The Beaver-Man

Partisans of Candidate Hoover last week publicly began what is to be a national indoor and outdoor sport for the next three months--delegate-counting. Of the 1,089 Republicans who assemble in June at Kansas City, a simple majority of 545 are all that will be required to nominate. But such simple majorities are seldom arrived at without preliminary complications. What with Favorite Sons and Uninstruction and the wishful valor of Candidate Lowden's friends, the height of Hoover optimism last week was 414 delegates, or 131 shy. And of these 414, only 45 were on-the-dotted-line, there having been up to last week only seven State conventions and one primary election.

The one election--first whisper of vox populi--was in New Hampshire. Only 11 delegates were involved, but all came out instructed for or partial to Candidate Hoover. Senator Moses, a charter subscriber to Hooverism, polled the highest vote. One Everett R. Rutter, the sole would-be-delegate in favor of Calvin Coolidge, was defeated. Only four years ago when Senator Moses refused to run as a Coolidge delegate he suffered the outstanding political defeat of his astute career.

Though the New Hampshire result was no more significant than any other accident of geography and the calendar; and although only 17 States hold primary elections; leaving popular choice elsewhere in the hands of convention floorwalkers; and although the next pronouncement of -vox populi, in North Dakota, was scheduled to be unanimously in favor of Candidate Lowden, still the first actual balloting in the 1928 election had gone Hoover. Voters talked about it in other States and told each other what they knew about the Republican party's man-of-all-work whose friends now think he should be, as they call him at the Department of Commerce, "the Chief."

Life. Most people know that he was born in Iowa, son of a Quaker blacksmith; that he is chunky, round-faced, about six feet high, with beaverish shoulders and neck and with greying hair, much thinner and less brushed down than it used to be, and with his teeth chewed down to a peculiar slant on the left side, where he keeps his cigars. This feature repeats his beaverish aspect which is, of course, enhanced most of all by his well-earned reputation for patient industry and again, perhaps, by his familiarity with rivers and dams and husbanding food through lean seasons. Any man of distinctive personality and appearance resembles some animal. Senator Borah is a bear; Secretary Mellon, an aging horse of fine blood; Senator Heflin, an astounding whale calf; Senator Johnson, a caged lion; Senator Norris, an owl; Senator Watson, a roguish elephant; Charles Evans Hughes, a lofty mountain goat; Will H. Hays, a monkey; Curtis Dwight Wilbur, a stork. Herbert Clark Hoover is a beaver-man, aged 53, in his prime.

Persons who have read the Hoover biography by his college-mate, Will Irwin*,know that Mr. Hoover was subject to croup when young and laid out for dead not long after his first birthday. Returning to life, he played vigorously with other small Midwesterners, including Osage pa-poosesf at Pawhuska, Okla., where his Uncle Laban Miles lived. Herbert trapped rabbits, learned to fish, read the Youth's Companion and Robinson Crusoe (secretly, for Quakers are strict) and when he was 11 went to live with another uncle, Dr. John Minthorn, in Newberg, Ore. His father and mother had died.

Dr. Minthorn heard about a university that Senator Leland Stanford was founding in memory of his son and namesake, down in a meadowy place called Palo Alto, near San Francisco. Nephew Herbert went there, immature, shy, curly-headed, precocious at 17 except in English. Professor John Branner helped him become a prodigious geologist. Also, in that first class at Stanford University, Herbert Hoover had his first taste of politics.

A chronic organizer, he had propounded an efficient, unified student government, and drafted a constitution. The small campus boiled with political fervor, causing President David Starr Jordan to remark: "I wonder if I'm not presiding over a young Tammany Hall." The two parties were an "aristocratic" fraternity element v. a "barbarian" element led by the constitution-writer's friends. Hoover was reluctant to run for an office himself, but they insisted he was their strongest candidate for the important post of treasurer. Finally he said, "Well, perhaps I can swing it." Swing it he did.

Engineer Louis Janin and Miss Lou Henry came into the Hoover picture at about this time--Mr. Janin to hire Herbert Hoover as a stenographer and to let him, almost overnight, acquire an outstanding international reputation as an engineer; Miss Henry to gaze awestruck at Professor Branner's greatest pupil and to accept him a few years later, when he cabled an important question to her from the Australian goldfields, scene of his first big job.

