For those of us who spent part of our careers in UNICEF, Maurice's own trajectory—his early rejections, his persistence, the moment when preparation finally met opportunity—may sound familiar. His story illuminates something crucial about the culture he built: field work, meet those you serve face-to-face, and always keep to your principles, in this case: aid without ideology, care for all children.
This article explores Maurice's story before and up to that appointment. A second article will address the crises that faced UNICEF and Maurice in its early years—the funding struggles, Eleanor Roosevelt and the State Department's effort to end what they saw as emergency relief, and UNICEF's unexpected role in major global conflicts including Korea, Vietnam, Congo, and Biafra. Each will receive fuller treatment in subsequent articles.
Denver
Maurice was born in 1894 in the small farming town of Pender, Nebraska where his father headed the town's only bank. When Maurice was only three years old, the family moved to Denver where his father went into business and later came to own a very successful furniture company. Three of Maurice's grandparents came from Wales and one from Ireland. According to one biography, "the mixed Welsh Irish ancestry may account for his dogged Welsh persistence and a touch of Irish sentimentality that he tries to hide manfully".
Three of Maurice's six siblings did not survive infancy—one each to polio, diphtheria, and unpasteurised milk. Maurice later remarked to a friend: "To think that these children would live today if more had been known then about children's care."
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| 1911 Denver East High School - "A man not of words but of action" |
Maurice grew up in Denver and excelled in school, allowing him to skip fourth grade and graduate a year early. When he graduated from Denver East High School in 1911, his classmates lauded him in the yearbook as "a man not of words, but of action". His academic record was strong and he won admission to Princeton where he began his freshman year before even turning seventeen.
A Career Begins with Frustration
Like many young Americans of his generation, Maurice was deeply restless. War was raging in Europe, yet with the United States still neutral, military service was not an option. Adding to his frustration was the fact that he had visited Europe with his father, Richard, in 1913, just a year before the war broke out in August 1914. The records tell us little about where father and son traveled or what impressions Maurice gained, but it was clear that the war weighed heavily on him and he wanted to play a role. |
| 1915 Princeton |
Maurice graduated from Princeton University in 1915 Phi Beta Kappa with high honors in mathematics and physics. His classmates voted him "most likely to succeed" and remembered him as " ``a tall, dark, wavy-haired figure of boundless geniality and seemingly infinite energy, whose view of the world was much more advanced than that of most of us.''
Yet in 1916 he found himself working as a clerk at his uncle's bank in a small town in Iowa. His duties were humble: arriving at 7:30 a.m. each morning to light the stoves and clean the premises before senior staff arrived. He did his duties faithfully, but he knew that this was no life for him.
Crossing the Border?
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| With his aunt and cousin in Denver |
While visiting his family in Denver in early 1916, Maurice let slip to his father that he intended to cross the border and join the Canadian Army. Richard Pate, who had always given his son great freedom, received the news calmly. Not surprisingly, his mother, Rachel, reacted quite differently—she wept and shouted, "Whose war is this?"
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| "No Dividends - Big Business Works for Charity - The Saturday Evening Post August 28, 1915 |
Rather than debate the matter, his father gently suggested there might be a better way to help. Richard handed Maurice a back issue of the Saturday Evening Post from August 1915. The article "No Dividends: Big Business Works for Charity" described Herbert Hoover, a wealthy American mining engineer in London, who had established the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) to feed millions of civilians living under German occupation in Belgium and northern France. Maurice found the idea of relief work compelling. With his father's blessing, he took a train to New York in April 1916 to apply. Along the way he stopped at Princeton and secured a letter of recommendation from Princeton's president.
Rejection and Rejection
Despite his Princeton academic credentials and a strong letter of recommendation, his reception at CRB's New York office was decidedly cold. Though nearly twenty-two, he looked "like a skinny kid of seventeen." The staff sent him away, saying among other things that his French was inadequate.
But Maurice was not one to accept defeat. He befriended a Belgian soldier convalescing in a New York hospital and spent weeks practicing French for hours each day. When he returned to the CRB, the staff remained dismissive, informing him he would need to pass an examination with the Belgian Consul-General. Undeterred, he sought out the Consul-General and impressed him with both his French and his determination. Finding they could no longer dismiss him, the CRB office reluctantly sent him to their branch in Rotterdam, the primary port for relief supplies.
Even there, resistance continued. The Rotterdam office eventually cabled New York pleading with them not to send "any more of those little boys." Perhaps to get rid of him, Maurice was passed on to the Brussels office, where he encountered again a very cold reception.
A Bit of Luck at Last
Fortune intervened. One of the CRB's delegates fell ill and had to return to the United States. Suddenly, a position opened: Maurice became CRB's field representative in Tournai, a city in the region near Lille bordering France.
