Herbert Hoover's Grand Parade in Warsaw

Children from General School No. 11, many of them barefoot, prepare for the parade in honor of Herbert Hoover, August 14, 1919. “American Friendship: Herbert Hoover and Poland” Exhibit Catalog

     Today marks the 93rd anniversary of Herbert Hoover’s historic visit to Warsaw, Poland. It wasn’t his first visit, nor his last, but surely the most memorable and one of the most moving experiences of his life. At that time Herbert Hoover was chairman of the American Relief Administration (A.R.A.), which had begun to provide massive humanitarian aid to Eastern Europe, then recovering from the devastation of World War I.
     Hoover took a particular interest in Poland when he learned of the serious shortages of food in the country and its effect on children. At Hoover’s initiative, shipments of condensed milk, flour, and wheat, totaling thousands of tons, began arriving in Poland in the spring of 1919. By the time of his visit in August, an extensive operation had been established through the cooperation of the A.R.A. and civic organizations, which established hundreds of kitchens that fed more than 500,000 children daily. Within a year the operation would feed as many as 1.5 million children and nursing mothers each day. The humanitarian aid for children was a precursor to massive shipments of clothing, shoes and medical supplies to establish inoculation centers against typhus and other diseases. Extensive technical assistance from American advisers also helped rebuild Poland’s railways and other industries. The Poles had much to be grateful for.

Vernon Kellogg, a close associate of Hoover’s who made the initial reports on the situation in Poland, was present in Warsaw at the Mokotow Field on August 14:

  It was a great day for the children of Warsaw. It was a great day for their parents, too, and for all the people and for the Polish Government. But it was especially the great day of the children. The man whose name they all knew as well as their own, but whose face they had never seen, and whose voice they had never heard, had come to Warsaw. And they were all to see him and he was to see them.
  He had not announced his coming, which was a strange and upsetting thing for the government and city officials whose business it is to arrange all the grand receptions and the brilliant parades for visiting guests to whom the Government and all the people wish to do honor. And there was no man in the world to whom the Poles could wish to do more honor than to this uncrowned simple American citizen whose name was for them the synonym of savior.

A group of children in Eastern Poland forming the letter “H” in honor of Herbert Hoover, 1921. “American Friendship: Herbert Hoover and Poland” Exhibit Catalog

  For what was their new freedom worth if they could not be alive to enjoy it? And their being alive was to them all so plainly due to the heart and brain and energy and achievement of this extraordinary American, who sat always somewhere far away in Paris, and pulled the strings that moved the diplomats and the money and the ships and the men who helped him manage the details, and converted all of the activities of these men and all of these things into food for Warsaw---and for all Poland. It was food that the people of Warsaw and all Poland simply had to have to keep alive, and it was food that they simply could not get for themselves. They all knew that. The name of another great American (Woodrow Wilson) spelled freedom for them; the name Herbert Hoover spelled life to them.
  So it was no wonder that the high officials of the Polish Government and capital city were in a state of great excitement when the news suddenly came that the man whom they had so often urged to come to Poland was really moving swiftly from Prague to Warsaw.
  Ever since soon after Armistice Day he had sat in Paris, directing with unremitting effort and absolute devotion the task of getting food to the mouths of hungry people of all the newly liberated but helpless countries of Eastern Europe, and above all, to the children of these countries, so that the coming generation, on whom the future of these struggling peoples depended, should be kept alive and strong. And now he was preparing to return to his own country and his own children to take up again the course of his life as a simple American citizen at home.
  But before going he wanted to see for himself, if only by the most fleeting of glimpses, that the people of Poland and Bohemia and Serbia and all the rest were really being fed. And especially did he want to see that the children were alive and strong.
  When he came to Paris in November, 1918, at the request of the President of the United States to organize the relief of the newly liberated peoples of Eastern Europe, terrible tales were brought to him of the suffering and the wholesale deaths of the children of these ravaged lands. And when those of us who went to Poland for him in January, 1919, to find out the exact conditions and the actual food needs of the twenty-five million freed people there, made our report to him, a single unpremeditated sentence in this report seemed most to catch his eyes and hold his attention. It did more; it wetted his eyes and led to a special concentration of his efforts on behalf of the suffering children. This sentence was: “We see very few children playing in the streets of Warsaw.” Why were they not playing? The answer was simple and sufficient: The children of Warsaw were not strong enough to play in the streets. They could not run; many could not walk; some could not even stand. Their weak little bodies were bones clothed with skin, but not muscles. They simply could not play.
  So in all the excitement of the few hours possible to the citizens of Warsaw and the Government Officials of Poland to make hurried preparation to honor their guest and show him their gratitude, one thing they decided to do, which was the best thing for the happiness of their guest they could possibly have done. They decided to show him that the children of Warsaw could now walk!
  So seventy thousand boys and girls were summoned hastily from the schools. They came with the very tin cups and pannikins from which they had just had their special meal of the day, served at noon in all the schools and special children’s canteens, thanks to the charity of America, as organized and directed by Hoover, and they carried their little paper napkins, stamped with the flag of the United States, which they could wave over their heads. And on an old race-track of Warsaw, these thousands of restored children marched from mid-afternoon till dark in happy, never-ending files past the grandstand where sat the man who had saved them, surrounded by the heads of Government and the notables of Warsaw.

