The world's greatest collection of incendiary literature was last week opened to the public by Herbert Hoover. It is the Hoover Library of War, Revolution, and Peace on the Campus of Stanford University. The Library is also the world's hugest collection of social and political documents, and all of them relate to the contemporary world. Mr. Hoover has spent some 25 years collecting its vast, inflammatory archives, so that the hushed new Romanesque tower is a storehouse of most of the social and political dynamite of our times. There are the secret minutes of chancelleries and general staffs, secret memoirs, state papers, conspiratorial records of revolutionary parties and governments, data on plot and counterplot, war, espionage, assassination, treason. Far more complete than the great French, British and German war libraries (even if these were available), the Hoover Library makes Stanford the future focus for all important study in 20th-century social history.
Hoover got the idea for his library while he was crossing the North Sea in 1914. Instead of worrying about drifting mines, he read the autobiography of Cornell University's Andrew White. The spark that fired Hoover's high-test historical sense was President White's observation that most of the records of the French Revolution are lost. Hoover is a firm believer that social and political records tell more about an age than military records. He also knew that the French Revolution was a minor engagement compared with the period in which he was playing a major part. He saw that for an archivist there was no time to lose.
"Gigantic boils" of European civilization had been lanced, Bernard Shaw said, "by a million bayonets." World War I ended in revolution in Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary. From Russia the wave of the future threatened to engulf Europe as it later engulfed Germany under the Nazis. The Bolsheviks fighting on six fronts began a systematic terror that bagged some 3,000,000 victims in six years, while hungry ravens forced themselves through the boarded glassless windows of Moscow's Hotel Lux.
In Hungary a sadistic Bolshevik schoolteacher named Tibor Szamuely made Elizabethan progresses through the countryside, stringing up uncooperative peasants to the nearest trees ("Szamuely fruit").
In Germany the Bavarian Soviet toppled, while little girls of 12 solicited openly on the Alexanderplatz, and in the dead of nights, whose terror exceeded anything known in the U.S. since Indian days, good citizens heard the shuffle of marching feet and voices singing:
Blut muss fliessen!
Blut muss fliessen!
Blut! Blut! Blut!*
It was the first stage of the world revolution, and Herbert Hoover, unlike most conservatives, knew it almost as soon as the revolutionists. He also had a formula for checking it: food. He was so successful that Communists hate no one worse than Hoover, whom they accuse of overthrowing the Hungarian Soviet by withholding rations. But while, as a practical man, Hoover was saving Europe's civilization with U.S. food, as a scholar he was saving Europe's social records.