Thegoing to mosety in, on beginning of my own presentation so that people can head in from the break. Great pleasure to be invited here and be part of this event. It is a distinct pleasure, to be surrounded by so many hoovers. [laughter] like we are complete. We start this segment in the summer of 1921, and in that summer soviet russia is the scene of a catastrophic famine. As george nash mentioned earlier. Millions are threatened with starvation and disease. Most of them, i will have a map up, situated in and beyond the volga river valley. The soviet government, led by vladimir lenin, is unable to cope with the disaster, so it is goced to allow an appeal to out for foreign assistance. And at that time, on that day, in the summer of 1921, there is only one man on the planet in a position to answer that call, and that of course is the man you see here. That is Herbert Hoover, as chairman of the American Relief administration, the a. R. A. As george nash told us, since 1919 the a. R. A. Is a private relief organization, relief agency. But i would say really, at least for this part of the hoover humanitarian story, we should say it is quasiprivate. Hoover is the secretary of commerce, and that will play a role in the story as it spins out in the next few minutes. In that summer of 1921, after some very delicate negotiations, in latvia, hoovers a. R. A. Enters soviet russia to fight the great famine. In the end, millions would die in that famine. Most soviet historians believe the figure is at least 6 Million People would die in 1921, 1922. Other estimates go as high as 10 million. These are deaths not from outright starvation. Most people in a famine die from hungerrelated disease. But many millions, i should say, are saved by what the a. R. A. Is about to undertake. In fact, we will do a flash forward. By the summer of 1922, american kitchens were feeding every day so on a daily basis about 10 million soviet citizens. And here you see i will come back to this map a little later but here you see how the food is going to get into the baltic ports up here, and coming in through the black sea ports here. Here is where the famine is centered, also beyond the volga river valley. But this is where the volga is located. At the time, when this operation was unfolding, certainly by the summer of 1923 when it ends, the American Rescue operation is of theas the beau geste 20th century. That remark is made by a norwegian explorer and humanitarian. But within a decade, it was all but forgotten or ignored. In particular by americans. And at the very end today, i will explain to you how that happened. The official papers of the American Relief administration, hundreds of manuscript boxes, are located in the Hoover Institution archives. On the stanford campus. That is where i did most of my research for a book on this episode beginning back in 1987. But i did need to come to west branch. I did it twice, back in 1989, 1990. It proved to be essential for my research. I looked into diaries and personal letters of the americans who served in the mission. These are chiefly men who are in their midtolate 20s. They are former doughboys, such as this group right here. This is the group that served on the volga. A, on most of them are university graduates. Some of them are real characters who are looking to continue the great adventure they began when they came over to serve in the great war. These young men, all of these, had experience as relief workers with the a. R. A. In places like poland and austria. But the hardship they encountered in Central Europe did not compare to the horrors they now witnessed in soviet russia. This was a genuine, large scale famine. It was brought on by years of war and revolution, followed by a major drought in russias main grain growing regions. This was a famine not in the cities. That is what the a. R. A. Men were used to in central and eastern europe, but in the countryside. The famine devastated the grain producers, the producers of the food. This is a new ballgame for the americans of the a. R. A. So what kinds of things did they encounter . What kind of sights did they see . A big thing they encountered when they arrived on the volga is a lot of people were trying to get out in order to get to a source of food. A lot of people assumed that would be in ukraine. Ukraine was having their own famine in the south. They found people dying in large numbers, many dying at railway stations, such as this at a provincial town on the volga. The refugee problem is enormous, and they have to turn the tide in order to solve the problem of the famine. Another few slides in here, i think there are only three, but they are a little difficult to look at, so i am going lightly on this kind of thing today. Here is one of them. Many of the young victims, and that was the central focus for Herbert Hoover, are suffering from edema, the distended stomach, caused by eating grass and weeds, various other food substitutes. In fact, going through the museum yesterday, you could see some of the food substitutes brought back by the americans who served in russia. They are in the museum displays. I saw them yesterday. What passes as food you can see this in the museum resembles sort of black or green bread. It usually contains only the slightest bit of flour, the rest being grass or some other similar ingredient. Children are especially vulnerable to that kind of socalled food. Substances that could sustain adults could kill their offspring. The worst scenes of suffering