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| April 1915 - CRB's work in Belgium |
His primary responsibility was ensuring the relief distribution system functioned smoothly and that CRB's supplies did not fall into the hands of the German army. Maurice took a hands-on approach, visiting every one of the more than one hundred villages in the province to personally inspect flour mills, bakers, warehouses, and bookkeeping records. He often worked twelve hours or more a day; on one occasion, his Belgian driver reported covering over 600 miles in a single day to complete his rounds.
The work suited him. By the end of his first month, despite his youthful appearance and the skepticism of his superiors, he knew the operation "inside out." Word soon reached the Brussels CRB office that "the skinny kid was working out alright."
About a month into his field work, Maurice was summoned to Brussels for a conference with Herbert Hoover, the head of the CRB. Everyone called Hoover, "The Chief". During the discussion, Maurice told the Chief that he was deeply concerned that the entire Tournai operation would fail, because the Germans army were requisitioning Belgian manpower, including families of men working for the relief mission.
Hoover said little during the meeting. But the following morning, Maurice found a handwritten note among his mail. It read:
"My dear Pate, I envy your opportunity to work so closely with people in the field. I know that you are doing a wonderful job. Remember that whatever you do I am one hundred per cent behind you. - H.H."
Maurice later recalled that this brief note "added figuratively six inches to my size and ten years to my stature." Armed with Hoover's confidence, he successfully confronted a German general and secured an exemption from conscription for his relief workers.
In Uniform
When the US entered the war in April 1917, the CRB was unable to continue operations. Maurice and a few other Americans stayed on to wrap up operations. A German officer told them not to worry, as the war would be over soon.
After leaving Belgium, Maurice quickly found himself back in France as a sergeant in the US Army's American Expeditionary Force (AEF). When the war ended in November 1918 he held the rank of second lieutenant.
Years later on an early trip to France as Executive Director, Maurice, was invited to a luncheon meeting at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Quay d'Orsay. Out of courtesy for an American visitor who they assumed would not speak French, the officials organized the meeting in English. When it came to Maurice's moment to speak, he surprised everyone. Instead of the expected pitch for political support and financial support, Maurice told the story in fluent French of his time as a 'lonely dough-boy' in France and how his affection for France was rooted in the extraordinary kindness and hospitality he received from simple farmers and villagers who welcomed him to their homes in those days. The officials left the meeting deeply impressed by the simple and effective way he weaved his story into one of the needs of children.
Central and Eastern Europe
When the United States entered the war in April 1917, the CRB wound down. President Wilson immediately appointed Hoover to head the US Food Administration, tasking him with managing domestic rationing and distribution while pushing American farmers to maximize grain production for the war effort. The strategy succeeded: by war's end, the US held enormous surpluses.
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| Public appeal by ARA a public / private fund |
As the armistice neared, Central and Eastern Europe descended into catastrophe—waves of refugees, overlapping epidemics, famine described as "the worst in 300 years." Those American grain surpluses suddenly became instruments of relief. America's allies—Britain, France, Italy—resisted any relief effort, fearing it might reignite fighting behind the former German lines. In response Congress created an American led effort, the American Relief Administration (ARA) to channel the surpluses into post-war aid, with Hoover again at its head.
He dispatched Maurice, still an Army lieutenant, along with other army officers in France to establish relief programmes across Central and Eastern Europe. Maurice's assignment was Poland, where Hoover set a goal of one warm meal daily for 1.3 million children.
Poland presented brutal logistical problems. The newly created state had uncertain borders and a single deep-water port—the German-majority free city of Danzig—lying within Germany's frontiers. Hoover instructed his teams to ignore the political disputes and simply get food to those who needed it.
Maurice recalled later: "I had thought Belgium serious, but when I reached Warsaw, I could see Poland was far worse. It would take fast work to save those children." Food arrived at Danzig; but getting it through Poland was another matter. Locomotives and freight cars were scarce in the devastated landscape, and Polish officialdom moved slowly.
At Katowice, a border town claimed by Poles, Germans, and Czechs alike, Maurice abandoned bureaucracy. He boarded a locomotive pulling twenty-two freight wagons laden with rice, tinned meats, sugar, and cocoa, and walked into town to find the mayor. He gave the mayor one day to form a mixed committee of Poles, Germans, Czechs, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews to assume responsibility for fair distribution. Within three hours, the committee existed. Before day's end, the children were eating.
Hoover recognised what Maurice had accomplished. He would later call him "the most efficient human angel I ever known".
Hoover knew the clock was ticking. US government funding would not extend beyond mid-1919. He had designed the ARA from the start to blend government resources with private charity—Polish and Jewish organizations, the YMCA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and others—precisely because he understood that children's needs would outlast the emergency.
