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58 3 FOOD WILL WIN THE WORLD Food Aid and American Power It looks, does it not, as if the crowns of Europe were toppling from the heads of kings. Perhaps you are going to wear them as a halo. —Ray Wilbur, in a speech to American women, 1917 “Gentlemen, Europe has begun to take stock of us,” Herbert Hoover announced in a fund-raising speech in New York in February 1917. Since the start of the war in Europe, Hoover had led food relief efforts as head of the Commission for Relief in Belgium. In the months before the United States entered the Great War as a belligerent, Hoover made a brief trip to the United States to drum up enthusiasm—and money—for the cause of feeding hungry Belgian and French civilians in occupied areas. He stressed over and over again in his speeches that America’s global position was changing. In their unprecedented efforts to feed hungry Belgians, he said, Americans had “laid claim to idealism, a devotion to humanity, and to great benevolence,” but he warned that if they did not increase their support of food relief efforts, their newly minted international reputation for benevolence would fade.1 Hoover based his appeals on the idea that Europeans were reassessing Americans: “Europe is looking at us; our measure is being taken.”2 And this was a powerful argument precisely because it was a moment when Americans were taking stock of themselves anew. Once the United States entered the war in 1917 and Woodrow Wilson created the United States Food Administration, Hoover no longer had to bother with piecemeal fund-raising. Congress allocated $150 million for the Food Administration, and in the next year and a half it exported Food Aid and American Power / 59 enough food to feed tens of millions of Allied civilians and soldiers.3 The international food relief project of World War I was America’s first formal foreign aid program, and it was unprecedented in its scope.4 Both the novelty and the ambition of the program buoyed up the claim that in the midst of destruction and death the United States was the one nation whose citizens were devoted to saving lives. Yet although the food aid program was styled as altruism, “aid” in this context is a very complicated term. The U.S. Food Administration was never simply philanthropic. Most obviously, of course, food aid was strategic, and as food shortages worsened on both sides of the conflict, Americans openly considered food shipments a kind of military supply along with guns or gas masks. At the same time, the project was animated by the widely shared hope that food aid would boost the country’s international standing in the future, permanently elevating Americans in the eyes of thankful Europeans. The strategic goals of provisioning America’s allies and securing their lasting gratitude were both important factors. They set a precedent for what would become a long-standing U.S. policy of strategically offering— and withholding—food aid, and they also complicated contemporary claims to pure benevolence.5 But in this case the idea of “aid” is more complicated still. The Allies paid for the enormous flow of American foodstuffs with loans from the United States itself, and those loans helped secure the United States’ role as a powerful creditor to Europe after the war. Furthermore , Hoover was proud to run the administration on a business model, and he ran it for profit. After the war, Hoover not only returned the $150 million that Congress had allocated, but he also turned over more than $50 million in profits to the U.S. Treasury.6 As Hoover put it, “the Administration cost the government over $50,000,000 less than nothing.”7 Feeding hungry Europeans and U.S. soldiers was always Hoover’s central goal, in the name of humanitarianism as well as in the name of victory. For example , when it became clear that by bidding against each other for limited food shipments Allied governments were driving up food prices, Hoover urged them to create an inter-Allied food board to dampen competition in the international food market.8 But that $50 million in profits makes it clear that food administrators could have lowered their prices much further still.9 Moreover, while administrators stressed to Americans that diets with less meat could be both healthful and economical, it is noteworthy that they continued to prioritize costly meat for...

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