ntinued
rapidly through November and December. It had to be done with care to
prevent dangerous disorganization, and some continued control was
necessary during the winter and spring in order to carry out the
agreements of price stabilization entered into between the Food
Administration and the producers and handlers of certain commodities, as
hogs, sugar, rice, and cotton seed and its products. The wheat price
guarantee and control especially provided for by Congress and later
Presidential proclamation remained vested in the United States Grain
Corporation. It will expire on June 30, 1920.

But Hoover could not remain in America to see this demobilization of the
Food Administration through personally. Only ten days after the
armistice he left for Europe, at the request of the President, to direct
the participation of the United States in the imperatively needed relief
of the war-ravaged countries of Eastern Europe. Edgar Rickard, who had
been Hoover's chief personal assistant through all of the Food
Administration work, was appointed by the President as Acting Food
Administrator in Hoover's absence.

CHAPTER XII

AMERICAN RELIEF ADMINISTRATION

With the coming of the armistice victorious America and the Allies found
themselves face to face with a terrible situation in Eastern Europe. The
liberated peoples of the Baltic states, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia,
Jugo-Slavia, and the Near East, were in a dreadful state of starvation
and economic wreckage. A great, responsibility and pressing duty
devolved on America, Great Britain, France, and Italy to act promptly
for the relief of these peoples who had become temporarily, by the
hazards of war, their wards. But the Allies themselves were in no
enviable position to relieve others. Their own troubles were many. It
was on America that the major part of this relief work would fall.

No man knew this situation, as far as it could be known before the veil
of blockade and military control was lifted from it, better than
Hoover. And no man realized more clearly than he the direful
consequences that it threatened not only to the peoples of the suffering
countries themselves but to the peace and stability of the world, to
restore which every effort had now to be exerted. Hoover was not only
the man logically indicated to the President of the United States to
undertake this saving relief on the part of America, but he was the man
whom all of Europe recognized as the source of