Crimes and Mercies (4 page)

GEORGE ELIOT,
Middlemarch

During the century before 1914, the Western democracies began a series of reforms such as the world had never witnessed. All of them abolished cruel institutions – duelling, slavery, religious discrimination and child labour. In Ontario, the first universal, free, long-term education system in the history of the world was begun and perfected within forty years. In the US and UK, cures for diseases were discovered, electricity made useful, aeroplanes invented and hunger abolished among millions of people. All the democracies began the process of electoral reform that brought the polling booths to everyone by 1925.
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In agriculture, industry and science, advances were made that produced prosperity for the great majority of their citizens, something that had never happened before. The democracies did these things under no threat from enemies, nor to surpass other societies. These things occurred because there was a civilizing genius among the people based on their ancient beliefs.

The rapid improvement of life that seemed inevitable in 1900 was slowed to a walk by the catastrophes of the twentieth century. These were prefigured largely in the century before.

Darwin, Marx and Freud had all invented new beliefs for mankind, which had in common the idea that people must forever struggle against each other. In society, class must fight class; in the natural world, individual must compete against individual; and within the individual, ego must war with libido, or instinct with learned behaviour.

These ideas ignored the fact that the very definition of society is people co-operating to a greater good. Co-operation and trust alone enabled societies to survive, but ideas such as permanent class warfare, the Oedipus complex and survival of the fittest created conflict and mistrust in personal relations, political revolutions, wars between nations and eugenics programs which were a major part of the social catastrophes of this century.

The nineteenth-century spirit of generous reform in England, Canada, Germany, France and the US continued into the twentieth century. But now the powers of the state were being vastly extended by the reformers themselves in order to implement their generous ideals. Under the fascists and communists, the reforming passions were taken over by the state. They animated the state and were controlled by it. In the brilliant phrase of the philosopher Michael Polanyi, ‘The generous passions of our age could now covertly explode inside the engines of a pitiless machinery of violence.’
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What saved the democracies from the fate of these authoritarian states were, largely, traditions deriving from the Protestant Reformation that previously had expressed and limited the faith of people in a central power, whether church, feudal monarchy or modern state. The people had already freed their individual consciences from the priests, aristocrats and bureaucrats who had controlled them through a vast machinery of patronizing moral condescension, the class system, hypocritical imputations of basic guilt, reciprocal loyalties and violence.

Totalitarianism was far stronger in Italy, Spain and Russia, where the Protestant revolution had not occurred, or where it had been curtailed by the older authoritarian traditions, as in Germany. Among the particular traditions that protected the
democracies were freedom of conscience, expressed as freedom of speech; mass literacy;
habeas corpus
; the extended franchise; and the various other constitutional protections of individual rights all proceeding largely from the Reformation and the Enlightenment. That these traditions did not always guide the foreign policies of the democracies was clear to see in Ireland and in the American west. But by far the most spectacular failures were in Europe, after the German wars.

Two men struggled for the soul of the west in London during the First World War. They were Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, the very model of the arrogant, conservative power of the British Empire, and Herbert Hoover. Churchill’s sea blockade, intended to strangle the German war effort, was also starving millions of Belgian children. This pained Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer from Iowa, unknown to politics. He was typical of the reforming, generous, independent spirit of many Americans: opposed to Empire and big government, with a naïve faith in the goodness of democratic peoples.

Beginning only a few months after the declaration of war in August 1914, Hoover met many times in London with the most powerful men in the British Empire – Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, First Sea Lord Winston Churchill and Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, who soon succeeded Asquith as Prime Minister. Hoover was always trying to relieve the miseries of the war, first for American citizens trapped in Europe, then for Belgian and French civilians starving under German occupation.

He wanted to get permission from the British government to ship food from Canada and the US through the British sea blockade to Belgium. Churchill refused. The Germans, having occupied Belgium and northern France, were responsible for feeding the people, Churchill said. Any food imported into Belgium would relieve some of the pressure that the blockade was exerting on the Germans.

Hoover went around Churchill, straight to Germany, to make them promise to all inspectors to supervise the issue of rations directly to the children. He found the Berlin bureaucrats to be ‘automatic and inhuman,’
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but he got them to agree. On his return to London, he found Churchill in alliance with Lord Kitchener, organizing opposition to all relief regardless of the widespread starvation in Belgium, now spreading to occupied France.

The British themselves were under tremendous pressure after the first year of war, because their armies were losing the land battle, the French army was growing mutinous, their ally Czarist Russia was collapsing, and in fact made peace with Germany in 1917. British shipping, including much of their own food supply, was being destroyed wholesale by the German U-boat campaign.

What Hoover was proposing to the worried British ministers could not decide the war, so they were reluctant even to hear him. But Hoover played adroitly on one British hope: they desperately needed American help. No help was likely if the Americans thought the British were deliberately refusing to let Hoover ship food to starving Belgian women and children.

