Belgian
workmen and the other hundreds of thousands of unskilled ones shut up in
the country.

Germany, also, had two opinions about Belgian relief. There were zu
Reventlow and his great party of jingoes who cried from beginning to
end: Kick out these American spies; make an end of this
soft-heartedness. Here we have ten million Allied hostages in our hands.
Let us say to England and France and the refugee Belgian cabinet at Le
Havre: Your people may eat what they now have; it will last them a month
or two; then they shall not have a mouthful from Germany or anywhere
else unless you give up the blockade and open the ports of Belgium and
Germany alike to incoming foods.

On the other side were von Bissing and his German governing staff in
Belgium, together with most of the men of the military General Staff at
Great Headquarters. Von Bissing tried, in his heavy, stupid way, to
placate the Belgians; that was part of his policy. So he would offer
them food--always for work--with one hand, while he gave them a slap
with the other. He wanted Belgium to be tranquil. He did not want to
have openly to machine-gun starving mobs in the cities, however many
unfortunates he allowed to be quietly carried out to the _Tir National_
at gray dawn to stand for one terrible moment before the ruthless firing
squad. And the hard-headed men of the General Staff knew that starving
people do not lie down quietly and die. All the northern lines of
communication between the west front and Germany ran through the
countries of these ten million imprisoned French and Belgians. Even
without arms they could make much trouble for the guards of bridges and
railways in their dying struggles. At least it would require many
soldiers to kill them fast enough to prevent it. And the soldiers, all
of them, were needed in the trenches. In addition the German General
Staff earnestly desired and hoped up to the very last that America would
keep out of the war. And these extraordinary Americans in Belgium seemed
to have all of America behind them; that is what the great relief
propaganda and the imposing list of diplomatic personages on the C. R.
B. list were partly for. Hoover had realized from the beginning what
this would mean. "No," said the higher German officials, "it will not do
to interfere too much with these quixotic Americans."

But the Germans, most of them at least, never really understood us. One
day as Hoover was finishing a conversation with the head of the German
Pass-Zentral in Brussels, trying to arrange for a less vexing and
delaying method of granting passes for the movements of our men, the
German officer said: "Well, now tell me, Herr Hoover, as man to man,
what do you get out of all this? You are not doing all this for
nothing, surely." And a little later, at a dinner at the Great
Headquarters to which I had been invited by one of the chief officers of
the General Staff, he said to me, as we took our seats: "Well, how's
business?" I could only tell him that it was going as well as any
business could that made no profits for anybody in it.

It was impressive to see Hoover in the crises. We expected a major
crisis once a month and a minor one every week. We were rarely
disappointed in our expectations. I may describe, for illustration, such
a major crisis, a very major one, which came in August, 1916. The
Commission had been making a hard fight all summer for two imperatively
needed concessions from the Germans. We wanted the General Staff to turn
over to us for the civil population a larger proportion of the 1916
native crop of Occupied France than we had had from the 1915 crop. And
we wanted some special food for the 600,000 French children in addition
to the regular program imported from overseas. We sorely needed fresh
meat, butter, milk and eggs for them and we had discovered that Holland
would sell us certain quantities of these foods. But we had to have the
special permission of both the Allies and Germany to bring them in.

Hoover, working in London, obtained the Allied consent. But the Germans
were holding back. I was pressing the General Staff at Great
Headquarters at Charleville and von Bissing's government at Brussels.
Their reasons for holding back finally appeared. Germany looked on
Holland as a storehouse of food which might some time, in some way,
despite Allied pressure on the Dutch Government, become available to
Germany. Although the French children were suffering terribly, and
ceasing all growth and development for lack of the tissue-building
foods, the Germans preferred not to let us help them with the Dutch food
but to cling to their long chance of sometime getting it for themselves.

Hoover came over to Brussels and, together, we started for Berlin. We
discovered von Bissing's chief political adviser, Baron von der Lancken
and his principal assistant, Dr. Rieth, on the same train. These were
the two men who, after the armistice, proposed to Hoover by wire
through our Rotterdam office, to arrange with him for getting food into
Germany and received by prompt return wire through the same
intermediary: "Mr. Hoover's personal compliments and request to go to
hell. If Mr. Hoover has to deal with Germany for the Allies it will at
least not be with such a precious pair of scoundrels."