Herbert Hoover (no. 6) sits next to Prime Minister IgnacyPaderewski (no. 5), Commander-in-Chief Josef Piłsudski (no. 9), Ambassador HughGibson (no. 11) and Commander George Barr Baker (no. 4), in front of Belvedere Palace in Warsaw, August, 1919. “American Friendship: Herbert Hoover andPoland” Exhibit Catalog

  They marched and marched and cheered and cheered, and waved their little hands and cups and napkins. And all went by as decorously and in as orderly a fashion as many thousands of happy cheering children could be expected to, until suddenly from the grass an astonished rabbit leaped out and started down the track. And then five thousands of these children broke from the ranks and dashed madly after him, shouting and laughing. And they caught him and brought him in triumph as a gift to their guest. But they were astonished to see as they gave him their gift, that this great strong man did just what you or I or any other human sort of human being could not have helped doing under like circumstances. They saw him cry. And they would not have understood, if he had tried to explain to them that he cried because they had proved to him that they could run and play. So he did not try. But the children of Warsaw had no need to be sorry for him. For he cried because he was glad.

(“Review of the Children of Warsaw”, Vernon Kellogg papers, Box 1, Folder 1, Hoover Institution Archives)

Tower of Peace

Mary Wright, curator of the Chinese collection and C. Easton Rothwell, director of the Hoover Institution, examine a shipment of documents, with collection assistant Eugene Wu in the foreground, 1950s. Hoover Institution Records, Hoover Institution Archives

In his 1970s radio addresses, Ronald Reagan often featured a “desk-clearing day,” where he would tackle a few different, smaller issues in one sitting.  In the same spirit, here’s a Hoover Archives’ desk-clearing blog.

One of the more pleasing features of the Hoover Tower is our excellent carillon. Last month, I made a recording of it as part of the Free to Choose Network’s tribute to Milton Friedman. If you’ve ever been on campus in the early evening, perhaps you’ve heard the chimes. If not, I suggest clicking that link.

Writing to the audiophiles, recordists, audiophile recordists, and other sound enthusiasts out there, it was really a great experience.  I was shocked to learn how relatively quiet these bells are. Posts at a recording forum had me believe they could get as loud as a jet engine.  Ours only gets up to around 115 dB!  I had planned an elaborate rig where a handful of mics would stick out of windows on the 11th floor, but, no, I could mic the carillon right up in there on the platform (wearing ear plugs, of course) with just a simple X-Y pair.  Moreover, the normally blusterous wind decided to stay away while I had microphones up that high, and I was able to get a surprisingly good representation.

For more information about the carillon, please see I Ring Only for Peace by Elena Danielson.

Speaking of the tower, back in 1957, the Hoover Institution produced a radio series entitled Tower of Peace.  In it, a host interviewed several notable people from the Hoover and larger Stanford communities to highlight the collections of the Institution and the work done by those studying them.  No surprise, lots of important research and many saw the collections as some of the best in the world, whether they be of European, African, Middle Eastern, or East Asian focus.  What did surprise me, however, given that this dates from 1957, is how many women were featured, and how prominent of a role they played here at Hoover.

Who were these women?  Ruth Perry, curator of the African collection; Mary Wright, curator of the Chinese collection; Agnes Peterson, area associate for Central and Western European collections; Christina Harris, curator of the Middle Eastern collection; Inez Richardson, coordinator for foreign visitors to Stanford University; and Hildegard Behringer, program officer in Stanford's office for foreign visitors.