They were married in a hurry, in a civil ceremony performed by a Catholic priest who had known Miss Henry since she first went to Monterey, Calif., and rode horseback with flying pigtails. They had to hurry because Engineer Hoover was sailing again from California for his second big job, to advise the young Emperor of China about his ancestral mines and newfangled railroads.

During the first 15 years of her married life, Mrs. Hoover, herself an able geologist, accompanied her husband to China, to Mandalay, to St. Petersburg, to the Alps, except when the exigencies of motherhood (two sons) prevented. Hoover offices girdled the globe, above and below the equator. Hoover homes followed them, but, according to Biographer Irwin, 1907 was the only year prior to 1914 in which the Hoovers did not spend some time at their California base.

Resourceful, Mrs. Hoover carried off a shelling and the pillage of her Tientsin home by Cossacks during the Boxer uprising,*no less gracefully than she presided over cosmopolitan gatherings at the Red

House, in quiet Kensington (London), where they settled down fairly permanently in 1914 when Belgium engaged the Hoover genius to keep 10,000,000 warhemmed people fed for four years. Intellectual, she helped her husband in his post-War diversion of translating Georg Bauer's De Re Metallica from cryptic 16th Century Latin into quaint but useful English.

"As American as baseball or apple pie," is what Biographer Irwin thinks his college mate is after years of industrious migration. Writer Arthur Brisbane suggests the handy parallel of Benjamin Franklin and says: "The more he saw of other countries, the better American he became."

Utterance. People who wonder what Candidate Hoover stands for in a political way can educe the following from his public utterances (usually made with a minimum of enthusiasm) :

Against centralization of government ("By our system there were established 48 experimental laboratories for development in government").

For prohibition (". . . [other factors] and the advent of prohibition, have raised our standards of living and material comforts to a height unparalleled. . . .").

Against putting the Government into business (". . . an umpire and not a player in the economic game").

For the World Court (". . . all these are milestones marking a course of international cooperation").

He is also on record for restricted immigration, a protective tariff and short work-hours through industrial efficiency.

Lately he was asked what he considered the "immediate" task of the U. S. He, whose philosophy of government is based primarily on business economics, answered: "The development of water resources to relieve railway congestion. . . . Our engineers assure me that a consolidated Mississippi Valley system of water trunk lines and tributaries can be finished in five years if we go at it vigorously, and that the cost will not be much above a hundred million dollars. This is negligible expense for facilities that will move--economically speaking--our Middle Western wheat growers and cattle raisers hundreds of miles nearer to shipside and place them on a par with their competitors in the Argentine, India and Australia.

"The manufacturer also will be benefited. Get the factory to the fields. . . ."

For. The following persons and institutions are in favor of Herbert Clark Hoover's nomination: Senators Moses, Gillett, Jones, Shortridge, Edge; Representatives Burton, Fort, Albert Johnson, A. T. Smith; Amelita Galli-Curci, Christopher Morley, Emil Fuchs, Henry Ford, Thomas Alva Edison, Emory R. Buckener, George W. Wickersham, Louis Marshall, Elihu Root Jr., George Eastman; Michael Idvorsky Pupin, Will H. Hays; Secretaries Work, Wilbur, Jardine; Postmaster-General New; Assistant Secretaries Mills, Robinson, Brown; Governors Fuller of Massachusetts, Spaulding of New Hampshire, Green of Michigan, Brewster of Maine; the Hearst and the

Scripps-Howard newspapers; the Christian Science Monitor; Political Commentators Arthur Brisbane, William Hard, Frank R. Kent; Presidents Wilbur of Leland Stanford and Angell of Yale.

Against. The following Republicans are opposed, more or less openly, to Herbert Clark Hoover's nomination: Candidates Curtis, Dawes, Lowden, Norris, Watson, Willis; G. 0. Politicians in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois (the so-called Six Big States, with a total of 337 delegates, which the G. O. Politicians hope to take to Kansas City uninstructed, for "trading" in a hotel-room nomination).

Why He May. Candidate Hoover may well be nominated because people admire his unquestioned ability, integrity, services. They know he has made the least of the Government's departments into one of the three greatest, at the same time doing much of the headwork for the rest of the Cabinet during two administrations. His popularity tends to transcend partisan politics, from which he has been, until recently, free. Unless the widespread sentiment for him proves academic, he is signally a "people's choice." Business, as distinct from Finance, is on his side because it trusts him as a student of material wellbeing. Labor likes him because he is fair, thorough, gives clear orders. Women trust him because he is a high-minded man whose deeds need no retelling and, from him, get none.