When these gentlemen, who had helped greatly in making our work and life
in Belgium very difficult, saw us, they were somewhat confused but
finally told us they were called to Berlin for a great conference on the
relief work. When we reached Berlin we found three important officers
from Great Headquarters in the Hotel Adlon. Two of them we knew well;
they had always been fairly friendly to us. The third was General von
Sauberzweig, military governor of Brussels at the time of Miss Cavell's
execution, and the man of final responsibility for her death. As a
result of the excitement in Berlin because of the world-wide indignation
over the Cavell affair he had been removed from Brussels _by promotion_
to the Quartermaster Generalship at Great Headquarters!

The Berlin conference of important representatives of all the government
departments and the General Staff had been called as a result of the
influence of zu Reventlow and the jingoes who wished to break down the
Belgian relief. We were not invited; we just happened to be there. We
could not attend the conference, but we could work on the outside. We
went to Ambassador Gerard for advice. The Allies were pressing the
Commission to get the concessions on the 1916 native crop. Our effort to
get the food for the children was entirely our own affair. Mr. Gerard
advised Hoover to rely entirely on the Commission's reputation for
humanity and neutrality; to keep the position of the Allies wholly out
of the discussion. But this was indeed only the confirmation by a wise
diplomat of the idea of the situation that Hoover already had.

Most of the conference members were against the relief. At the end of
the first session Lancken and one of the Headquarters officers told us
that things were almost certainly going wrong. They advised Hoover to
give up. What he did was to work harder. He forced the officials of the
Foreign Office and Interior to hear him. He pictured the horrible
consequences to the entire population of Belgium and Occupied France of
breaking off the relief, and painted vividly what the effect would be on
the neutral world, America, Spain, and Holland in very sight and sound
of the catastrophe. He pleaded and reasoned--and won! It was harder than
his earlier struggle with Lloyd-George, already entirely well inclined
by feelings of humanity, but in each case he had saved the relief. Not
only did the conference not destroy the work, but by continued pressure
later at Brussels and Great Headquarters we obtained the agreements for
an increase of the civilian allotment out of the 1916 French crop and
for the importation of some of the Dutch food for the 600,000 suffering
children. It was a characteristic Hooverian achievement in the face of
imminent disaster.

Hoover and the C. R. B. were in Belgium and France for but one purpose,
to feed the people, to save a whole nation from starvation. To them the
political aspects of the work were wholly incidental, but they could
not be overlooked. So with the Germans disagreeing among themselves, it
was the impossibility of France's letting the two and a half million
people of her own shut up in the occupied territory starve under any
circumstances possible to prevent, and the humanitarian feeling of Great
Britain and America, which Hoover, by vivid propaganda, never allowed to
cool, and the strength of which he never let the diplomats and army and
navy officials lose sight of, that turned the scale and enabled the
Commission for Relief in Belgium to continue its work despite all
assault and interference. Over and over again it looked like the end,
and none of us, even the sanguine Chief, was sure that the next day
would not be the last. But the last day did not come until the last day
of need had passed, and never from beginning to end did a single commune
of all the five thousand of Occupied Belgium and France fail of its
daily bread. It was poor bread sometimes, even for war bread, and there
were many tomorrows that promised to be breadless, but no one of those
tomorrows ever came.




CHAPTER IX

THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM; SCOPE AND METHODS


I have dropped the thread of my tale. Our narrative of the organization
of the Commission for Relief in Belgium had brought us only to the time
when the Commission was actually ready to work, and we have leaped to
the very end of those bitter hard four years. We must make a fresh
start.

First, then, as to money. And to understand about the money it is
necessary to understand the two-phased character of the relief of
Belgium. There was the phase of _ravitaillement_, the constant
provisioning of the whole land; and the phase of _secours_, the special
care of the destitute and the ill and the children.

The ring of steel did not immediately make beggars of all the Belgians
enclosed within it. Many of them still had money. But, as I have already
said, the Germans would not allow any of this money to go out. It could
buy only what was in Belgium. And as Belgium could produce only about
half the food it needed to keep its people alive, and only one fourth of
the particular kind of foodstuffs that were necessary for bread, and as
it was arranged, by control of the mills and bakeries, that these
bread-grains should be evenly distributed among all the people, it meant
that even though banker this or baron that might have money to buy much
more, he could really buy, with all his money, only one fourth as much
bread as he needed. There had to be, in other words, a constant bringing
in of enough wheat and flour to supply three fourths of the bread-needs
of the whole country, and another large fraction of the necessary fats
and milk and rice and beans and other staples. This was the
_ravitaillement_.