Finally, working on this collection was not without irony, either.  In the introductory program, Herbert Hoover himself spoke of the need to migrate the content of newspapers to microfilm before they deteriorated.  I heard him say this from a structurally-deficient acetate tape being digitized before it becomes unplayable itself.

The Battle for Hearts and Minds

From the introduction to the exhibit "The Battle for Hearts and Minds: World War II Propaganda" currently on display at the Hoover Institution, by Dr. George H. Nash

   In an unpublished, autobiographical essay written around the time of World War I, Herbert Hoover declared: “There is little importance to men’s lives except the accomplishments they leave to posterity.”  It is in “the origination or administration of tangible institutions or constructive works” that men’s contributions can best be measured.  “When all is said and done,” he asserted, “accomplishment is all that counts.”
     One of Hoover’s supreme accomplishments in his long and productive life was the creation and upbuilding of the “tangible institution” known today as the Hoover Institution.  Founded in 1919 and housed at Stanford University, the Hoover War Collection (as it was initially called) grew quickly into what was known for years as the Hoover War Library: an immense and invaluable archive of historic manuscripts, newspapers, photographs, books, governmental records, and “fugitive documents” bearing upon the Great War of 1914–1918 and its aftermath.  Under Hoover’s indefatigable, hands-on leadership, the repository became, in his words, “the most important [such] collection” in the world.
     Hoover never wanted his war library to be a mere “packrat operation” or “dead storage of documents.”  Instead, he envisaged it as the nucleus of a dynamic “research institution upon the most vital of all human questions—War, Revolution and Peace.”
     Yet authoritative research cannot proceed without data.  Scholars cannot definitively probe the past without access to every possible scrap of crucial evidence that the past leaves behind.  Hoover recognized this, and—along with numerous associates and agents—went on amassing, from around the world, historical treasures that would shed light upon the often tragic course of the twentieth century.
     Of special interest to Hoover were his institution’s extensive holdings of propaganda used by governments as instruments of modern warfare.  During World War I, as an acclaimed humanitarian who saved millions of European civilians from starvation, he had watched as the belligerent nations of Europe attempted to manipulate American public opinion in their favor. For the first time in human history, he later wrote, war propaganda became a “major strategy of war.” Fascinated and appalled, he collected as much of this material as he could for his library on the campus of his alma mater.
     On June 20, 1941, in ceremonies at Stanford University, Hoover dedicated the 285-foot-high tower that would hold his peerless cache of information on war, revolution, and peace.  In his remarks he expressed hope that the “voice of experience” embedded in his vast trove would induce humankind to “stop, look and listen” and turn to the ways of peace.
     Even as he spoke, another global conflagration was raging around him.  Just a few months later, the United States was drawn in.  In this war, too, propaganda would be a formidable weapon. During the remainder of World War II, Hoover gathered “fugitive material” on the new conflict and prepared for a monumental, postwar collecting drive that would take him and his allies to distant lands in search of precious documentation on the most stupendous war ever fought.  As the guns fell silent, he resumed his worldwide quest for “living history”—and never stopped as long as he lived.
     Today the Hoover Institution holds the fruits of Hoover’s prodigious labors—and of those of his colleagues and successors: thousands of manuscript collections and literally millions of documents and other historical artifacts.  Among these irreplaceable treasures are the items on display in this exhibit. They are a small but superb selection of the more than 100,000 posters and other propaganda materials preserved in the Institution’s vaults.
     The exhibit reminds us that modern wars are increasingly ideological struggles in which hearts and minds (as well as territory and natural resources) are targets. It reminds us also that the causes for which nations fight can be either noble or hideous.
    This fine exhibit represents the work of many talented and devoted people. Ultimately, it was made possible by the vision, generosity, and resourcefulness, decades ago, of Herbert Hoover.  The institution at Stanford that bears his name “is probably my major contribution to American life,” he wrote in 1959.  Its existence is a testament to his unwavering faith in the importance of  “constructive works”—to our lasting benefit.

Copyright © 2012 by George H. Nash

George H. Nash is a professional historian, lecturer, and author of several books about Herbert Hoover.  Recently he edited the never-before-published memoir/history, Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath
(Hoover Institution Press, 2011).

