To Manage the World’s Food: The Culture of Administration in America’s World War I Food Relief Program

Immediately after American entry into World War I, a powerful wartime agency called the United States Food Administration was created to maximize the food exported to Allies and American troops in Europe, where food supplies ran low. The food aid project represented a monumental accomplishment to Americans, partly because recent history had galvanized fears of global food shortages. In the late nineteenth century, a series of devastating famines had struck parts of Asia, Russia, Africa, and South America. With European food shortages in the 1910s, it seemed clear that global food systems, left to the vagaries of weather and war, were pitifully vulnerable to shortages and disruptions. Yet it also seemed that humans were developing the very communication and transportation tools needed to manage global food systems. With careful planning, proper funding, and above all, central organization, it seemed increasingly conceivable that Americans and Europeans might be able to feed the world, at least parts of it, at least in emergencies. Even as the lion’s share of World War I food aid went to western Europeans, Americans saw the aid project as a shining example of global food management.
On the American homefront, the international food aid program inspired intense debate over rationing versus voluntarism, and over the merits of state versus private initiatives. The structure of the Food Administration incorporated elements from both camps, as a federal bureaucracy coordinated some 800,000 volunteers. An administrative ethos permeated every level of the organization, from the applied engineering philosophy of its head, a young Herbert Hoover, to the individual actions of American housewives, newly celebrated as the expert managers of their families’ health and finances. This paper will interrogate how the exaltation of administration in wartime food relief efforts challenged and in some ways transmuted the boundaries between public and private activities.