But even with the food thus brought in there were many persons, and as
the days and months and years passed they increased to very many, who
had no money to buy this food. They were the destitute, the families of
the hundreds of thousands of men thrown out of work by the destruction
of the factories and the cessation of all manufacturing and commerce.
And there were the Government employees, the artists, the lace-making
women and girls, and a whole series of special kinds of wage-earners,
with all wages suddenly stopped. To all these the food had to be given
without pay. This was the _secours_.

To obtain the food from America and Argentina and India and wherever
else it could be found a constant supply of money in huge amounts was
necessary. Hoover realized from the beginning that no income from
charity alone could provide it. His first great problem was to assure
the Commission of means for the general _ravitaillement_. He solved the
problem but it took time. In the meanwhile the pressure for immediate
relief was strong. He began to buy on the credit of a philanthropic
organization which had so far no other assets than the private means of
its chairman and his friends.

The money, as finally arranged for, came from government subventions
about equally divided between England and France, in the form of loans
to the Belgian Government, put into the hands of the Commission. Later
when the United States came into the war, this country made all the
advances. Altogether nearly a billion dollars were spent by the C. R. B.
for supplies and their transportation, at an overhead expense of a
little more than one half of one per cent. This low overhead is a record
in the annals of large philanthropic undertaking, and is a measure of
the voluntary service of the organization and of its able management.

For the _secours_, fifty million dollars worth of gifts in money, food
and clothing were collected by the Commission from the charitable people
of America and Great Britain. The Belgians themselves inside the
country, the provinces, cities, and well-to-do individuals, added, under
the stimulus of the tragic situation and under the direction of the
great Belgian National Committee, hundreds of millions of francs to the
_secours_ funds. Also the Commission and the Belgian National Committee
arranged that a small profit should be charged on all the food sold to
the Belgians who could pay for it, and this profit, which ran into
millions of dollars, was turned into the funds for benevolence. All
this created an enormous sum for the _secours_, which was the real
"relief," as benevolence. And this enormous sum was needed, for by the
end of the war nearly one-half of all the imprisoned population of over
seven million Belgians and two and a half million French were receiving
their daily bread wholly or partly on charity. Actually one half of the
inhabitants of the great city of Antwerp were at one time in the daily
soup and bread lines.

Of the money and goods for benevolence that came from outside sources
more than one third came from England and the British Dominions--New
Zealand gave more money per capita for Belgian relief than any other
country--while the rest came chiefly from the United States, a small
fraction coming from other countries. The relief collections in Great
Britain were made by a single great benevolent organization called the
"National Committee for Relief in Belgium." This Committee, under the
chairmanship of the Lord Mayor of London and the active management of
Sir William Goode as secretary and Sir Arthur Shirley Benn as
treasurer, conducted an impressive continuous campaign of propaganda and
solicitation of funds with the result of obtaining about $16,000,000
with which to purchase food and clothing for the Belgian destitute.

But in the United States the C. R. B. itself directly managed the
campaign for charity, using its New York office as organizing and
receiving headquarters. Part of the work was carried by definitely
organized state committees in thirty-seven states and by scattered local
committees in almost every county and large city in the country. Ohio,
for example, had some form of local organization in eighty out of the
eighty-eight counties in the state, and California had ninety local
county and city committees all reporting to the central committee.

The American campaign was different from the English one in that instead
of asking for money alone, the call was made, at first, chiefly for
outright gifts of food, the Commission offering to serve, in connection
with this benevolence, as a great collecting, transporting and
distributing agency. This resulted in the accumulation of large
quantities of foodstuffs of a wide variety of kinds, much of it in the
nature of delicacies and luxuries and most of it put up in small
packages. Tens of thousands of these packages were sent over to Belgium,
but the cry came back from the Commission's workers there that food in
this shape was very difficult to handle in any systematic way. It was
quickly evident that what was really needed was large consignments in
bulk of a few kinds of staple and concentrated foods, which could be
shipped in large lots to the various principal distribution centers in
Belgium and thence shipped in smaller lots to the secondary or local
centers, and there handed out on a definite ration plan.