the americans encountered in the socalled childrens homes were refugee children, orphaned or abandoned by their parents, who were taken in. The americans, dreaded after a short time in the volga valley, dreaded going into these childrens homes. They were haunted by it afterwards. Children looked at the relief workers, looked at the americans in a kind of absent sort of way. They expected kids to be pleading for bread. They seemed to be beyond that point. That is the scene going into the autumn of 1921. Herbert hoovers original idea was to feed only i am going to do the scare quote thing only 1 million children. Soon that was increased by the time they signed the riga agreement to 3 million children. What they pictured going in was that the kitchens they would operate would look like this. This was the fall of 1921. This is one of the largest kitchens, and it is in petrograd. And 3 million children, by the way, would have been the largest a. R. A. Mission to date. And so, they were thinking it would be in the cities that the relief would be delivered and distributed, and they pretty much thought it would be capped at 3 million. But the types of scenes that i showed you in the previous slides would soon transform the mission into something much more ambitious than hoover had contemplated. Now, hoover was perceived at the time, perceived in those days, as americas leading antibolshevik. He was a communist killer. His feeding in europe had the effect of stemming the tide of spreading bolshevism. Hoover assumed that food could stop the spread of the disease of bolshevism, which is believed to be caused by an empty stomach. Stop that and you put a stop to bolshevism. Food relief inside soviet russia, it was assumed, might help bring the russian people to their senses, give them some oomph, and help bring down the soviet government. These attitudes were very well known to soviet officials. Lenin not the least among them. It is no surprise that American Relief workers get there, despite the fact that they had a good agreement they signed going in, they find it difficult to get the cooperation of soviet officials. The a. R. A. Men, these young guys, they expect this. They expect obstructionism on the behalf of the bolsheviks. They know that lenins government had allowed hoovers men in out of desperation. The soviet archives reveal this in particular after 1991. The soviet union collapses. It shows that hoover and his colleagues were originally absolutely paranoid about what this guy might try to pull off inside the homeland of communism. Anything has been possible, right . This guy could do it. The kremlin, or the bolsheviks in the kremlin, had very good reason to be on their guard, although their worst fears were quickly dissipated. Keptrs relief workers strictly to business. They did not try to use food as a weapon by feeding antisoviet elements. But still, still, the very presence of an American Relief organization operating inside soviet russia constituted a dangerous threat. Aside from the soviet government being embarrassed by having to be bailed out by Herbert Hoover and his a. R. A. , to see an example of American Energy and efficiency, it was feared, might give some russians the wrong idea about the wisdom of the communist experiment. And so the bolshevik authorities make every effort to give the appearance of control. That inspired the title i gave to this talk. Say it aint so, comrade. I dont know if any of the americans said it that way, but that was the spirit of a lot of the explanations of disbelief that came out. The hoover was convinced soviet experiment, still after four years, was destined to be shortlived. The famine seemed to be a deathknell. There was at this time, i think most of you will know, no u. S. Official diplomatic relations with the soviet union. That would come, by the way, only after president Herbert Hoover would leave office in 1933. As i say, initially hoover wanted to restrict the relief to feeding children. And the idea was to come up with meals that consisted of some combination of beans, rice, corn grits, bread, milk, cocoa, lard, and sugar. Did i mention cocoa . Cocoa was huge with these kids. Dont have time to go into it. [laughter] so feeding children, it is a hoover hallmark. But the American Relief workers on the ground see the enormity of the catastrophe, and their reports are that russia, tell hoover that much more is required. How can we feed the children and let the parents die . Among other things that might result in huge numbers of orphaned children, and russia would be saddled with that problem going in for another decade. So, these reports that the americans send out, and which eventually reached Herbert Hoover, set the stage for the dramatic expansion of the mission in the winter of 19211922. Hoover listened to those pleas, and he asked for harding to approach congress with a request for appropriation of 20 million. Eventually, all monies for this vision would add up to about 60 million. That translates into about 909 million today. The 20 million congressional appropriation would be used to purchase corn. And a very importantly, seed, w heat seed, that would be sent to soviet russia. The essential story of the mission, a book i wrote about the a. R. A. , is how backed by this congressional appropriation of 20 million , undertakes a Massive Campaign to transport corn and seed from the american midwest to the russian heartland, thereby breaking the back of famine and securing the harvest of 1922. We