In July 1919, he established the American Relief Administration European Children's Fund (ARAECF), a charitable body initially headquartered in Paris that could operate independently once the ARA itself wound down. The ARAECF's reach was ambitious: field missions stretched across Finland, Estonia, northwest Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia, working alongside the European Relief Council, Red Cross, American Friends Service Committee, and the YMCA.
Critically, Hoover insisted that this machinery work within existing government structures. In Poland, Maurice worked with the government to establish the Polish Children's Relief Committee under the Health Ministry. Schools became the main delivery mechanism: food drew children back to classrooms, and helped settle migrants. When American relief workers departed, the national government would assume full responsibility for sustaining the work. The model was explicit: external charity could help initiate, but only national structures could endure.
Ludwik Rajchman had returned to Warsaw at the end of 1918 to head the Ministry of Public Health and fight the typhus epidemic which was raging through Poland. Maurice arrived in early 1919 and must have gotten to know each other during the period when the Children's Relief Committee was being built.
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| ARAECF |
As former UNICEF staff, we may reflect on how the ARAECF abbreviation was later mirrored by UNICEF's own. Another parallel runs deeper: both were created as "funds" open to both government and private contributions. Maurice would carry this lesson forward.
By 1920 Poland and Russia were at war and large numbers of Russian troops occupied parts of Poland and caused frequent disruptions in the distribution of food. Maurice went to Moscow in an attempt to get orders for the Russian troops to stop interfering with the child-feeding programme.
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| Moving ARA supplies to Russia and Poland |
The visit accomplished more than he expected. The Bolsheviks were impressed enough to ask Maurice to conduct a firsthand assessment of food conditions in their territory. As Maurice recalled: "We found appalling conditions of starvation in Russia. (We) sent a fourteen-hundred-word telegram to Mr. Hoover describing what we had witnessed. That was the first step in the large American food-relief action in Russia— an action that some Americans and Russians now tend to forget about.”
In 1922, as the ARA wound down its Polish operations, Maurice resigned. He had come to love Poland and had become fluent in the language; he decided to stay in Warsaw. He worked first as a representative for an oil company, then founded his own import-export business. By 1926, when a military coup overthrew the democratically elected government dividing the country Maurice's neutral standing and business connections made him a trusted intermediary. He had become a prominent figure in Polish society.
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| Jadwiga Monkowska |
In 1927 Maurice married Jadwiga Monkowska, daughter of an established Polish family. The marriage did not survive the move to New York in 1935, where Maurice took work as an investment banker. Jadwiga missed Poland and could not adapt to American life. They divorced in 1937 but remained close friends throughout her life; he visited her on every trip to Europe until her death in 1960. Only after Jadwiga's passing did he re-marry,
On September 1, 1939, German forces invaded Poland. Within hours, Maurice went to Washington and volunteered his services. With Herbert Hoover's backing, he was appointed president of the Commission for Polish Relief. He at once began negotiating passage for relief supplies through German and Russian territory. His experience in European logistics, his years in Poland, and his standing with various European powers made him indispensable. Between 1939 and America's entry into the war in December 1941, the Commission shipped substantial quantities of food and medical supplies into Poland through negotiated channels with both German and Soviet authorities. Once the United States entered the war, that work became impossible.
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| Contributions to Polish Relief Netted Donors a Pin |
The Commission for Polish Relief brought together figures who would later shape UNICEF's creation. Helenka Pantaleoni, a prominent voice in the Polish American community, worked alongside Maurice in relief operations. Ludwik Rajchman, with whom Maurice had collaborated in post-war Warsaw, was also involved. These three would converge again, within years, in an entirely different context.
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| American Red Cross Appeal to Help Troops and POWs |
When the US entered WWII, sending relief supplies to Poland became impossible. Maurice shifted to the American Red Cross, where he took on the position of Director of Relief to Prisoners of War. For the next five years, he managed an enormous challenge in logistics: channeling over $170 million in supplies to American and Allied prisoners scattered across the European and Asian theaters. Opening new supply routes required him to work with British and American military commanders, but also to coordinate with neutral powers like Count Folke Bernadotte, who headed the Swedish Red Cross. Maurice himself would later describe his approach to the work as "the Hoover technique": the art of moving supplies and securing agreement across ideological and political lines.
By 1944, while still absorbed in tracing and providing supplies for POWs, Maurice wrote to Herbert Hoover. The war was nearing its end. In his letter Maurice said that he was still unsure, but might return to private business once the war was truly over. But, he said, if Hoover needed him, he would welcome "the opportunity to again serve you in some capacity."
Maurice was still working at the American Red Cross in early 1946 when Hoover called and asked him to coordinate a team of researchers who would conduct a rapid survey of the food situations in war affected countries between March and June 1946. Hoover pointed out that the request for the survey came from President Truman who had offered his full support for the mission. Hoover wanted Maurice to focus reporting on the situation of mothers and children.