A number of states very early concentrated their efforts on the loading
and sending of "state food ships." California sent the _Camino_ in
December, 1914, and in the same month Kansas sent the _Hannah_ loaded
with flour contributed by the millers of the state. In January and
March, 1915, two Massachusetts relief ships, the _Harpalyce_ (sunk by
torpedo or mine on a later relief voyage) and _Lynorta_, sailed. Oregon
and California together sent the _Cranley_ in January, 1915, loaded with
food and clothing, and several other similar state ships were sent at
later dates. A gift from the Rockefeller Foundation of a million dollars
was used to load wholly or in part five relief ships, and the "Millers'
Belgian Relief" movement organized and carried through by the editor of
the Northwestern Millers, Mr. W. C. Edgar, resulted in the contribution
of a full cargo of flour, valued at over $450,000, which left
Philadelphia for Rotterdam in February, 1915, in the steamer _South
Point_. The cargo was accompanied by the organizer of the charity, who
was able to see personally the working of the methods of the C. R. B.
inside of Belgium and the actual distribution of his own relief cargo.
His Good Samaritan ship was sunk by a German submarine on her return
trip, but fortunately the philanthropist was not on her. He returned by
a passenger liner, and was able to tell the people of America what was
needed in Belgium, and what America was doing and could further do to
help meet the need.

Later, when it became necessary to obtain food from other primary
markets in addition to those of America, appeal was specifically made
for gifts of money in place of goods. In response to this call various
large gifts from wealthy individual donors were made, among them one of
$210,000, another of $200,000, and several of $100,000 each, and various
large donations came from the efforts of special organizations, notably
the Daughters of the American Revolution, the New York Chamber of
Commerce, the Cardinal Gibbons' Fund from the Catholic children of
America, the Dollar Christmas Fund organized by Mr. Henry Clews, the
"Belgian Kiddies, Ltd.," fund, organized by Hoover's brother mining
engineers of the country, and, largest of all, the Literary Digest fund
of more than half a million dollars collected by the efforts of Mr. R.
J. Cuddihy, editor of the Digest, in sums ranging from a few pennies to
thousands of dollars from children and their parents all over the land.

By far the greater part of the money that came to the Commission through
state committees or through special organizations, or directly from
individuals to the New York office, was made up from small sums
representing millions of individual givers. And it was a beautiful and
an important thing that it was so. The giving not only helped to save
Belgium from starvation of the body, but it helped to save America from
starvation of the soul. The incidents, pathetic, inspiring, noble,
connected with the giving, gave us tears and smiles and heart thrills
and thanksgiving for the revelation of the human love of humanity in
those neutral days of a distressing pessimism.

But finding the money and food and clothing was but the first great
problem for the resourceful C. R. B. chairman to solve. Next came the
serious problem of transportation, both overseas and internal. Ships
were in pressing demand; they constantly grew fewer in number because of
the submarine sinkings, and yet the Commission had constant need of more
and more. Some way Hoover and his associates of the New York and London
offices got what it was necessary to have, but it was only by a
continuous and wearing struggle. Altogether the C. R. B. delivered seven
hundred and forty full ship cargoes and fifteen hundred part cargoes of
relief food and clothing into its landing port, Rotterdam. The seventy
ships under constant charter as a regular C. R. B. fleet crossed the
seas under guarantees from both the Allies and Germany of
non-molestation by sea raiders or submarines. A few accidents happened,
but not more than twenty cargoes were totally or partly lost at sea.
Most of the losses came from mines, but a few came from torpedoes fired
by German submarines which either did not or would not see the C. R. B.
markings on the ships. The signals were plain--conspicuous fifty-foot
pennants flying from the mast-heads, great cloth banners stretching
along the hull on either side, a large house flag, wide deck cloths, and
two huge red-and-white-striped signal balls eight feet in diameter at
the top of the masts. All these flags and cloths were white, carrying
the Commission's name or initials (C. R. B.) in great red letters.
Despite all these, a few too eager or too brutal submarine commanders
let fly their torpedoes at these ships of mercy.