Max Gordon, US 6556, Poster collection, Hoover Institution Archives

Cinderella Story

Letestan? This place name stopped me in my tracks as I was consulting our poster database. Although I have kept up with all the new countries of Central Asia, such as Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, Letestan didn't ring any bells. I searched few standard sources, including the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, GeoNames, and the authority files of the Library of Congress, but found no mention of Letestan. I then searched the Internet, using Google and a few other search engines. Google produced about 1,770 results, very few for Google, only one of which was an exact match of "Letestan" and which turned out to be the Facebook page of someone with that surname. After my search seemed to have pushed the Internet beyond its limits, I tried a pre-Internet source, Webster's New Geographical Dictionary, which was standard issue at every desk at the National Geographic Society when I interned there long ago. No luck.

Some philatelists specialize in Cinderellas: postage-stamp-like labels produced by unrecognized countries. Some Cinderellas are playful fantasies; others represent serious political statements and secessionist movements. Was Letestan some sort of Cinderella country?

I then examined the poster, which was of World War I vintage, more closely. It bore a simple text message urging British men to join the Leicestershire Regiment: "If you want Honour and Glory, join the Regiment that has made History, the Regiment that has Gained the Honours." In the lower right corner was a small imprint: Willsons, Printers, Letestan. But why would Willsons, which was undoubtedly advertising its work, list a false location? Then I noticed the seal at the top of the poster, a tiger wrapped in the banner "Hindoostan/Leicestershire," which was the Royal Tiger Badge awarded the regiment for its service in India in the early 1800s. The name Hindustan has at times been applied to India and does share a "stan" with Letestan.

I then searched a rack of geographic and historical British databases available at Stanford's library, but none yielded any results for Letestan.

There's no neat ending to this puzzle, but it got me thinking about how libraries and archives view place names and the controlled vocabularies that govern their use. How do these rules accommodate fictional places? How are such places distinguished from real places? I'm left with more questions than answers. But the next time someone types "Letestan" in Google's search box, they will find a link to this blog--maybe in the coveted number one spot.

Leicestershire Regiment recruiting poster, UK 425, Poster collection, Hoover Institution Archives

Floppy Diskography

Recently three researchers sought access to the contents of 3.5-inch floppy disks in three archival collections at Hoover. You might think that responding to these requests is routine, but, after activating the write-protection tab and scanning for viruses, the process can take many turns.

Three disks in the Roger Mansell collection were labeled as containing the unpublished memoir of Robert Bjoring, a prisoner of war in the Philippines during World War II. A number of the files on the three disks had the same file name and were the same size, a common occurrence when files are repeatedly backed up. For each file we always generate a checksum, a digital "fingerprint" that serves as a unique identifier. By comparing the checksums of all the files, we were able to confirm the existence of duplicate copies and eliminate the duplicates, saving time for researchers using the files and conserving space in our storage system.

The papers of A. L. Adamishin, a Soviet and Russian diplomat, contained eleven disks with dates written on the labels. We were able to open ten of them; the last one was corrupted and unreadable. Once we viewed the contents (diaries for 1990 and 1991), we found that they matched up to paper diaries in the collection. Evidently, someone printed out the contents of the disks and placed both the printouts and the disks in the boxes shipped to Hoover. Given the many hundreds--perhaps thousands--of computer media in our archival collections, we decided that the paper printouts were sufficient for research and preservation purposes and ceased work on the digital files.

The thirty-two disks in the David Fowler collection proved to be the most exotic. The curator who acquired the collection was told that the disks contained newswire stories, a rather vague description. The few disks with labels were handwritten in an incomprehensible scrawl. Our standard software could not read the disks and reported that they had not been formatted. We are still hoping to recover at least some data from the disks by using specialized software running in a Linux environment, which requires more staff time. Who knows what we'll find?

After activating the write-protection tab (at the tip of the pencil), files on the disk cannot be altered or deleted.

Is This Bit Rot?

The term "bit rot" gets batted around a lot, but its definition isn't so easy to nail down. ComputerUser's dictionary describes it as "gradual decay of storage media" while the Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing states that it is "a hypothetical disease the existence of which has been deduced from the observation that unused programs or features will often stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if 'nothing has changed.'" Some online technical dictionaries do not include the term. Meanwhile, Wikipedia's bit rot entry is surprisingly short and contains multiple definitions: decay of storage media, decay of data on storage media, and degradation of software programs. (The entry is flagged as needing citations to reliable sources.)