are going to go to a different map. You see this is a big picture map. Are you going to blink . Here we go. We go a little bit tighter, and you see here you have the baltic ports up here and the black sea ports down here. Sorry i dont have time to get into these ports in the north. But there is ae, race against the clock to get in before they freeze. Not always successful. These are the transport lines here from moscow going out. And you see the volga river snaking down here. This is where most of the slides i am showing you come from. In a few minutes, we will go out here in the ural mountains. We are going to move these supplies. We have to get them to the victims. We have to get the seed there right before the corn arrives no, we have to get the corn there before the seeds arrive so the seeds will not be consumed by the peasants and will save the harvest. But this will take time. In the meantime, soviet citizens are dying by the hundreds of thousands every week. This is the most difficult image i will show you today. This is a city on the volga. It later becomes stalingrad. Today, it is volgagrad. And this is the kind of thing thats going on, all through the winter. The delivery of the relief proves to be a tremendous logistical challenge. When you look back and you see how many things could have gone wrong, this mission could have easily failed instead of becoming the crowning achievement of hoover relief in the wartime and postworld war i period. The obstacles to success were many. It starts with this. The key physical obstacle, aside from the russian winter, the state of russias railroads. European russia is scarred with what the americans call locomotive graveyards like this. Rows of rusted and dilapidated locomotives. They had gone unused for years, the tinders are missing, boilers piston rods removed, boilers opened. Wrote,n journalists they are resting there like sleeping monsters. That is a big deal. At one point in march of 1922, there is a nearly disastrous jam up of corn trains. You can do this. Corn trains here. See the backup going to kazan on the volga, and especially right here. The Railway Lines cannot handle the load. Hoover anticipated this. He worried about this. The central drama is how against all odds, and after that nearly disastrous jam up of corn trains west of the volga, in 1922 the lifesaving corn and wheat seed begins arriving in the villages. And it is the nick of time. The way they get from the railheads to the villages surprises some people. This is a photograph i used on the cover of my book. These are camels. You can see down there. This is the volga river. It is frozen. One of the advantages to the russian winter, right . People are surprised in this story i was when i first began to research this story how many camels were appearing in various places. There were striking images throughout the archives of horse caravans, camel caravans, mixed caravans, oxen. Camels, though, survived longer than the horses. Horses died in large numbers. Camels proved to be a hardier sort, and they were heavily populated in central asia, and also at that time, no longer today, up into the lower volga and north. When the food arrives, remember that petrograd kitchen i showed you earlier . It looks neat and clean and sort of urban. This is more typical of the type of kitchen that the a. R. A. Was serving in, in the villages. I love this photo. This is a different kitchen i am about to show you. This is an exterior shot, and here is an interior shot here. Look at this girls face in the middle here. Striking photograph. Briefly, but it has to be mentioned, the a. R. A. For its first time in its existence, conducted a medical program in russia. The conditions demanded it. Simply, russian medicine could not handle the medical emergency or medical famine, as the americans called it. An important part of that program was an inoculation drive of both adults and children. So the adults, there are the kids, a brave little boy right there. This vaccine was employed to immunize against cholera, typhoid, paratyphoid and dysentery. And a very important part of the program. The mission would stay in russia for a second year. After the secure the harvest of 1922, they stay on for a second year on a much reduced scale. The harvest of 1922, very successful. But still, and one argument for staying was that they could not avoid what some of the a. R. A. Men saw from the beginning as inevitable, and that is an orphan problem. Despite this a. R. A. s best intentions and despite the feeding of many adults, there are many orphans. I would not try to put a number on it. Waif children such as these who roamed the streets into the 1920s, roamed the cities in packs like wild animals. The problem becomes so acute it will last until the end of the decade, and stalin has an idea of how to put an end to that. It is called the first fiveyear plan. Those kids end up working in factories. Another orphan shot. This was the autumn of 1921. The reason i want to show you that photograph is that american is working for the a. R. A. His name is vernon kellogg. He was Herbert Hoovers biology teacher at stanford, and hoover drafted him to become a very important figure relief in belgium and with the a. R. A. A very striking photo otherwise, but i wanted you to see vernon kellogg. So, millions will die, as i say. Millions were saved. This is one of two official a. R. A. Posters that were distributed inside soviet russia during the a. R. A. Mission. And it is quite possible