Why He May Not. The central fact militating against Candidate Hoover is that many people cannot understand what he stands for. He is no forthright protagonist of an ideal or program. He puts forth no clear-cut political or social theory except a quiet "individualism," which leaves most individuals groping. Material wellbeing, comfort, order, efficiency in government and economy--these he stands for, but they are conditions, not ends. A technologist, he does not discuss ultimate purposes. In a society of temperate, industrious, unspeculative beavers, such a beaver-man would make an ideal King-beaver. But humans are different. People want Herbert Hoover to tell where, with his extraordinary abilities, he would lead them. He needs, it would seem, to undergo a spiritual crisis before he will satisfy as a popular leader.

Until then, his detachment, his impatience with questions not concrete, his zeal for his own job, will continue to be interpreted by many as political cowardice or autocratic overbearing.

Republican corruption, farm relief, flood costs; these are only three outstanding topics on which he has remained silent or evasive, doubtless for highly intelligent reasons but with the effect, nevertheless, of making him seem an opportunist. And this effect is borne out by his shifting position on international relations. Once a sturdy Leaguer, he is now a hesitant World Court man, and suspected by newsgatherers of trimming his helm as the breeze may blow, off-shore or overseas. With all his other qualifications, he could well afford to speak out, in simple, declarative English on one or the other side of every so-called "issue" of his time. But he does not speak out. And it may be significant that most of the newsgatherers upon whose help he plans to rely in lieu of an active personal campaign are less and less impressed with him as a servant of the people, but more and more as a big, self-sufficient boy who, if given the whole government to run, would no doubt run it efficiently but insist upon running it--like a new train--all by himself.

Tactics. Virtually these same cons and pros obtained in 1920, when Candidate Hoover was put forward by Democrats and Republicans alike until he finally decided he belonged with the latter. At that time, however, his militant following was composed almost exclusively of the Harvard Business School type of person, plus clubwomen. His failure at the gang-ridden Chicago convention was almost spectacular in its completeness, considering the figure he had been cutting in public life. This year, the tactics and tacticians are different. First of all, the Hoover Republicanism is thoroughly established. The Harvardian support, typified by Private Secretary George E. Akerson (TIME, Feb. 13) and Publisher Archibald Wilkinson Shaw of System, has been swelled and extended to include able, hardworking undersecretaries in all the Government branches, notably Ogden L. Mills of the Treasury Department. In addition, there has been a hard-headed political increment, led by New Hampshire's Moses in the Senate, Ohio's Burton in the House, John Taylor Adams and George Browning Lockwood (and perhaps Will H. Hays) among national G. O. Politicians. The acquisition last year of Walter F. Brown of Toledo as Assistant Secretary of Commerce was significant of Hooverism's increasingly expert political technology. All these, and many a political idealist, are working on a "seek-the-man" campaign in which they hope Candidate Hoover will not have to participate personally. He is a very, very bad public speaker. The plan is to have him stick to the radio--though the noisy challenges of Candidate Willis may stir Candidate Hoover to take the platform in Ohio.

More important to Hooverism than Harvard, radio or Ohio, however, is the attitude of a gentleman right in Washington who is an equally poor speaker and who for the moment holds the Republican nomination in the hollow of his delicate, leisurely hand. Not what President Coolidge wants, but what Secretary Andrew Mellon wants, will probably decide what Candidate Hoover will get. Last week, the Hooverites were more confident than ever, and therefore more than ever anxious to be certain, that Andrew Mellon wants Herbert Hoover.

*Currently serialized by the Scripps-Howard newspapers; to be published more fully in book form next fortnight by the Century Co., Manhattan, at $3 the copy.

Some of whom, doubtless, were connections of Candidate Curtis of Kansas, whose great-great grandfather was Chief Pawhuskie ol the Osage tribe. -Last week, Mrs. Hoover's nerve was again tested. She was motoring at night over the Shenandoah River bridge at Berrys Ferry, Va. The car skidded, crashed through the guard rail, hung over the water. Mrs. Hoover crawled out unscathed, as did the wives of two of her husband's friends, Mrs. Hugh S. Gumming (he is U. S. Surgeon General) and Mrs. Vernon L. Kellogg (he was a Hoover colleague in Belgium and now directs the National Research Council).