Commission No. 13

"I propose, therefore, to appoint a committee of outstanding men who would review these questions and advise upon them. ..."

President Hoover repeated this formula once again last week to set in motion his 13th Presidential commission. Its subject: the merchant marine. The occasion: a deep-rooted controversy within the U. S. Shipping Board over the sale of the Government-owned Black Diamond and Cosmopolitan trans-Atlantic freight-lines. For more than a year disposal of these services has been delayed while the two operating companies and the U. S. lines wrangled with the Shipping Board over purchase bids. The President said commission No. 13 would also supervise the financing and building by U. S. lines of two new Leviathan-class ships with $60,000,000 loaned by the Shipping Board. President Hoover thought the whole inquiry could be cleaned up in 60 days. Though as a matter of law the President has no power to interfere with the Shipping Board's activities, that agency promptly acceded to the idea of another Presidential investigation. Whereupon President Hoover began to look about for more "outstanding men" with which to staff commission No. 13.

P: Much mail and many a caller came last week to the President concerning the London Treaty, the Tariff.

P: President Hoover's third veto: a bill making the U. S. a party to a land suit in the Federal District Court in Oregon. As an answer to the Congressional overriding of his veto of the Spanish War pension bill, the President declared: "I favored a liberalization of the Spanish War veterans pensions, but I have not changed my opinion that it should have been worked out in such a way that men having substantial incomes should not draw pensions from the Government . . . [also] I do not believe it is right to change our national policy to pay disability allowances to men who may destroy their health by vicious habits."

P: Fifteen guests including the sons of two Presidents (Governor Theodore Roosevelt of Porto Rico and Lawyer Robert Alfonso Taft of Cincinnati) accompanied President Hoover to his Rapidan Camp over the weekend. There they found Mrs. Hoover, convalescing from the injury to her back two months ago. The President caught a 16-in. 2-lb. rainbow trout with a black gnat fly, the season's record for him. Rain and bad weather drove the President and his party back to Washington ahead of time.

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