that hoovers mission saved the bolshevik regime from utter collapse. This is a point of speculation. I think it will keep coming back in waves. The first person in print to speculate about this as a historian was george kennan, the diplomat turned historian, in the 1950s. Did hoover let lenin off the hook . Would the bolshevik government had fallen, had american aid not come in and saved the day . Hoovers conservative critics at home during the mission were after him about this. In part, the congressional appropriations were a little difficult to get through. It was going to happen, but he had to really nudge some people on capitol hill. In part, conservative critics wondered, as one line in a newspaper put it, we would give soup to nuts. You get the picture, right . Meanwhile, many liberals and leftist radicals accused hoover of plotting to use relief as a tool to overthrow bolshevik power. For those people, hoovers antibolshevism seriously diluted the sincerity of his humanitarianism. The fact is, in understanding hoovers motives, it is not at all helpful to insist on a dichotomy of humanitarianism versus antibolshevism. For hoover, and just like for Woodrow Wilson and most western statesmen at the time, bolshevism was a symptom of people in distress. Thus, fighting bolshevism itself was in fact humanitarian. Now, hoover hoped that the a. R. A. Example of its energy, efficiency, these posters were distributed in the tens of thousands across soviet russia, so the image of american benevolence is spread. He hoped that would serve to further discredit what he called the foolish soviet economic system, in the eyes of the soviet people, and perhaps serve to catalyze the inevitable political healing process. As i said a little earlier, and i am going to bring this up in a different context, soviet officials from lenin on down for were very aware of this. So they set up a hierarchial system of secret police minders that were sent from moscow into the provinces, and even down to the town and village level, to keep an eye on the americans, ostensibly to assist, but often times it ended up being obstruction or just getting in the way. Local soviet officials also kept a close eye on the americans. This is in a place that i pointed out to you. It is beyond the volga and the ural mountains. The man in the middle is william kelly. I will get back to him in a moment. But the man on the left is the soviet official, the secret police guy, from moscow. And the guy on the right is a local official. Kelly did not have a very good opinion of these two individuals. That smile on his face, i think, says a lot. The supervision, the obstructionism of the soviets exasperated the relief workers, who found most officials not up to the job. These are former something other than government officials who after the revolution inherited or come into very big jobs. The a. R. A. Men realize that they just cant do it. They see themselves very much in Herbert Hoovers image. They are engineers executing the business of relief, and they were also spreading the benign influence of american efficiency. And for me, fascinating, and i write about this in the book, peculiarities of the russian environment seem to have magnified the crusading spirit of the relief workers. There is zeal for spreading their particular idea of civilization, for how things work. They grew more fervent in proportion to the level of passivity and inefficiency they came up against in russia. One example is, and it is one of my favorites, is william kelly. Bill kelly, native of kentucky. Went on to be a journalist with the associated press. During the war he went to paris, and was a u. S. Army intelligence officer. As i said, he was stationed in a remote region beyond the volga, the ural mountains, nearly the edge of siberia. We have at the hoover archives every single letter he wrote, and he wrote every few days, to a colleague in new york. And those letters are, i mean, they are they give tremendous insight into what is going on. At times they are laugh out loud funny as kelly describes what he is seeing. I knew immediately when i found this cache of letters that had not been exploited by anyone, i knew i had a character to focus on. In those letters, kelly found little cause for optimism about the caliber of local officials that he had to contend with. He allowed, in one letter, that the men running the kremlin might be ruthlessly efficient, but that was beside the point. Were they all hoovers, they could do little to improve the general situation working through the existing personnel in the provinces. And to bring the matter alive, he employs american points of references. Is the government here conducted efficiently . The board of alderman of any dakota town could be counted on to administer the provinces utter than their present executives. I have tested their knowledge of their own territories, of their institutions, of their resources, and i avow that with rare exceptions, they are incompetent to conduct the affairs of a Small Town Grocery store. [laughter] bertrand sure enough, a lot of American Relief workers had that opinion of the officials they were dealing with. And these were guys in their 20s. They are kings of the world in their particular kingdoms. Kelly came from a district the size of france. They were feeding at one point 1. 6 Million People. Life and death decisions are theirs. I will prove the numbers thing to you. I know this slide is dark, but i had to include it. What we are seeing is the famine relief in the district. September 10, 1922. 