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From General John J. Pershing, Hoover asked 15 history professors and students then serving in various ranks of the A.E.F. He sent them in uniform to the governments whose people he was feeding. They made the right contacts, snooped for archives. They found so many that Hoover was soon shipping them back to the U.S. as ballast in the empty food boats.
Some 15 carloads of material came from Germany alone. Among them: the complete secret minutes of the German Supreme War Council—a gift from President Fritz Ebert. "Ebert, you know, was a radical," says Hoover, "with no interest in the work of his predecessors." Later the German Government asked that the collection be kept secret for 30 years. The Library agreed.
When the Bolsheviks overthrew the liberal Kerensky Government, Kerensky's foreign minister, learned History Professor Paul Miliukov, told Hoover he had hidden tsarist archives in a barn in Finland. "If you can get them," said Miliukov, "you can have them." "Getting them was no trouble at all," says Hoover. "We were feeding Finland at the time."
The Russian Bolsheviks cooperated from the first, allowed Hoover's representatives to remove 25 carloads of material. It includes the minutes of all the big town and district Soviets and comprises the largest soviet archive in the world, not excluding those in the Soviet Union.
The Library's irreplaceable Hungarian archives came in a different way. When the Hungarian Soviet fell, Hoover Representative Ralph Haswell Lutz (now chairman of the Library's Board of Directors) strolled around to the soviet offices to see how things were going. The Communists were all gone. "You may remember," says Hoover pleasantly, "that a number of them killed themselves." So Lutz had a truck back up to the door, removed two large packing cases full of records to the U.S. Consulate where he defended them against all comers. Later the Horthy Government requested that they be returned. The Hoover Library agreed provided the Hungarians would supply photostatic copies.
Curators and archivists of these tremendous items ("if," says Hoover, "you want to call them items") are Head Librarian Nina Almond and a staff of eight librarians, eight assistants and secretaries. Also in their care are:
> Some 25,000 volumes of official publications by 60 governments.
> Some 80,000 books and pamphlets from 33 countries.
> Some 1,724 newspapers in 26 languages.
> More than 2,060 official general staff maps of World War I, many others.
> Some 281,000 feet of film covering the activities of the U.S. Food Administration, the American Relief Administration, the A.E.F., the Red Cross.
> A vast collection of coins, medals, posters, photographs.
> The irreplaceable archives of the Red Cross during World War I, the American Relief Association, Hoover's Presidential papers.
> Three hundred sealed collections that may not be opened for many years. Among them: a trunk containing the records of a woman spy known only by number, but conjectured to be Mata Hari (see cut).