Official proceedings of the annual meeting: 1923

INFORMAL REMARKS-HOOVER

99

the foundation upon which that service has been built, and to you is deserving some
accounting more than the formal reports of a financial statement, the audited accounts
that are circulated to the public.
In order that I may give you perhaps a better comprehension of the problems faced
during the last two years in Russia, let us go back to the foundation of this work itself.
The American Relief Administration, founded immediately after the armistice at the
request of then President Wilson for the purpose of relief of the then imminent famine
throughout eastern and central Europe, was the greatest relief organization the world
has yet seen. It was organized because 200,000,000 people, exhausted in four years
of war and engaged in revolution and in the founding of new governments and new
states, were involved in a food shortage of a dimension never before known. During
the course of the administration, in the year z199, something more than 2,500,000 tons
of American food were distributed throughout that great area from Finland, through the
Baltic states, south into the Balkans; and something more than 50,000,000 people
were directly sustained from that food supply. Not even these numbers recount the
total volume of service given, because theoretically, in any given state, the food supply
may be adequate for the entire population for one half of the harvest year, or it may be
adequate for one half of the population throughout the harvest year, or the whole of
the people may survive from three to six months out of the harvest year, so that in
providing a food supply for half the population, one has really saved the whole, because
the food would have been completely exhausted at some time before the harvest. And
so the work of the American people during the winter of 1919 was practical relief in the
greatest of all families.
No loss of life of any numerical dimension resulted from that famine because organization was started early enough to provide a food supply in advance of the necessity,
and Europe was saved, not alone from the tremendous calamity of loss of life from
starvation and disease, but, in that period when all human institutions were tottering
at the foundations, the masses of the people in twenty-three governments were given
such sustenance in spirit, such sustenance in economic strength, that they managed to
survive, and upon the foundations of order peace was built. There could have been
no peace in Europe had there not been this priceless service of the American people in
the relief of economic destitution.
The organization of that relief extended in far greater ramifications than the mere
provision of food supplies, because with some fourteen new governments erected from
the ruins of four great empires, as yet unable to find their feet economically, with railroads disorganized, industry paralyzed, every farmer holding such food as he had,
every village against its neighbors and every other city and state, we were on the threshold of chaos, and it became necessary to reorganize so as to take charge of transportation and of coal supplies, and to place Americans in strategic positions in the various
governments. All these things were accomplished by a group of a thousand Americans,
drawn from the ordinary run of American life; men were chosen from all callings, from
all parts of the United States, who rose in an emergency to service of a character that
is not called for often in the lifetime of a man; service in government and in the administration of economic functions strange to them all, but they performed a disinterested
service, winning for America the esteem of 200,000,000 people and a confidence that
there rested upon them the primary functions of government for over scores of millions
of people.