American Experience

(wind howling) (shovel digging) (grunting)

MALE READER

"December 4, 1921. "Samara District, Soviet Russia. "Today I came upon a group of men in a makeshift cemetery "digging a mass grave. "When I asked where the bodies were, "one of them explained... (speaking Russian) "'We are trying now to make a place "'to put the future corpses. We are afraid we won't have the strength to do it later.'" "As I looked at them, I wondered if any of those men thought he might be digging his own grave." Will Shafroth, American Relief Administration.

NARRATOR

In July 1921, noted Russian author Maxim Gorky issued a plea to the West. "Gloomy days have come for the country of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Mendeleev," Gorky wrote. "I ask for prompt aid to the Russian people. Give bread and medicine." Gorky never mentioned Vladimir Lenin or his Bolshevik revolution. Russia had suffered a drought, which was not unusual. The famine of 1921 was. It would become the worst natural disaster in Europe since the Black Plague in the Middle Ages.

RONALD SUNY

There was this historical coincidence

of a number of social forces

the collapse of the tsarist regime, the outbreak of civil war, the policies of the Bolsheviks themselves. The government carried out mass requisitioning of grain, which prevented peasants from feeding themselves or even having enough seed to carry on next season planting a new crop.

NARRATOR

Herbert Hoover, the new secretary of commerce under President Warren Harding, spotted Gorky's plea in a newspaper. Hoover was also the director of the American Relief Administration, known as the ARA.

BERTRAND PATENAUDE

For most Americans, Herbert Hoover is associated with the Great Depression. But back in the 1920s, his image was one of being a very efficient... a hardheaded humanitarian who knew how to get the food through.

NARRATOR

No one in the West had better credentials to answer Gorky's request than Herbert Hoover. Hoover was a Stanford-trained mining engineer who had operated in Australia, China, and Russia's Ural Mountains, and knew the logistics of moving men and materiel around the world. When World War I broke out, he was asked to organize the relief of an entire nation.

GEORGE NASH

There were seven million Belgians living under German occupation. So it became Hoover's responsibility to provide daily food assistance that would keep all those people alive. And Hoover showed that he had the administrative talents as well as the humanitarian sympathies to pull this off. And he became an American hero and even an international hero.

NARRATOR

After the war, the Paris Peace Conference asked the United States to feed tens of millions in 21 countries throughout war-torn Europe and the Near East. The U.S. created the ARA with Herbert Hoover as its head.

NASH

It has been said, and I think correctly, that Herbert Hoover was responsible for saving more lives than any person who has ever lived. (crowd applauds)

NARRATOR

He became known as the "Master of Emergencies" and the "Great Humanitarian," the embodiment of an America proud of its newfound sense of itself as an altruistic nation. Hoover accepted Russia's plea for help. Will Shafroth, 29, son of the governor of Colorado, joined other famine relief workers from the United States and headed for Moscow. Spurred by a sense of adventure and altruism, "Hoover's boys," as they came to be known, had done relief work after World War I and represented an America that emerged from the war as a world power. Now their idealism would be tested by a railroad system in disarray... (train clatters) a forbidding climate... (wind whipping) a ruthless government suspicious of their motives... and the shear scale of starvation and death. They would be among the first Americans to see the earth-shaking revolution that Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks had wrought and the first to feel the tensions that would mark U.S.-Soviet relations for much of the century. (crowd cheering) On September 1, 1921, the first ship carrying American relief supplies arrived from Hamburg, Germany, and docked at Petrograd, the former St. Petersburg. (machinery clattering) It began to unload 700 tons of rations that had been in storage since the European relief. The ARA's goal in Russia was to do what it had done

in postwar Europe

feed children, mainly in the cities. Feeding one million seemed a manageable task. Within a week, the first ARA feeding station opened in Petrograd School number 27. The menu was white bread, corn grits, rice, milk, cocoa, and sugar.

ANATOLY UTKIN

At a time when there was not a spark of hope anywhere, unexpectedly, without any reason, nobody could explain why Americans came, why they provide food for children.

NARRATOR

The "Chicago Tribune" began running a story that would captivate America. It also appealed for funds. Private donations began to flow to the ARA. Five days after his arrival in Moscow, Will Shafroth was part of an ARA scouting party sent east to evaluate the famine in the Volga valley. People had fled their villages, desperate to escape the famine. At the station at Kazan on the northern Volga, Shafroth noted "wretched creatures huddled together in compact masses like a seal colony." Most were children whose mothers had deserted them or had died. Shafroth and his fellow scouts then drove to a home for orphaned and abandoned children whose lice-ridden clothes had to be destroyed.

READER

"I saw emaciated little skeletons, "whose gaunt faces and toothpick legs testified to the truth of the report that they were dying daily by the dozen." "The stench was nauseating." He served with the ARA in Poland right after the war, but he had never witnessed scenes of horror like this.

NARRATOR

Shafroth witnessed the same or worse in Simbirsk, in Sengiley, in Samara. Once the richest grain-growing province in the Volga valley, Samara was now at the heart of the famine.