In April, 1917, America entered the war, and Minister Whitlock came out of Belgium with his shepherded flock of American consuls and relief workers, although a small group of C. R. B. men, with the director, Prentis Gray, remained inside for several weeks longer. In the same month Herbert Hoover heard his next call to war service. For almost immediately after our entrance into the war President Wilson asked him to come to Washington to consult about the food situation. This consultation was the beginning of American food administration. It did not end Belgian relief for Hoover, for the work had still to go on and did go on through all the rest of the war and even for several months of the Armistice period, with the C. R. B. and its Chief still in charge, although Dutch and Spanish neutrals replaced the Americans inside the occupied territory. But the new call was to place a new duty and responsibility on Hoover's broad shoulders. Responding to it, he arrived in New York on the morning of May 3, 1917, and reached Washington the evening of the same day. On the following day he talked with the President and began planning for the administration of American food. CHAPTER X AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION: PRINCIPLES, CONSERVATION, CONTROL OF EXPORTS Put yourself in Hoover's place when the President called him back from the Belgian relief work to be the Food Administrator of the United States. Here were a hundred million people unaccustomed to government interference with their personal affairs, above all of their affairs of stomach and pocketbook, their affairs of personal habit and private business. What would you think of your chance to last long as a new kind of government official, set up in defiance of all American precedent and tradition of personal liberty, to say how much and what kinds of food the people were to eat and how the business affairs of all millers and bakers, all commission men and wholesale grocers and all food manufacturers were to be run? The stomach and private business of Americans are the seats of unusually many and delicate nerve-endings. To hit the American household in the stomach and the American business man in the pocketbook is to invite a prompt, violent and painful reaction. Yet this is what President Wilson asked Hoover to do and to face. Hoover realized the full possibilities of the situation. He had seen the rapid succession of the food dictators in each of the European countries; their average duration of life--as food dictators--was a little less than six months. "I don't want to be food dictator for the American people," he said, plaintively, a few days after the President had announced what he wanted him to do. "The man who accepts such a job will lie on the barbed wire of the first line of intrenchments."