So maybe I'm not alone in wondering what bit rot looks like in a word-processing file. Some of our archival collections, such as the Marshall Green papers and Notgemeinschaft für eine freie Universität records, contain 5.25-inch floppy disks, which often present problems. Today I'm looking at a disk containing files that open on a PC. They suffer from some malady, as indicated by this sample from a letter dated January 21, 1986:

<<<<<>>>>

Thankó verù mucè foò á lovelù luncheoî anä somå splendiä views® Wå 

imaginå yoõ no÷ iî Indiá anä wondeò iæ yoõ arå listeninç tï somå oæ thå 

samå Indianó witè whoí wå talkeä yearó ago® Thå artistó anä economistó 

werå quitå remarkable¬ buô thå politicaì scientistó useä tï talë abouô 

atomiã bombó foò Indiá witè eager¬ burninç eyeó whilå beinç verù carefuì 

noô tï kilì anù insects® (Severaì haä theiò beardó covereä iî whitå 

silk so that no insect would get caught and be stifled there.)

<<<<<>>>>>

The file name, Enid, has no file extension, so it is difficult to determine what software was used to create it. The sample above is from the rendering in MS Word with Windows character encoding, but no matter what software I open the file in, I get some gibberish. But it isn't all gibberish--the last line is completely legible. Sometimes a letter displays correctly, like the "n" in "insect," but not in other cases, like the "n" that should end "luncheoî" in the first line. Is this bit rot?

Regardless of the diagnosis, the next question is what to do. Because we can infer what many of the corrupted characters should be, we can match them to their actual counterpart, as in this sample:

Corrupted version True character

ë k

ì l

í m

î n

ï o

ð p

Then we could use the find-and-replace feature to fix all the corrupted characters. But it is more difficult to infer the correct characters for corrupted numbers. In addition, I assume that matching corrupted to true characters also varies from one file to the next--after all, this decay probably doesn't occur in the same, predictable manner and at a steady rate. Furthermore, we've got to deal with thousands of corrupted files on hundreds of disks. Lastly, if we did restore all the files, how can we ensure that the researchers studying them understand our restoration process and its implications for the authenticity and reliability of the content?

If you have answers to any of the above problems, I think Wikipedia needs you to enhance its bit rot entry.

An example of bit rot. Hoover Institution Archives

A Note On Hoover History

Recently, the Hoover Tower’s exterior was cleaned and thus brought closer to how it looked when it opened in 1941. The interior? Not even close. After all, we don’t have a radio room any more.

Radio room? Yes, the Hoover Tower was built with a radio room in the blueprints. Funnily enough, none of us was aware of this until a few years ago; when we were preparing an exhibit on the Institution’s 90th anniversary, I found a recording that mentioned it was produced in “the radio room of the Hoover Tower.”

Why did we have a radio room? Good question. From the records we’ve been able to search, the room was there, at least in part, because of World War II. It seems the room’s purpose was to listen to and record foreign broadcasts, in concert with the military. Over the years, its purpose began to change, with radio programs being produced in the room, including Wealth of the West, a McLaughlin-Group-like program of the day’s issues. This change prompted Stanford to build a production studio across the street in Memorial Hall. (Fun Archives fact: in the Wealth of the West recording on which the radio room was name-checked, one of the guests mentioned an event at the Commonwealth Club of California.)

Do we still have any of these recordings? Another good question. No, but we have something close.

When the room was spec’d out, the records indicate that the broadcasts were intended to be recorded onto cylinders. This doesn’t quite jive, though, because, by the late 1930s, cylinders were an obsolete format. The tower opened in 1941, and it seems odd they would use a format that can record only five minutes at a time when technology of that era (discs) got up to twenty minutes at a time. In any case, there are no cylinders in our stacks that I’m aware of.

We do, however, have a lot of lacquer discs cut in 1942 of English-language, American-audience-intended shortwave broadcasts from Tokyo, Chungking, Bangkok, and Australia. These discs were cut in San Francisco and accessioned by Hoover in 1958. As it happens, I’m currently working on preserving these discs.

So what happened to the radio room? Yet another good question. I don’t know except that the area in which the room used to be is now the wheelchair entrance to the Tower.

And so the mystery remains.

Original floor plan of the Hoover Tower, including the Radio Room. Hoover Records, Hoover Institution Archives.