The Herbert Hoover Library and Museum reopened in a ceremony Thursday and one of the guests at the event talked about Hoover’s accomplishments outside the presidency.

Belgium legal scholar Jan Wouters said there are moments in history when one individual changes not merely the course of events, but the fate of the people.  “For Belgium, Herbert Hoover was such a person. In my country, his name is associated not with presidential politics, but with food, survival and reconstruction,” he says. The Germans had invaded Belgian and the British were blockading the country, which brought in most of its food, and the people there faced starvation.

Wouters says Herbert Hoover took on the challenge of feeding them. “This is more than an episode in the biography of a great American statesman. It is a major chapter in the history of modern humanitarianism. It is proof that even in a war of unprecedented violence, it remained possible to create an international space devoted to human survival,” Wouters said.

He said Hoover accomplished what no one thought was possible. “Hoover’s staff was to build the external machinery to make sure that there would be food purchased, raise money, charter ships, negotiate passage through the blockade, and secure German guarantees,” he said. “And in October 1914, the Commission for Relief in Belgium, the CRB, was established with Hoover as chairman and dominant organizing force.”

Wouters said Hoover got the wealthy to donate to Belgium and his efforts became a symbol to people in the United States, who also rallied around the effort. There were millions of dollars left over after the war and he said Hoover created the Belgium American Educational Foundation. “That turned wartime capital into an engine of academic exchange, funding university reconstruction, but also creating a fantastic fellowship program that has since supported thousands of Belgium and American scholars,” he said.

Wouters said Hoover taught us a lesson about public service, as he exercised his most admirable leadership before he became president.  “He possessed no electoral mandate in Belgium. He commanded no army. He governed no territory, yet he organized an enterprise upon which millions of lives depended on an authority derived from competence, trust, and moral purpose alone,” he said.

Wouters says history tends to judge people on the office they hold, but Hoover’s legacy goes well beyond that.