Hoover's most serious time in connection with the overseas
transportation, and the most critical period as regards supplies in the
whole course of the relief was just after the putting into effect by the
Germans, in February, 1917, of the unrestricted submarining of all boats
found in the so-called prohibited ocean zones. These zones covered all
of the waters around the United Kingdom, including all of the English
Channel and North Sea. This cut us off entirely from any access to
Rotterdam from the West or North. But it also cut Holland off. And
between our pressure and that of Holland the German authorities finally
arranged for a narrow free, or "safe," north-about route extending from
the Dutch coast north to near the Norwegian coast, thence northwest to
the Faroe Islands, and thence west to the Atlantic beyond the barred
zone. At one point this "safe" zone was only twenty miles wide between
the German and English mine-fields in the North Sea and any ship getting
a few rods across the line either east or west was in great danger from
mines and was exposed to being torpedoed without warning. Imagine the
state of mind of a skipper who had not seen the sun for three or four
days in a North Sea fog, trying to make out his position accurately
enough by dead reckoning to keep his boat in that "safe" channel.

But even this generous concession to the Commission and Holland was not
arranged until March 15, and in the six weeks intervening between
February 1 and this time we did not land a single cargo in Rotterdam.
Belgium suffered in body and was nearly crazed in mind as we and the
Belgian relief heads scraped the very floors of our warehouses for the
last grains of wheat.

Another almost equally serious interruption in the food deliveries had
occurred in the preceding summer (July, 1916), when, without a whisper
of warning, Governor General von Bissing's government suddenly tied up
our whole canal-boat fleet by an order permitting no Belgian-owned canal
boat--although chartered by us--to pass out from Belgium into Holland
without depositing the full value of the boat in money before crossing
the frontier. The Governor General had reason to fear, he said, that
some of the boats that went out would not come back, and he was going to
lose no Belgian property subject to German seizure without full
compensation. As the boats were worth, roughly, about $5,000 each, and
we were using about 500 boats it would have tied up two and a half
million dollars of our money to meet this demand, and tied it up in
German hands! We simply could not do it. So we began negotiations.

Oh, the innumerable beginnings of negotiations, and oh, the interminable
enduring of negotiations, the struggling against form and "system,"
against obstinate and cruel delay--for delay in food matters in Belgium
was always cruel--and sometimes against sheer brutality! How often did
we long to say: Here, take these ten million people and feed them or
starve them as you will! We quit. We can't go on fighting your floating
mines and too eager submarines, your brutal soldiers and more brutal
bureaucrats. Live up to your agreements to help us, or at least do not
obstruct us; or, if you won't, then formally and officially and
publicly before the world kick us out as your arch-jingo, Reventlow,
demands.

But we could not say it; we could not risk it; it was too certain to be
starving rather than feeding. So we did not say it, but went on with the
negotiations. In this particular case of the canal boats we finally
compromised by putting up the value of five boats. If one did not come
back the Germans were to take out its value and we were to replace the
money so as to keep the pot full. Of course all the boats did come back,
and now the Belgians and not the Germans have them.

Thus, guarded by guarantees and recognition marks, there came regularly,
and mostly safely, across wide oceans and through the dangerous
mine-strewn Channel or around the Faroe Islands, the rice from Rangoon,
corn from Argentina, beans from Manchuria, and wheat and meat and fats
from America at the rate of a hundred thousand tons a month through all
the fifty months of the relief. At Rotterdam these precious cargoes were
swiftly transhipped into sealed canal boats--a fleet of 500 of them
with 35 tugs for towing was in service--and hurried on through the
canals of Holland and across the guarded border, and then on to the
great central depots in Belgium, and from there again by smaller canal
boats and railway cars and horse-drawn carts under all the difficulties
of carrying things anywhere in a land where anything and everything
available for transport was subject to requisition at any time by an
all-controlling military organization, to the local warehouses and
soup-kitchens of every one of the 5,000 Belgian and French communes in
the occupied territory. And always and ever through all the months and
despite all difficulties on water or land the food had to come _in
time_. This was the transportation undertaking of Hoover's C. R. B.

Finally when the food was brought to the end of its journeying it had to
be protected from hungry Germans and divided fairly among hungry
Belgians. Always the world asked: But don't the Germans get the food?
and it still asks: Yes, didn't they? Our truthful answer then and now
is: No. And you need not take our answer alone. Ask the British and
French foreign offices. They knew almost as much as we did of what was
going on inside of the steel ring around Belgium and occupied France.
Their intelligence services were wonderful. Remember the guarantees of
the German government to us and our protecting ministers and
ambassadors, the diplomatic representatives of neutral America and Spain
and Holland. The orders of von Bissing and the General Staff were
explicit. Official German placards forbidding seizure or interference by
German soldiers or officials were on all the canal boats and railway
cars and horse carts and on all the warehouses used by the Commission.

