Feeding the Hungry, P. C. Hiebert, 1929

antsville, Maryland, in the Casselman River valley, lying high in the Allegheny Mountains. His fa- ther, Joel J. Miller (deceased), was for many years a minister and bishop in the Amish Mennonite Church. Both his father and his mother, Savilla Beachy, were de- scendants of pioneer settlers in southwestern Pennsylvania. His early years were spent on the farm. School opportunities were limited to about five months in a year, but being of a studious nature, he made the most of them, and of the books at his disposal. He taught two years in the public schools. At the age of twenty-two he went to the Maryland Collegiate Institute for his preparatory work, graduating two years later. He received his B. A. degree from Goshen College in 1911, and his M. A. from Columbia University, New York City, in 1912. After one year at Wakarusa, Indiana, as superin- tendent of schools he returned to Columbia University for another year of graduate work, and then taught in the departments of Psychology and Education at Wooster and Ohio Wesleyan Universities, and at Kent State Normal College, Ohio. In the summer of 1915 he traveled in Europe study- ing the social psychology of the early period of the recent Great War. He volunteered for relief or reconstruction service in Europe, and in 1919, he with other Mennonites was sent to the devastated regions in France to work with the Friends’ Unit under the American Red Cross Soon after the Conference of young Mennonites held by the Mennonite relief workers at Clermont-en-Argonne, Meuse, France, a delegation of which he was a member called on the heads of two strong American organizations in Paris, Col. Bicknell of the American Red Cross and PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 33 Herbert Hoover of the American Relief Administration, to discuss possible fields of service for a Mennonite relief organization. When the Mennonites decided to carry on relief activities in their own name he was sent from France in 1919 as a member of a committee to investigate needs and possibilities in central and eastern Europe. On this jour- ney, which led through Germany and Austria and extended into southern Russia, the first contact between the Amer- ican Mennonite relief organization and the Russian Men- nonites was made. In 1920 he again went to the south of Russia—Crimea under the American Red Cross during the cholera epidemic there, at the same time maintaining the contact between the Mennonites of Russia and Amer- ica. In the spring of 1921 he was commissioned by the Mennonite Central Committee to enter Soviet Russia through a southern port in order to organize relief opera- tions and to locate Clayton Kratz, a Mennonite relief worker who had disappeared the autumn previous. In the fall of 1921 he re-entered Russia from the north, going direct to Moscow, where he made a contract with the Russian government for the American and the Holland Mennonites. A few days later another contract wa