
Foodship for Belgium Poster.
Photo courtesy of the crb collection, Hoover Institution Archives.
Hoover organised ‘Save Belgium Festivals’ all over the place and posters were put up with slogans such as ‘
Hoover calls for clothes for Belgium’ or ‘
Keep Belgium warm this winter’. At a rough estimate the man who was elected in 1929 as the 31st President of the United States amassed some two and a half billion dollars. The money did not come directly to Belgium but was used mainly to buy grain and other foodstuffs. Between January 1915 and December 1918 3.2 million tons of goods were shipped to Belgium They reached Belgium via Rotterdam, because the port of Antwerp was blockaded by the British.
In Belgium these goods were distributed by the National Committee, the CRB's partner. Together they succeeded in successfully organising food supplies for the Belgian population. This still required a lot of diplomatic discussion because both the Germans and the British had to be convinced that the food was really going to the people of Belgium and not to the enemy. Hoover knew that he had to maintain as neutral a position as possible. Naturally that became problematic when the US became actively engaged in the war in 1917. At that point the role of the CRB was taken over by the Spanish-Dutch Committee; Spain and the Netherlands were of course still neutral.
Co-operation between the CRB and the National Committee and the Belgian government, which was in exile in Le Havre, did not always run very smoothly. The Belgian government had very little control over the running of the Committee, despite the fact that it was the chief source of funds. Moreover there was repeated tension between the CRB and the National Committee. The conflict came to a head in 1916 when Hoover made known his plan to intervene much more directly in the distribution of aid in Belgium and of the funds raised from the sale of foodstuffs. The Belgian Minister of Finance spoke of ‘an attempt by Hoover to gain absolute power’ and the Spanish ambassador in Belgium, Villalobar, spoke of ‘Hoover the adventurer’. But Francqui was reluctant to lose the support of the Americans and therefore agreed to certain of their conditions. So in 1916 a new agreement was reached between the CRB and the National Committee. The CRB was given a greater role in the organisation of supplies to Belgium and the fact that three-fifths of the funds came from Belgium itself was quietly ignored.
At the end of the First World War a considerable amount of the ‘Hoover-money’ which had been collected still remained unspent. Hoover and Francqui both believed strongly in the role of the universities and the importance of the intellectual development of young people. Some of the money went directly to the large Belgian universities and another part was used in 1920 to establish the University Foundation. In the same year Hoover gave some of the profits from the sale of surplus foodstuffs to the Belgian American Educational Foundation. Ever since then this organisation has been responsible for arranging exchanges