The Thirty-First

Imagine seeing a black cat in front of the house, first thing in the morning of the day your husband expects to be elected President of the United States!

Mrs. Hoover went out and caught the cat, took it indoors. After breakfast, she accompanied her husband to a polling place, with their sons and daughter-in-law. They returned to a house full of people, sandwiches, chrysanthemums, telegraph tickers and commotion, to wait and hear how many millions of citizens were voting the way the Hoovers had voted. If Mrs. Hoover thought about the black cat during the day, there was another "omen," too. It was not only Mrs. Smith's birthday, but Herbert Hoover III's.

Three big blackboards were set up in the living room. As the sun sank returns began coming in. The Hoover secretaries darted hither and yon with slips of paper, chalk and chalk-erasers, like marker boys in a brokerage office. Mr. Hoover worked with them for a while, then sat in the front row of chairs, smoking a pipe. The buzzing crush of people seemed to bother him. He went into his study. Telephone calls were incessant. He discouraged premature congratulations, wandering between living room and study.

On the blackboards, positive claims were made with caution. At 7:15 p. m. Pacific time, about the moment that Executive Editor Swope of the arch-Democratic New York World was handing a yellow slip to a reporter, conceding the election, the Hoover quotation at Palo Alto was only 206 electoral votes. The total popular vote was even at three million for each nominee.

Fifteen minutes later, Palo Alto quoted 251 electoral votes. With great care, they had added New York's 45. Not until 8:43 p. m. (11:43 Eastern time) did they chalk up Tennessee, Wisconsin and Iowa for a total of 289.

Seven minutes later, in Washington, the thirtieth President of the U. S., who had been reading telegraph returns alone in his study, went to bed. The thirty-first President was elected.

The buzzing in the Palo Alto living room became a loud caucus of triumph. John Philip Sousa's band blared its best. The President-elect was sitting down at the moment. He did not get up at once but sat, eyes downcast, embarrassed, rubbing his forehead with his fingertips. They wanted a speech. "Not tonight," he said. Outside the house, a phalanx of Stanford University undergraduates yelled persistently. The President-elect reluctantly took his way to the terraced roof of his house, under the California stars. Tears glistened on his cheeks as he looked down on that fragment of the electorate. He said: "I thank you all for coming up here tonight. I appreciate it from the bottom of mv heart."

Full Measure. Reasons omitted, the Hoover victory loomed as one to which Republicans would be able to point with effective pride for several political generations. Against the most formidable Democrat since Wilson, Hoover had won the most overwhelming majority since Grant smothered Tammany's Seymour (1868). It was the greatest electoral majority ever--444 to 87. The Harding landslide of 1920 was considered remarkable when it chipped Tennessee and Oklahoma off the Solid South. The Hoover avalanche included both these States and also swept away the Democracy's corner anchors, old Virginia and North Carolina, fruitful Florida, vast Texas. The Hoover-Smith ratio of popular votes, 17 to 12, was smaller than the Harding-Cox (16 to 9) or the Coolidge-Davis-LaFollette (15 to 8 to 5) but the electoral margin was such as to suggest that unless issues develop to split the Republican Party within itself during the next four years, the re-election of 1932 might as well be a perfunctory one-party affair, to save public bother and private expense. With a Republican Congress, an efficient nationwide party organization, good times and peaceful problems to start his record on, Herbert Hoover appeared to have the U. S. more completely in the hollow of his hand than any President since Roosevelt.

Reasons. Politics is the art of speaking convincingly on selected topics. The reasons they advanced why Hoover should be elected were the reasons Republicans stressed, in public, to explain why he was elected. Democrats to the contrary notwithstanding (see p. 24), the Republican explanations were:

Prosperity--It rests on confidence in the Government. Change shakes confidence, if only temporarily. Why change? The people chose not to change because they felt prosperous.

Morality--Trustworthy man though Governor Smith may be, the people trusted Herbert Hoover more deeply, considered him the finer type.

Ability--Able man though Governor Smith may be, the people considered Herbert Hoover an abler, on his record as a national executive, to meet the country's problems of Farm Relief, Waterways, Cooperation with Business, the Tariff.

Prohibition--Here a split. Wet Republicans insisted that they hoped to see "the experiment noble in motive" worked out "constructively" by Hoover and that "constructively" would mean "liberally," i.e., modification. Dry Republicans approved the words of Superintendent Francis Scott McBride of the Anti-Saloon League of America, whose election proclamation was:

"... A thorough vindication of the Anti-Saloon League, which was bitterly attacked by Gov. Smith throughout the campaign.

"In other countries throughout the world, Hoover's election will be accepted as proof that Prohibition is to continue as the permanent policy of America in dealing with the liquor traffic.

"With a President committed to the support of the eighteenth amendment and the Volstead act, a dry Congress and the dry public sentiment demonstrated in this election, the way is open for increasingly effective prohibition enforcement."