Abstract
The Armistice was not the end of the CRB. The French Government requested the Commission to help for several more months. Hoover agreed, setting priorities to nourish children. Back in Europe, as a personal envoy to Wilson, Hoover was adamant about continuing the US control of peace and the reconstruction of European economies. Bitter discussions arose among the Allies and their American Associate. A conflict over the attribution of the CRB balance in dollars was the sign of tension between Paris and Washington. Hence, France has scarcely recognized the action of Hoover and the CRB on its own; Hoover is remembered as the harsh negotiator of the Paris Conference, as a staunch Secretary of Commerce, and a supporter of a US President claiming the payment of French war debts to America.
Title taken from Denise Artaud, La fin de l’innocence: les Etats Unis de Wilson à Reagan, Paris, Armand Colin, 1985.
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Notes
- 1.
The President’s Committee of Economic Advisers included several members of the President’s War Council, Bernard Baruch, Vance McCormick, and Hoover in particular.
- 2.
Georges-Henri Soutou, L’Or et le Sang. Les buts de guerre économiques de la Première Guerre mondiale, Paris, Fayard, 1990, this author develops at length the Clémentel plan for the pooling of Allied resources including those of the USA and the fierce opposition of Hoover.
- 3.
Hoover, The Ordeal … op. cit., location 1241 (Kindle edition).
- 4.
MAE Peace Series, 150–151, no. 47, Conference Office of the Minister of Blockade, August 4, 1918.
- 5.
Hoover wanted to replace Louis Guérin, who had not been in the occupied regions since 1917, by Maurice Le Blan from the Brussels office. The authorities allowed him to settle this question, which they considered to be internal to the CRB. The new management appointed as of September 1st continued its activities for only a few months before merging into a new Committee. MAE Peace Series, Europe, 1918–1929, Z Paper Series, Belgium, 145 no. 43, letter from Hoover copied to Guérin, August 14, 1918. See Arch. Dep. du Nord, 9 R 1467 on the reorganization of the CANF on the eve of the liberation and the correspondence between the CRB and the CANF during the year 1918–1919.
- 6.
MAE Peace Series, 150–151, no. 2, memorandum of Poland, October 5, 1918 on the operations of the CRB in the event of their total or partial evacuation by the Germans, 5 pp.
- 7.
MAE Peace Series, 147, no. 22, note from Béri, Delegate for Supply, to Allizé, Légation de France, July 31, 1918 on CRB stocks in invaded areas, 6 pp.
- 8.
MAE Peace Series, 150–151, the file contains several notes on evacuations.
- 9.
MAE Peace Series, 147, no. 75 et seq., telegram from The Hague to Paris, August 19, 1918 on the risks of looting and the state of mind of the population and no. 78, Mr. Prevost, The Hague, to MAE Paris, on the confidences of General Charles Collyns, Minister of War of the Netherlands on the difficulties that could possibly be felt by his government to ensure the free landing of supplies of the CRB and a copy of the article in the newspapers presenting the Commission’s food activities and non-commercial character.
- 10.
MAE Peace Series, 150–151, no. 39, telegram Cambon, London to the Blockade, reporting Poland’s analysis.
- 11.
MAE Peace Series, 150–151, no. 43, telegram from MAE, Paris, to The Hague, October 23, 1918 and no. 48, MAE to London and Le Havre, October 24, 1918.
- 12.
MAE Peace Series, 150–151, no. 53, Minister’s Office Ministry of War, to MAE October 21, 1918.
- 13.
MAE Peace Series, 150–151, no. 71, meeting of November 14, 1918, 4 pp.
- 14.
Visibility was certainly not desirable for Hoover and the USA, who wanted to retain control of their resources and jobs and remain associates without falling into the field of obligations they did not want.
- 15.
MAE Peace Series, 150–151, no. 90, Interministerial Instruction on the Supply of Civilian Populations of the Invaded Regions, December 18, 1918, signed by the Minister of Blockade and the Liberated Regions, Lebrun and the Under-Secretary for Food, Vilgrain.
- 16.
Mabel Hyde Kittredge (1867–1955), an economist and social worker, had been involved since 1901 in the New York City School Feeding Program. She is representative of the progressivism of social workers at the beginning of the century.
- 17.
CRB, box no. 505, Note on the work accomplished by the CRB since the liberation of the invaded regions of the north of France until the cessation of its operations. Period 1st November 1918–20th June 1919. The file includes all the conferences at the Ministry of Food. Copy of the report in MAE Peace Series, 145, no. 127 et seq., 50 pp.
- 18.
The list appears in the general report op. cit.
- 19.
CAEF B 0062583/1 Commission for the supply of Belgium: the file includes the exchanges relating to the dispute and part of the financial correspondence of 1917 concerning the sums to be allocated to the account of advances from France to the USA to be paid directly to the account of the CRB in the USA.
- 20.
Herbert Hoover, An American Epic … op. cit., pp. 438–439.
- 21.
See P. Collinet and P. Stahl, The Supply of Occupied France … op. cit.
- 22.
Herbert Hoover, An American Epic … op. cit., pp. 419–421.
- 23.
CAEF B 0062583/1, telegram from Jusserand, New York, to Paris, September 28, 1921. The ambassador pointed out that any further insistence would upset the Treasury with regard to France as Mr. Wadsworth, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, had suggested.
- 24.
CAEF B 0062583/1, Commission for the supply of Belgium.
- 25.
CRB, box no. 7, folder 40, Financial cooperation between the USA and Europe, Memoranda and letters from Hoover, 11 documents.
- 26.
Idem., pp. 3 and 4.
- 27.
CRB, box no. 7, statement to the press on the financial requirements of Europe, June 7, 1919 p. 1.
- 28.
