Herber Hoover and a Locker Room Expression

Belgium is one of the smallest and most densely populated nations in Europe.  It is snugged between France, the Netherlands and Germany with the North Sea forming its northern border. Belgium’s population is educated, intelligent, refined and ostensibly neutral. But, in 1914 its children were starving to death.  During World War I Belgium fell to Germany, which refused to feed Belgian’s civilians.  You don’t have to carry a gun to die in war, and children are the easiest and most quickly dismissed victims of all. 

In London an American businessman had already launched and administered a successful effort to bring relief to Americans trapped in England at the beginning of the war.  He was respected and liked, though his social skills were sometimes thin or absent entirely (when he grew weary of the chatter at a dinner party he would simply find a quiet room, pick up a book and start reading).  He was well known as a good judge of character, a creative problem solver, a tireless worker and a man with the ability to see complex solutions where others saw chaos. His name was Herbert Hoover.  Eventually he would become President of the United States but in 1914 he would become the savior of Belgium and then all Continental Europe. 

Herbert Hoover built and administered the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB).  This became the first large international food relief operation in the world.  He recruited and mobilized thousands of American volunteers.  Having secured the food, he then negotiated an agreement with both the allies and the Germans to secure safe passage for food into Belgium. For almost three years, Hoover’s organization delivered 2.5 million tons of food to Belgium, feeding up to 9 million people every day.  At the end of WW I he organized shipments of food for the millions more facing starvation in postwar Europe.  Hoover muscled through the feeding nearly 11 million people a day in 19,000 kitchens across the country.  He refused to take a salary during these years and even paid his own expenses.  Top of Form

To this day, Belgians and many Europeans honor Hoover and refer to him as The Great Humanitarian. 

Hoover’s broad, positive experience with volunteerism both in Europe and the United States did not serve him well when he was faced with the Great Depression.  Hoover had constantly warned Calvin Coolidge and the business establishment against the lack of regulation and margin purchasing on the stock market.  But when the market crashed, the Dust Bowl devastated the middle of the country, and the Great Depression destroyed the economies of North America and Europe, Hoover was the one in the Oval Office.  His emphasis on what had worked almost 20 years before failed to touch the problems of the 1930’s.  The Depression also casts a backward shadow over the remarkable good he had done up to that time. 

Hoover was born to a poor Quaker family in West Branch, Iowa.  His father died when he was nine years old, his mother a year later.  He was then moved from one relative to another, ending up with an uncle in Oregon.  He worked hard every day of his young life. He managed to be admitted to Stanford University in its first class, working his way through and earning a degree in geology.  There he also found the love of his life, Lou Henry Hoover, herself the first woman to be admitted to Stanford.  Hoover was intelligent, educated self-effacing and dedicated to making this world better. 

And now, I hear Trump saying he doesn’t want to be a Herbert Hoover, using that as an excuse to give up power, blood and treasure to Iran. 

Mr. Trump, I know more about both history and Hoover than you do.  And you can’t carry Herbert Hoover’s jock strap. 

Hoover kept the faith.