Between March and June 1946, Maurice traveled across thirty-eight countries in an unpressurized aircraft, conducting country-by-country appraisals in real time. The survey was orchestrated for maximum public impact. Daily reports from the mission were transmitted directly to Washington while still in flight and immediately released to the American press, building political will for a permanent American commitment to postwar child relief.
From Cairo on April 23, 1946, Maurice sent Hoover detailed health reports filled with details on the condition of women and children that Hoover could then use in his speeches. They included a letter that shifted the numbers of affected children significantly. Hoover's original public estimate of twenty million underfed European children, Maurice wrote, "hits far short of the mark." The actual crisis was far worse: forty million children faced severe malnutrition, and of these, eleven million were orphans or half-orphans who had completely lost their family structures.
In Poland Maurice reported, 1.1 million of seven million children were orphans, with more than twenty percent of Warsaw's children having died in the preceding year. In Yugoslavia, infant mortality had soared to twenty-one percent. In Berlin, the entire child welfare system had collapsed.
These observations—transmitted to North America in daily dispatches that described mothers in rags standing in lines for meager rations, babies wrapped in newspapers instead of blankets, families subsisting on nothing but potatoes, overwhelmed and under-resourced ration centers—became the foundation for a shift in American political will.
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| Hoover presents his report to Truman |
When Hoover delivered his radio address to the 'peoples of North America' from Ottawa on June 28, 1946, he drew directly on Maurice's data. He warned the West that millions of children were growing up with "stunted bodies and distorted minds," preparing a future generation of totalitarian warmongers if the civilized world did not intervene. In that address, Hoover officially requested that Maurice "study the immediate rehabilitation of forty million undernourished, debilitated children in war-ravaged countries of Europe"—and called for the United Nations to establish a permanent children's fund.
By September, Maurice was back in the United States. He had not followed closely the news about the newly formed United Nations. When Helenka Pantaleoni, a friend from the Polish Relief days, casually asked if he would like to join her for an evening drive out to observe a UN meeting at Lake Success, she knew exactly what she was doing. Ludwik Rajchman also knew exactly what he was doing when he fished Maurice out at the meeting and offered him the post of Executive Director.
Rajchman had learned from bitter experience how easily postwar organizations could be strangled by Cold War politics and isolationist sentiment. He knew that there would be tough times ahead and the new children's fund would survive only if its leadership could build trust across ideological divides. That meant finding an American—specifically a Republican—who had no enemies and whose record was beyond reproach.
Maurice was that person. His thirty years of hands-on relief work had earned him a reputation for impartial benevolence. Unlike Rajchman, whose abrasive style and Polish associations made him politically unpalatable to Western governments, Maurice had stayed outside UN politics entirely, accumulating no political debts or adversaries. With Hoover's backing Maurice could insulate UNICEF from the early Cold War hostilities that might otherwise paralyze it.
Maurice consulted Hoover. The Chief's reply was enthusiastic.
There was one condition Maurice insisted upon: any fund he headed for children would serve all children, regardless of which side they had been on during the war. The Board accepted this principle without debate. Maurice's stipulation was the inspiration of what would become UNICEF's defining mandate—aid without ideology.
The United Nations General Assembly formally established UNICEF on December 11, 1946, with a three-year provisional mandate. Secretary-General Trygve Lie received the recommendation of UNICEF's Executive Board and confirmed Maurice as its first Executive Director.
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| Maurice @ Age 40 |
Maurice assumed the post of Executive Director on January 1, 1947. He was forty-two years old. He had spent three decades learning how to feed hungry children in rubble and chaos. He could not have known at the time that this short three year assignment would consume the remaining thirty-nine years of his life.
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| Maurice @ Age 60 |
The boy who had been rejected for looking "like a skinny kid of seventeen" had become the key figure in the world's major postwar challenge - ensuring adequate food and health care would reach current and future generations of children, that the "seeds of destiny" would grow into healthy adults.
Brilliant account, such an inspiration. Thank you, Saudamini
ReplyDeleteWhat a convoluted story, presented so clearly. I even shared with my husband, who is a Denver native.
ReplyDeleteTom, I love the stories you publish, this one about Maurice Pate is so interesting and contains so much I did not know. Thanks again
ReplyDeleteThanks everyone for your very kind comments. Some readers however must be asking, "I read #6 and now #10, so what happened to #s 7, 8, and 9. This seems to be due to a mistake I made while putting up the draft for #10. I must have accidentally hit the "Publish" button. The 'missing three' , 7, 8, and 9 are ready and waiting. I had suggested to the editors that they release them slowly so as to not overwhelm readers with too many at once. So the missing ones are coming soon. Meanwhile, I hope all of you are thinking about your own stories of UNICEF's history - ones we can collect before our 80th Anniversary arrives in December.
ReplyDelete