Written by Linda
May 07, 2011
Who ever knew that Hoover started out as a great man, before he got a bad reputation?
I love documentaries and history shows because they always tell you something you did not know. Take the story of The Great Famine, produced by the excellent PBS series American Experience. Things I did not know: Soviet Russia had one of the worst natural disasters since the Black Plague, and it was in the early 1920s. No, it wasn't the Spanish Flu, that felled millions across the world. The Soviet people died (five million total) of famine! How do they not teach this in history books?
What is more amazing about the story, is how the disaster was eventually turned around. As the United States had just proved a victorious leader in World War I, combined with the coincidence that American farmers had a huge surplus of crops, the country stepped in to help. And the man who organized it all was... Herbert Hoover! Previously, I (like most Americans) only associated him with being the unlucky bastard who was president the next decade, in time for the Great Depression, and having the treat of having decrepit and desperate slums ("Hoovervilles") named after him.
Hoover, the Secretary of Commerce at the time, used his rep as a humanitarian to get things started. Using a staff of 300 American relief workers that he spread across the huge expanse of land in the Volga region, Hoover managed the impossible. Not only was he dealing with a destroyed nation (whose train system was a victim of the war), but there was the pesky problem of the suspicious new Bolshevik government as well as horrible, horrible weather. And lice. And typhus.
At the peak of the humanitarian effort, the American Relief Administration was feeding nearly 11 million Soviets a day, both children and adults. Grain was distributed so that crops, that had been confiscated from the peasants by the communists, could be planted again. People could stop eating leather, and bark, and yes, each other. The disaster was turned around.
Did you know any of this? No. I didn't either. Rent this one and see a great example of world power used for good.
