Hoover biography briefly

Herbert Hoover the man who fed the planet Herbert Hoover was the embodiment of the American dream. Born in the poor family of Quakers and lost his parents early, he traveled around the whole world, allowed the food crises of a planetary scale and agreed with the governments of howling countries without any authority. He actually saved Russia ruined by the Civil War from hunger, but could not get along with the Bolsheviks who did everything that he hated: killed and controlled.

The person who made himself did so many times with humanitarian disasters, but could not - with his only presidency. Do you understand how grateful I am Columbus for one fine day he opened America? These three parcels mean more to me than just salvation from death. They gave me the opportunity to return to literary work, and now I feel like a writer again.

” At that time, they were starving in Russia. After the First World War and the Civil War, food was not enough in 30 provinces, but did not dare, according to various estimates, from 25 to 40 million people. Journalist Walter Duranti wrote that the roads in Russia, leading west, were crowded with refugees, whose wagons are stuffed with belongings, children and the elderly.

The carts dragged bulls and horses similar to skeletons, in which the bones shone through the skin. They wrote about the distress in Russia mainly in the foreign press, but by the year Soviet newspapers admitted that there is hunger in the country and he is a catastrophic proportion. The Bolshevik government had to look for help from the "hostile" capitalist states.

The writer Maxim Gorky turned through the press to all “honest people of Europe and America” with a request for supplying bread and drugs. It was then that Ara American Relief Administration came to Russia-the American Assistance Administration-a non-governmental charitable organization that helped save starving people in the war-ruined war of Europe and Russia. People were afraid that the war would reached Britain in a matter of days, and wanted to leave for their homeland faster, but the banks did not change their pounds for dollars.

Hoover together with colleagues set five tables at the embassy and organized exchange exchange, sometimes under honest. Two months later, the last compatriot Hoover went home. The US government was delighted with the work of Hoover and then asked him several times to help with the resolution of food crises in Europe. In the same year, hunger began in Belgium. President Woodlo Wilson again called Hoover to the rescue, and he was interested not only in the entrepreneur’s talent for organizing processes, but also that he is a private person.

The American government could not be directly drawn into the European conflict, so a person was required outside of politics. Hoover created a commission that collected money and purchased food at different points in the world, and then distributed it in Europe. In addition to Belgium, the representatives of the commission opened in several European capitals. Money was given by banks, ordinary people and governments of countries participating and often against each other in the war.

When the hunger reached Paris, Herbert Hoover turned a similar rescue operation there. He is the only person who, without any official powers, was negotiating with the highest statesmen of several countries - and never suffered defeats, ”the US consul Page said about him. In the eyes of the American government and indeed any other Hoover became those who would now be called a crisis manager: his name was when things were really bad.

Hoover conducted a campaign to raise products and excess products, offered indirect control of grain prices, and also deployed a large propaganda campaign: he offered housewives to save on products for the sake of “our guys in the war”, turned to people from the screens of cinemas, speaking of self -sacrifice, and proposed to cook modest food. The campaign was successful: there were so many products that it was possible to provide the US inhabitants themselves, and by the year the US army entered the war with Germany and starving in Europe.

Her first mission opened in Warsaw, and then appeared in all European states drawn into the war or injured from it. Products came from excess foods that USFA accumulated. Whoever wrote about Hoover, everyone emphasized that this person has achieved success in everything that he took for, because he categorically denied centralization, state control in business and bureaucracy.

He demanded that the governments of the countries to which his organizations were helped could not interfere in his work and had no power over him. Hoover believed that private charity was able to resolve any humanitarian crisis, and much more effective than if the state took up for it. The historian Yuri Zeldich said that Hoover was the embodiment of the American dream and the man who made himself.

And the reason for this was his difficult childhood and community in which he grew up.His family lived in a small white house, which, according to writer Bill Brayson, is still in its place. Hoover's father Jesse was a blacksmith and traded agricultural tools, and Hilda's mother taught children. They, their closest relatives, and indeed the whole community in which the buffa lived were pious quakers.

They worked hard, wore simple clothes, one couple of shoes a year, lived almost in poverty and prayed a lot. When Herbert was seven, his father died of fever, his mother was gone even four years later. Herbert moved to his uncle, whose own son died. Hoover did not feel a special love for himself, he missed his parents and grew up not a very happy boy. In his own words, until the age of 19, Herbert did not experience anything similar to real joy.

Hoover did not receive a full -fledged education at school - his uncle sent him to work in another city by a office employee. At the age of 17, he entered the newly opened and then free Stanford, and even then not immediately: he was finally accrued only when the Hoover passed the first exams. He studied on a geologist and met his future wife Lu Henry, who would marry eight years later.

