Abstract
On May 7, 1919, a servant awakened Hoover at 4:00 AM to give him the printed draft of the peace treaty that would be presented to the Germans later in the day. He read through the document, seeing it as a whole for the first time, and was “greatly disturbed.” Going for a walk through the streets of Paris to organize his thoughts, he ran into General Jan Smuts of South Africa and British economist John Maynard Keynes, whose faces reflected their own concern. They all agreed that if the treaty remained unaltered, it would guarantee future disaster. From the American perspective, Hoover thought, “the economic consequences alone would pull down all Europe and thus injure the United States.”1
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Notes
Herbert Hoover, Memoirs: Years of Adventure, 1874–1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 461–62
Ibid., 473–79; Sally Marks, The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe, 1918–1933, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 20–28.
Donald Markwell, John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 67.
Ibid., 68–72; Michael J. Hogan, Informal Entente: The Private Structure of Cooperation in Anglo-American Economic Diplomacy, 1918–1928 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1977), 25–29.
Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt, “German and American Concepts to Restore a Liberal World Trading System after World War I,” in Confrontation and Cooperation: Germany and the United States in the Era of World War I, 1900–1924, ed. Hans-Jürgen Schröder (Providence, RI: Berg, 1993), 356.
Carl P. Parrini, Heir to Empire: United States Economic Diplomacy, 1916–1923 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969), 80–88.
Edgar Rickard to Lou Henry Hoover, November 26, 1919, enclosing minutes of ARA Directors’ meeting on November 6, Lou Henry Hoover Papers, Hoover Library, West Branch, Iowa, Box 1, “Subject File: American Relief Administration, Correspondence and Reports, 1919–20”; Herbert Hoover, Memoirs: The Cabinet and the Presidency, 1920–1933 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 18–19
David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 338–40.
Robert H. Van Meter, Jr., “Herbert Hoover and the Economic Reconstruction of Europe, 1918–21,” in Herbert Hoover: The Great War and Its Aftermath, 1918–23, ed. Lawrence E. Gelfand (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1979), 145
“To the Publishers of The Literary Digest,” October 19, 1920, Hoover Papers, Pre-Commerce Period, Box 24, “ARA, undated to 1921”; Herbert Hoover, “Three Million Starving Children Crying to America,” Current Opinion, November 1920, 611–16; Herbert Hoover, “The Appeal of Hungry Children to the American Community Chest,” ARA Bulletin, 2nd ser., 1, no. 5 (December 1, 1920): 1–5
Hoover, “How Much Longer Must We Feed Europe?” The Forum 64 (December 1920): 377–79.
Unidentified clipping of photographs of December 29 “invisible guest” dinner, Hoover Papers, Pre-Commerce Period, Box 74, “January 7–9, 1921”; Herbert Hoover, “America’s Welcome to Its Invisible Guests,” December 29, 1920, ARA Bulletin, 2nd ser., 1, no. 8 (January 15, 1921); Hoover, Memoirs 2
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© 2010 Kendrick A. Clements
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Clements, K.A. (2010). The European Relief Program, September 1919–1921. In: The Life of Herbert Hoover. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230107908_5
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