d to. And the first
reaction to it was likely to be one of indignant opposition. This was
well expressed by the cartoon of black Matilda in the kitchen: "Mistah
Hoover goin' to show me how to cook cawn pone? Well, I reckin not." So
with the business man. But the second reaction, the one that came after
listening to Hoover and thinking about the matter overnight, was
different.

I remember a group of large buyers and sellers of grain, men who dealt
on the grain exchanges of the Middle West, who came to Washington, not
at his request but on their own determination to have it out with this
man who was threatening to interfere seriously with their affairs;
indeed, who threatened to put many of them out of business for the
period of the war. They came with big sticks. They met in the morning
for conference with the object of their wrath. Then they went off and
met in the afternoon together. They came the next morning for another
conference. And they met again alone to pass some resolutions. The
resolutions commended the Food Administrator for the regulations he was
about to put into force, and recommended that they be made more drastic
than he had originally suggested!

But among the hundred million people of the United States there were
some who did not justify Hoover's belief in American patriotism and
American heart. Just as there were some among the seven million Belgians
who tried to cheat their benefactors and their countrymen by forging
extra ration cards. So when a measure to regulate some great food trade
or industry, as the wholesale grocery business or milling, was agreed to
and honestly lived up to by eighty-five or ninety per cent of the men
concerned, and for these could have been left on a wholly voluntary
basis, there were a few for whom the regulations had to be legally
formulated and energetically enforced. They were the ones who made the
reluctant gifts to the American Red Cross, which was the Food
Administrator's favorite form of penalization, when he did not have to
go to the extreme of putting persistent profiteers out of business.

The Food Control Law, passed by Congress in August, 1917, under which
the Food Administrator, acting for the President, derived his authority,
was a perfectly real law, but it left great gaps in the control. For
example, it exempted from its license regulations, which were the chief
means of direct legal control, all food producers (farmers,
stock-growers, et al.) and all