One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson Page A

tireless efficiency and dispatch, and he made sure that no one anywhere was ever unaware of his accomplishments. Myron Herrick, America’s avuncular ambassador in Paris, performed similar heroic feats in occupied France without receiving any thanks from posterity, but only because he didn’t seek them. Hoover by contrast was meticulous in ensuring that every positive act associated with him was inflated to maximum importance and covered with a press release.
    In fact, Hoover was almost totally lacking in feeling for those he saved. He refused to visit any relief sites or otherwise interact with the unfortunate victims he was helping. Once when an aide innocently took him to a field kitchen in Brussels, Hoover recoiled. “Don’t you ever let me see one of these again,” he seethed. To those who knew him he seemed to have no feelings at all. One acquaintance noted how Hoover talked of his relief work in Europe without emotion. “Not once did he show the slightest feeling or convey to me a picture of the tragedies that went on,” the friend related in wonder.
    Hoover was also extremely intolerant of anything that seemed likely to diminish his eminence. When a Saturday Evening Post article suggested, incorrectly, that the New York office of the Commission for Relief in Belgium was actually the most important and productive part of the operation and that the real leader of the organization was its American head, Lindon Bates, Hoover reacted with a certain wildness. He dashed off a long letter asserting that the article contained “46 absolute untruths and 36 half-truths,” and carefully addressed each contentious point in turn. He ordered the New York office to cease putting out press releases and to clear all announcements in advance through Hoover’s office in London, thus severely hampering its ability to generate donations.
    Belgium was just the beginning for Hoover. Solving crises became his role in life. When America joined the war, President Woodrow Wilson called Hoover home and asked him to become national food administrator, looking after every aspect of wartime American food production, to make sure that plenty was grown, every citizen amply fed, and profiteering rooted out. Hoover coined the slogan “Food will win the war” andpromoted it so effectively that millions were left with the impression that it was Hoover more than anyone else who secured America’s triumph. At war’s end he was sent back to Europe to save millions from starvation again as head of the American Relief Administration (ARA). The challenge was bigger than ever. Hoover was responsible for the well-being of four hundred million people. He oversaw relief operations in more than thirty countries. In Germany alone, the ARA ran thirty-five thousand feeding centers, which collectively provided three hundred million meals to people who would not otherwise have eaten.
    Austria was in an especially parlous state when Hoover arrived. “The peacemakers had done their best to make Austria a foodless nation,” Hoover noted drily in his memoirs. (For a man who had no sense of humor in his personal life, his writing was often bitingly ironic.) Hoover estimated that Austria needed $100 million of food aid to hold out until the next harvest, but it couldn’t raise even a small portion of that. The United States was unable to assist because U.S. law prohibited lending to enemy states, even after they had ceased being enemies. To get around this, Hoover arranged for America to lend $45 million to Britain, France, and Italy, and for them to lend the money on to Austria with the understanding that it be used to buy American food. This cleverly averted starvation while helping American farmers dispose of surplus crops, but it caused understandable dismay among the three allied nations when Congress subsequently insisted that they repay the loan after Austria defaulted. The allies pointed out that they had only borrowed the money in a technical sense and