Every Hour of the Day

It was an old story, as old as civilization itself: hunger and famine follow war. World War II was no exception.

Perhaps because it was so old, perhaps because it was so vast--an auto death on Main Street is still more real than news of 16,000,000 starving Chinese--its awful truth had never quite drilled itself into the U.S. consciousness. Winter, the traditional time of hardship, had passed. And now suddenly, in spring, when stalks of wheat were poking through the Polish earth, hunger stood on the world's doorstep.

In Cairo, after a six-weeks survey of 17 European countries, Herbert Hoover went to a microphone to broadcast to his fellow countrymen:

"Hunger has placed three words every hour of the day on the tongues of 150,500,000 Europeans. The first is bread, which has a reality, as the symbol of life, as never before in history.. . . The second is fats, for which there is an insatiable craving when in physical need. . . . The third is calories. That is the common denominator. . . . That word has become everywhere the grim measure of the steps along the road from plenty to hunger and thence to starvation. . . ."

In Washington and in the capitals of Europe, the experts and the managers translated the three words into specific needs, and sent hurry-up calls for more food. In the U.S., where food was richer and more plentiful than before the war, where everything from elephants to lolly-pops could be bought in the black market, the people began to awaken--a little. Housewives, seeing their grocers' shelves still filled to overflowing, began to ask: "What can I do?"

Said Herbert Hoover:

"The reconstruction of the children [of Europe and Asia] is more precious than factories and bridges. For they will determine the good or evil future of Europe. ... If every source of supply [is] scraped to the bottom of the barrel, we can pull the world through this most dangerous crisis.

"The saving of these human lives is more than an economic necessity to the recovery of the world. It is more even than the path to order and to stability and to peace. Such action marks the return of the lamp of compassion to the world. And that is part of the moral and spiritual reconstruction of the earth."

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