Yanks to the Rescue

BBC amazes me by digging into the archives for a good news story about American generosity, and gets all the way through it without a smirk or a sneer worth mentioning.

It does not detract from the relief operation in Asia to question the title almost routinely given to it as the "world's largest relief operation ever."

The huge American undertakings that fed millions of people during and after the World War I rescued not sections of populations but whole peoples.

Today they have been largely forgotten.

Yet 10 million people relied on food shipped in during the German occupation of Belgium and Northern France between 1914 and 1918. Tens of millions more were kept alive right across continental Europe after the war.

The hero of all this? Believe it or not Herbert Hoover, who appears here stunningly competent and vigorous, in stark contrast to his reputation as the one-term president who did nothing as the nation tumbled into the Great Depression.

A British diplomat remarked that Hoover had set up a "piratical state organised for benevolence."

Herbert Hoover was a successful mining engineer and businessman in London when war broke out in August 1914. A hundred thousand American tourists had to be got back home and he was called on to organise their return.

He did so. If they had no money, he lent his own, accepting only promises of repayment in return. Only a very few were not honoured. One lady demanded a written assurance that her ship would not be attacked by a German submarine. He wrote out the assurance himself.

...

His cohorts re-organised the broken railways of Europe, using barter if necessary to trade rolling stock. One message to headquarters read: "Have arranged sell Galicia ten locomotives for eggs. How many eggs go to a locomotive?" The reply was laconic: "Does not matter. We have no confidence in age of either."