The Life of Herbert Hoover: Master of Emergencies, 1917

""Food will win the war,"" proclaimed engineer-turned-bureaucrat Herbert Hoover, with a tinge of self-promotion, as head of the U.S. Food Administration, the WWI agency responsible for feeding America's troops overseas. While cloaking his efforts in the comforting language of voluntarism, the nervous, high-strung food czar, incessantly smoking Havana cigars, used a mix of price controls, exhortations, constraints and propaganda to seduce the general populace into eating less and reducing waste so our fighting forces could get adequate food supplies. As chairman of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Hoover orchestrated a massive emergency operation that provided desperately needed food to millions of Belgian and French citizens trapped between the German army of occupation and the British naval blockade. Hoover became a hero to legions of American housewives, middle-class professionals and businessmen, though farmers, livestock producers and middlemen saw him as a meddling, insensitive outsider, an image that dogged the future president all the way to the White House. In this absorbing third installment of a multivolume biography, Nash, a historian of conservatism, reconstructs an important chapter in American history. Photos. (May)