Idem., p. 3, “If we undertake to give credits, we should undertake it in a definite and organised manner. We should have a consolidated and organised control of the assistance that we give in such a way that it should be used only if economy in imports is maintained, that definite rehabilitation of industry is undertaken, that people return to work, that orderly government is preserved, that fighting is stopped and that disarmament is undertaken, that no discrimination is made against the United States in favor of other countries. If these things are done, the matter is of nothing like such enormous figures as we have been handling during the war and generally I look upon the third state of our intervention in the assistance of Europe as infinitely less difficult and less expensive that the two previous stage or our intervention.”
- 29.
CRB box no. 7, cable to the President recommending that the proposed International Economic Council be dropped.
- 30.
However, at the same time, Etienne Clémentel took the approach of the US Chamber of Commerce into consideration and formed the Schneider mission at the origin of the International Chamber of Commerce. I have studied the genesis. “The Great War. Matrix of the International Chamber of Commerce, Fortunate Business League of Nations,” Andrew Smith, Kevin D. Tennent, and Simon Mollan (ed), The Impact of the First World War on International Business, London, Routledge, 2016.
- 31.
CAEF B-0067580/1, Belgium, French-Belgian regulations Commission for the supply of Belgium, see letter from the Reparation Commission, Belgian delegation, to Formery, Inspecteur, Finances, Paris, March 17, 1922.
- 32.
CAEF B-0067580/1, Belgium, French-Belgian regulations Commission for the supply of Belgium, table of French advances to Belgium.
- 33.
MAE Peace Series, 150–151, no. 87, letter from Hoover to Vilgrain, Supply, January 16, 1919.
- 34.
G.-H. Soutou, L’Or et le Sang … op.cit., see, in particular, p. 746 et seq.
- 35.
On Hoover’s state of mind when he arrived in Europe in October 1918, see for example Telegram T 1477 from de Fleuriau to Clemenceau, Clementel, Loucheur, Boret, Lebrun, October 24, 1918, p. 109, doc. 80, in Robert Frank and Gerd Krumeich (eds), Documents diplomatiques français, Armistices et Paix, 1918–1920, vol. 1, 27 September 1918–17 January 1919, Berne, Peter Lang, 2014.
- 36.
H. Hoover, An American Epic … op. cit., pp. 389–390.
- 37.
H. Hoover, The Ordeal … op. cit., Chapter 9 and his memoirs, vol. 1, Years of Adventure, op. cit.
- 38.
H. Hoover, The Ordeal … op. cit., 1447 (Kindle edition).
- 39.
Francis William O’Brien, Two Peacemakers in Paris: The Hoover-Wilson Post-Armistice Letters 1918–1920, op. cit. Hoover to Wilson, January 23, 1919, p. 48.
- 40.
H. Hoover, The Ordeal … op. cit., Chapter 5. Hoover understood the need to maintain a certain pressure and blockade on Germany to urge her to sign the peace. He found, however, odious the insistence of Paris to refuse all the proposals he made to send in limited and supervised quantities of food.
- 41.
Viz: “to be considered for the purpose of relief in Europe and to determine the general policy and extent to which it is implemented and its relationship to the general supply to allies and neutral countries.”
- 42.
H. Hoover, The Ordeal … op. cit., 1224 (Kindle edition).
- 43.
Suda Lorena Bane, Ralph Haswell Lutz, Organization of American Relief in Europe, Including Negotiations Leading Up to the Establishment of the Office of Director General of Relief at Paris by the Allied and Associates Powers, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1943. The Specials Collections in Hoover Library at Stanford contain the records of the Supreme Economic Council.
- 44.
Kendrick A. Clements, The Life of Herbert Hoover: Imperfect Visionary (1918–1929), New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
- 45.
F. O’Brien, The Wilson-Hoover Wartime Correspondence 1918–1920 … op. cit., p. 19.
- 46.
The Presidency of Wilson, his personality, his legacy, are the subject of an immense literature, one will retain the work of Robert W. Tucker, Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering American’s Neutrality, 1914–1917, Charlottesville, Virginia University Press, 2007. Many of Wilson’s attitudes and considerations seem to have been shared but not clearly stated by Hoover.
- 47.
H. Hoover to President Wilson, April 4, 1917, Hoover and Wilson, Correspondence, idem., p. 21.
- 48.
Herbert Hoover and Hugh Gibson, The Problem of Lasting Peace, New York, Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1942. The book, which was a best seller, is not without interest, it is however often confused. As usual Hoover wants to embrace all the dimensions and scales of the question.
- 49.
New York, McGraw Hill, 1959.
- 50.
Frank M. Surface and Raymond L. White, American Food in the World War and Reconstruction Period: Operations of the Organization Under the Leadership of Herbert Hoover, 1924–1924, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1931. The date of publication was during full presidential turmoil.
- 51.
See, for example, the article and bibliography by Matthew Lloyd Adams, Herbert Hoover and the Organization of the American Relief Effort in Poland (1919–1923), vol. 4, no. 2, European Journal of American Studies, 2009, document 2.
- 52.
Program in force from 1939 to 1946, the substantial archives are kept at the Hoover Institution and the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, the main countries concerned were: Finland, Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, Poland.
- 53.
Joan Beaumont’s stimulating article, Starving for Democracy: Britain’s Blockade and Relief for Occupied Europe 1939–1945, War and Society, 8, no. 2, October 1990. From: Department of History New South Wales, Australian Defense Force Academy, pp. 57–82.
- 54.
The Hoover Presidential Archives at West Branch contains a directory: CRB Fellows 1920–1952; Biographical Directory with the names of 290 Americans and 660 Belgians.
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Druelle, C. (2019). The “End of Innocence,” 1918–1919. In: Feeding Occupied France during World War I. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05563-9_7
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