After Stanford was graduated, he worked on a gold mine seven days a week in California and received a very modest salary - 20 cents per hour. But then he was lucky. He got an engineer in a large British mining company and traveled around the world for the next six years. According to Bill Brayson, during this time Hoover traveled around the globe five times, was a witness to the boxing uprising in China, visited the jungle, crossed the Australian deserts, met with writer Jack London and sat in a tent near the Egyptian pyramids.

Having seen many countries, Hoover did not change his callousness and boring. He wrote that he did not remember these places, but for those who are interested in romance and adventure, there are entire libraries on geographical topics. He himself preferred to compose lists of completed tasks and materials found. Having finished traveling around the world, Hoover came to London.

There he became a partner of Beuik Moring. By that time, he was already married to Lou Henry, he made her in a telegram in which there was the only question - “Will you marry me? He was a respectable entrepreneur and spent all his time on the creation of capital. By the year, when the American authorities asked him to help with the transfer of Americans from London, his fortune exceeded $ 4 million later, it would increase many times.

Hoover for his rescue missions was often called the great humanist and even idolized. But Bill Brainson writes that it is unlikely that the future president of the United States was such a person, and his image was created thanks to two factors: his diligent work and the fact that he tried not to ignore the press. Braison suggests that Hoover did not feel any feelings for the people whom he helped.

He did not visit the field kitchens, and when he was brought to one of them, he demanded that he never show this again and talk about his successes in Europe without any emotions. But, if the newspapers diminished his merits, Hoover became furious. Seeing the mistakes in the articles or the fact that his merits were diminished, he wrote long angry letters in the editorial office and meticulously listed all the flaws, in his opinion.

A few days later, the Hoover, by that time already the Minister of Trade of the United States, replied to him: "You can count on me." At the same time, Hoover was an ardent opponent of Bolshevism: like a quaker, he could not justify the violence of Soviet power in relation to his own people. Realizing that Bolshevik Russia is not Europe where Hoover had a reputation and could establish its own rules, it drew up a contract.

The Soviet side explained the same conditions in it: the state’s intervention, the products will be distributed by the Americans, hiring Russian employees who will be chosen themselves.

The Soviets were supposed to organize the transportation of products within the country and provide premises. And another requirement is to release all the Americans from prisons. According to historians, Lenin was in rage. He wrote a note in the Politburo: “The meanness of America, Hoover and the League of Nations is pure - we must punish Hoover, publicly give him slap in the face to see the whole world, and the League of Nations too.” But in the end, I had to agree: the Soviet government was in a hopeless situation.

The first American ship with products arrived in Petrograd on September 1, six days later in the capital, the first dining room Ara earned. Then a children's nutrient point appeared in Moscow. By May, Ara had fed more than 6 million people in Russia. In addition to it, other charitable organizations worked - the Swedish and German Red Cross, the English trade unions, the Nansen Committee.

By summer, ARA worked in ARA, more thousand ARA delivered medicines for $ 8 million, providing 15 thousand.In the years, ARA provided Russia with sowing grain, which was enough to plant millions of hectares of land, so that in subsequent years the Russians could provide themselves with bread. The number of hungry deaths in Russia was significantly reduced, ARA once again received a reputation as a spacer, which probably arranged those whom she fed, but not quite-the Soviet authorities.

As Leonid Spivak wrote, the inhabitants of the villages sent letters to the organization and asked to send a portrait of Herbert Gover to put him in the red corner. The Soviet government, of course, could not stand this and gradually began to increase the pressure on the Ara. The guerriers established observation, read their mail, the Communists were introduced into the organization itself.

Spivak quotes a note of the head of the Inverse Department of the Investigative Committee of the Cheka Zalina dated January 26: "Anti -Soviet agitation in conversations with peasants, the destruction of portraits of Lenin and Trotsky in the dining room." Especially the Chekists were not satisfied with the fact that among the employees hired by the Gover among the Russians there were many “former” - educated people who knew how to count, read and speak foreign languages.

The revolution deprived them of constitutional rights, and Ara not only saved their lives, but also fed and forced the Bolsheviks to pay them a salary. One of the ARA attacks from the authorities was a criminal case, which was brought to an employee of the department of the organization in Tsaritsyn Mikhail Arzamasov. In March, he was accused of counter -revolutionary activity and sentenced to death.

Ara stood up for him and refused to feed adults in Tsaritsyno. The case was stopped in a month. After that, ARA worked in Russia for another year, but the beginning of the liquidation of the humanitarian mission was laid. Ara began to lose support and American society. In the year, the USSR began to sell its own products abroad, explaining this by the fact that the state needs money to buy equipment.

The export of grain introduced ordinary Americans who sent ARA money and humanitarian aid to be confused, the fundraising was greatly reduced. At the same time, the Soviet authorities began to clean up the Ara points. In October, the organization’s kitchens were ordered to be transferred under the control of the commission to combat the consequences of hunger, some points were closed, in December - to free the Moscow office.