Of course there were always minor infractions but there were no great
ones. The Germans after the early days of wholesale seizure during the
invasion and first few months after it, got but a trifling amount of
food out of Belgium and almost none of it came from the imported
supplies. Every Belgian was a detective for us in this ceaseless watch
for German infractions and we had our own vigilant service of
"Inspection and Control" by keen-eyed young Americans moving
ceaselessly all over the country and ever checking up consumption and
stocks against records of importation.

And this brings us to the American organization inside of Belgium. The
New York and London and Rotterdam C. R. B. offices had their
hard-working American staffs and all important duties but it was those
of us inside the ring that really saw Belgian relief in its pathetic and
inspiring details. We were the ones who saw Belgian suffering and
bravery, and who were privileged to work side by side with the great
native relief organization with its complex of communal and regional and
provincial committees, and at its head, the great Comité National, most
ably directed by Emile Francqui, whom Hoover had known in China.
Thirty-five thousand organized Belgians gave their volunteer service to
their countrymen from beginning to end of the long occupation. And many
thousands more were similarly engaged in unofficial capacity. We saw the
splendid work of the women of Belgium in their great national
organizations, the "Little Bees," the "Drop of Milk," the "Discreet
Assistance," and all the rest. My wife, who was inside with us, has
tried to tell the story of the women of Belgium in another book, but as
she rightly says: "The story of Belgium will never be told. That is the
word that passes oftenest between us. No one will ever by word of mouth
or in writing give it to others in its entirety, or even tell what he
himself has seen and felt."

But the Americans inside know it. Its details will be their ineffaceable
memories. It is a misfortune that so few Americans could share this
experience. For we were never more than thirty-five or forty at a time;
the Germans tried to limit us to twenty-five. We were always, in their
eyes, potential spies. But we did no spying. We were too busy doing what
Herbert Hoover had us there to do. Also we had promised not to spy. But
it was a hard struggle to maintain the correctly neutral behavior which
we were under obligation to do. And when the end of this strain came,
which was when America entered the War, and the inside Americans had to
go out, they all, almost to a man, rushed to the trenches to make their
protest, with gun in hand, against German Kultur as it had been
exemplified under their eyes in Belgium.

Altogether about two hundred Americans represented the C. R. B. at
various times inside of Belgium. They were mostly young university men,
representing forty different American colleges and universities in their
allegiance. A group of twenty Rhodes Scholars whom Hoover hurriedly
recruited from Oxford at the beginning of the work was the pioneer lot.
All of these two hundred were selected for intelligence, honor,
discretion, and idealism. They had to be able, or quickly learn, to
speak French. They had to be adaptable and capable of carrying delicate
and large responsibility. They were a wonderful lot and they helped
prove the fact that either the American kind of university education, or
the American inheritance of mental and moral qualities, or the two
combined, can justly be a source of American self-congratulation.

They were patient and long-suffering under difficulties and provocation.
Ted Curtis, whose grandfather was George William, did, on the occasion
of his seventeenth unnecessary arrest by German guards, express his
opinion of his last captor in what he thought was such pure Americanese
as to be safely beyond German understanding. But when his captor dryly
responded in an equally pure argot: "Thanks, old man, the same to
youse," he resolved to take all the rest in silence. And it was only
after the third stripping to the skin in a cold sentry post that Robert
W., a college instructor, made a mild request to the C. R. B. director
in Brussels to ask von Bissing's staff to have their rough-handed
sleuths conduct their examinations in a warmer room.

The relation of the few Americans in Belgium to the many Belgian relief
workers was that of advisors, inspectors and final authorities as to the
control and distribution of the food. The Americans were all too few to
hand the food out personally to the hosts in the soup lines, at the
communal kitchens, and in the long queues with rations cards before the
doors of the bakeries and the communal warehouses. They could not
personally manage the children's canteens, the discreet assistance to
the "ashamed poor," who could not bring themselves to line up for the
daily soup and bread, nor the cheap res

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