Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [43]
From all quarters of Europe, from officials and private relief agencies, alarming reports came in: millions of unemployed men, desperate housewives feeding their families on potatoes and cabbage soup, emaciated children. In that first cold winter of the peace, Herbert Hoover, the American relief administrator, warned the Allies that some 200 million people in the enemy countries and almost as many again among the victors and the neutral nations faced famine. Germany alone needed 200,000 tons of wheat per month and 70,000 tons of meat. Throughout the territories of the old Austria-Hungary, hospitals had run out of bandages and medicines. In the new Czechoslovak state, a million children were going without milk. In Vienna, more babies were dying than were surviving. People were eating coal dust, wood shavings, sand. Relief workers invented names for things they had never seen before, such as the mangel-wurzel disease, which afflicted those who lived solely on beets. 17
The humanitarian case for doing something was unanswerable. So was the political one. “So long as hunger continued to gnaw,” Wilson warned his colleagues, “the foundations of government would continue to crumble.”18 They had the resources. The Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and the Americans all had surplus food and raw materials which they were eager to sell. The ships could be found to carry them. But where was the money to come from? Germany had gold reserves, but the French, who were determined those should go toward reparations, did not want to see them used up financing imports. The European Allies could not finance relief on the scale that was needed, and the defeated nations, except Germany, were bankrupt. That left the United States, but Congress and the American public were torn between an impulse to help and a sense that the United States had done enough in winning the war. After the Second World War, their mood was very much the same, but with a crucial difference: in place of the diffuse threat of revolution there was a single clear enemy, in the Soviet Union. The equivalent of the Marshall Plan, which contributed so much to the revival of Europe in those circumstances, was not possible in 1919.
The United States, moreover, did not have the preponderance of power that it had after the Second World War. Its European allies were not exhausted and desperate, prepared to take American aid, even at the price of accepting American suggestions. In 1919, they still saw themselves as, and indeed were, independent actors in world affairs. Before the war ended, Britain, France and Italy drew up a plan for pooling Allied credit, food, raw materials and ships to undertake relief and reconstruction under an inter-Allied board. The Americans resisted. They suspected that their allies wanted to control the distribution of resources, even though the bulk would come from the United States, as a lever to pressure the enemy states into accepting peace terms. When Wilson insisted that Hoover be placed in charge of Allied relief administration, the Europeans objected. Hoover, Lloyd George complained, would become the “food dictator of Europe” and American businessmen would take the opportunity to move in. The Europeans only gave way reluctantly, and did their best to make Hoover’s job difficult.19
To Wilson, as to many Americans, Hoover was a hero, a poor orphan who had worked his way through Stanford University to become one of the world’s leading engineers. During the war he had organized a massive relief program for German-occupied Belgium, and when the United States became a belligerent in 1917 he took charge of saving food for the war effort. “I can Hooverize on dinner,” said Valentine cards. “But I’ll never learn to Hooverize, When it comes to loving you.” He was efficient, hardworking and humorless. Lloyd George found him tactless and brusque. The Europeans resented his reminders that the United States was supplying