Hoover’s forceful moralizing soon got him into serious trouble with Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1915. Hoover had asked Asquith to release to his control 20,000 tons of Canadian flour stockpiled in England. He wanted this for seven million people ‘surrounded by a ring of steel and utterly unable by any conceivable effort to save themselves.’ As Hoover himself admitted, it was with ‘some abruptness’ that he told Asquith that the Belgians were starving because of the British blockade, yet the British claimed to be fighting to save Belgium. He said that he was not begging for the Canadian flour, but asking permission to buy it. If he were to leave the meeting without the flour, he would be forced to make this public, and the American public, so far sympathetic to Great Britain, would be disgusted. Asquith remarked that it was not customary for him to be addressed in such a tone. Hoover immediately apologized, saying that he was moved by the anticipation of emotions that must
come from a negative reply on Asquith’s part.
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Churchill was so annoyed at Hoover’s enterprise that he actually went to the Foreign Office to file charges of corruption against Hoover, alleging that he was spying for the Germans. The Foreign Minister Lord Grey referred the charges to a Judge of King’s bench; Hoover was not only exonerated but eulogized by the judge.
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For years Hoover struggled until finally he was granted the extraordinary privilege of addressing the British Cabinet on 18 April 1917.
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That Hoover should have been invited to address the Cabinet which directed the affairs of the British Empire was in itself astonishing. The war was at a critical stage, the Allies were losing, the British were bankrupt, and he was now asking them for money for the children. But the Allies had been saying that they were fighting the war for the very ideals Hoover advocated. With Hoover, the British were arguing about the whole point of the war as it had been advertised to their troops.

The results were astounding. According to David Lloyd George, a most eloquent man himself, Hoover’s talk was ‘virtually the clearest exposition he had ever heard on any subject.’ Hoover stood before the Cabinet table, one hand in his pocket, the other gesturing slightly as ‘he spoke flawlessly, with not a word too few or too many.’
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He said that the Allies were in the war to preserve the rights of small democracies such as Belgium. Victory would be empty if many Belgians starved to death because of the Allied blockade. He begged the ministers to show a magnanimity that ‘would outlast all the bitterness of this war.’ The Cabinet agreed, setting up an International Food Board in conjunction with the Canadians and Americans, and also inviting France and Italy to participate. Lloyd George had encouraged the Cabinet’s approval, saying, ‘I am convinced. You have my permission.’
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The reasons that Hoover advanced for saving the Belgians were known in those days as ‘sentimental’, because they were thought to originate in trivial emotions found mainly in the ‘weaker sex’. For many aggressive empire-builders like Churchill,
to act on them was ‘ill-advised’. Hoover observed that Churchill believed that the ‘incidental starvation of women and children was justified if it contributed to the earlier ending of the war by victory.’
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The whole Belgian relief program was ‘indeed full of sentiment,’ as Hoover said.
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But the Cabinet turned the sentiment to cash for Hoover, pledging not only passage for the ships, but also the substantial sum of one million pounds per month in donations to the ‘Hoover Fund’.
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Secretly, the French government also put up money for Hoover’s relief ships.
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The triumph belonged not to Hoover alone: he had dozens of devoted helpers, who obeyed his instructions to the letter and cheerfully nicknamed him ‘Chief’. The Commission for Relief in Belgium was ‘a piratical state organized for benevolence’ according to one British official. The Commission had its own flag, a fleet of ships and its own communications system; it negotiated agreements like treaties with European states, it raised and spent huge sums of money, it sent emissaries across battle-lines with what amounted to a passport, and when the members thought they might be spied upon, they communicated in their own private language or code: American slang.
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Without realizing it, Hoover had more or less invented the idea of universal ‘human rights’. This idea, so familiar to us, was unknown round that Cabinet table,
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although an act
ex gratia
to save lives was not rejected unless it was tinged with bolshevism or impinged on some imperial interest.

That was one stage in the birth of a great saviour. Hoover was a wealthy man with a fascinating career when war broke out. But the Quaker faith of his Canadian mother and American father made him immediately sympathetic to the North Americans stranded in Europe by the outbreak of war in 1914. Hoover abandoned his profitable business to pour his money and organizing skills into arranging transportation, loans, visas, permits, communications and lodging for the many Americans – still then at peace – who wanted to get out of Europe. In those few weeks of
1914, a passion was born in Hoover that never failed him, or the starving millions who later turned to him when everyone else had failed.

Next came the Poles. They asked him for help to bring in food after the invasion by Germany in 1914. Hoover set up a committee of generous Americans, including many expert on the Polish situation. They collected money and goods, made arrangements for foreign credits and for foreign governments to permit the supplies to travel, and then they sent them.

Hoover proved himself so reliable, energetic, honest, discreet, well-organized, imaginative, common-sensible and well-intentioned during this and the Belgian relief campaigns, that by 1918 the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, was relying on him not only to organize food and relief but also for advice on the political consequences of relief. For instance, after the end of the First World War, millions of Russian prisoners were still in prison camps in Germany. Until the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ended the Russo-German war in 1918, the Russians had also held many German prisoners. Both sides treated the prisoners relatively well so long as this hostage system was in effect, but with the return of the German prisoners under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the system collapsed, and the Russians still imprisoned in Germany began to starve. After the Armistice ended the fighting in the west in November 1918, the Allies kept up their sea blockade which deprived the Germans both of food imported by sea and of the means to earn cash by overseas trade to buy food. Now German women and children began to starve, which was the purpose of the Western Allies, who wanted to keep up the pressure on the Germans to sign a peace treaty. It mattered not at all to the Western Allies that the Germans had signed the Armistice on the basis of Wilson’s ‘14 Points’ proposal, which included cessation of the blockade. The ‘14 Points’ were supposed to be the framework of the eventual peace treaty, so the Paris Peace Conference, which Hoover attended along with Wilson, should have merely worked out details which had already been agreed in principle with the Germans. But the blockade went on.

This was why the Russian prisoners began to starve, while the Allies wondered what to do about them. If they fed them, they were taking the pressure off the Germans. If the prisoners were allowed to return to Russia, they might be induced or pressed into the Red Army, which terrified the Western Allies. If the Allies did nothing, the men would die, long after the fighting had ended.