1. 6 million. And this is a breakdown. This photo was taken indoors by an amateur. Each american district had a physician assigned to it, and he took this photo. Can you see who that is . It is Herbert Hoover. From up here, it may not be as easy to see. It is Herbert Hoover. Think about it, the urals, who had some mining interests there before the war, all of those contacts were broken off. The rumors that hoover was there trying to revive business, which was nonsense. But hoovers image in that photo in particular shows up in many background offices. The reason i like that is the chief is there right above these tremendous totals. In fact, and this is what i will end with, researching the a. R. A. Records and i started doing this in 1987, and so my image of Herbert Hoover was of the other Herbert Hoover. I kept thinking Herbert Hoover, the postpresidency. I did not have a strong sense of how hoover related to or how the people who worked under him related to him. Reading the records, reading the private letters, the diaries of the americans who served, you get a sense of their ferocious feeling of loyalty toward hoover. They would follow him into any battle, right . Hoover it is a word i have used before, and people say, you must be talking about somebody else. But hoover had a quiet charisma, which for most americans has been obliterated by the Great Depression and what comes afterwards. But hoover, a man of few words, exerted that kind of Magnetic Pull on the men who served under him. I dont think we said his i dont think we said his nickname. He was known as the chief. They referred to hoover in their letters as the chief. The men of the a. R. A. , generally speaking, saw themselves as practical idealists in the hoover mode. They were engineer administrators who prided themselves on an efficient and hardheaded dispensation of relief using strict accounting practices. It is one thing that flummoxed soviet officials. They could not figure out why the americans were taking such records. There must be some active espionage behind this, right . What is the point . This was the hoover way. You accounted for everything that went in, who got it, and you make sure to give the American People the proper accounting of where their money went. Most of these Young Americans professed to be animated by a strong sense of loyalty to the man. They did this openly in their communications. One of them, a man who served on the volga, recalled, during the difficult days of the a. R. A. Mission to the baltic and later the Russian Mission, it was only necessary to say the chief wants it done, and in this particular way, that was that. Not only for me, but for all the men i knew who served in those missions. A singularly undivided loyalty. In fact, few workers ever met the man, or had up until that point met the man, but they knew what he personified, and many were intensely loyal to that idea. Another relief worker wrote from moscow in the summer of 1922 to a colleague back home. There is a saying among the there is a saying among the a. R. A. Men that once you tie up with hoover, you can never quite shake him off. [laughter] bertrand and he also wrote that when the frustrations of the Russian Mission seemed about to overwhelm them, the relief workers told themselves to do it for hoover, and pressed on. I showed you a poster before distributed across russia. There there were two posters. They held a competition to create a poster that would serve the a. R. A. Across russia. They could not decide between the one you saw earlier and this one. The ship, quite an image, the flag back there. Notice the rows of corn. This says america to starving russia. This is a real winner. I will use this poster to explain how this remarkable episode, so celebrated in its day, slipped into relative obscurity. There are two dimensions. On the soviet side, after the a. R. A. Withdrew from soviet russia in the summer of 1923, its reputation and its legacy were vulnerable to every kind of soviet slander. As it turned out, hoover had been wrong about one big thing. Fighting the famine was not going to bring down the bolshevisks. The fact is, by 1921, the soviet regime had wiped out all potential alternatives to bolshevisk power. Soviet communism, we now know, was there to stay for another seven decades. By the 1930s, and this would be under stalin, the party line instructed that the purpose of hoovers a. R. A. In russia had been espionage under the cover of philanthropy. For the most part, the a. R. A. Mission was purposefully ignored by the soviet authorities, and thus slowly forgotten by the soviet people. That is the soviet side. On the american side, within a decade of the soviet famine, the Great Depression would eclipse Herbert Hoovers reputation as the great humanitarian. Hoovers undoing and the depression itself would deal a devastating blow to the a. R. A. Ethos. The fundamental values that until 1929, hoover was seen to american individualism, Business Efficiency and cando optimism. These were not destroyed, it turned out, that but they had lost their aura of invincibility. Thank you. [applause] from George Washington to george w. Bush, every sunday at 8 00 p. M. And midnight eastern, we feature the presidency, a weekly series exploring the president s, their politics, policies and legacies. You are watching American History tv all weekend, every weekend, on cspan3
comparemela.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.