The Hoover Week

At his Rapidan camp President Hoover sat for a whole day pondering ways & means to accelerate the Government's $565,000,000 public building program as an aid to unemployment. With him were Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Ferry K. Heath in charge of such construction and Fourth Assistant Postmaster General John W. Philp. The President's mind was full of the new buildings which would soon replace the temporary Wartime structures of plaster board and stucco in Washington which now house many a potent Government agency, many a precious record. Thoroughly familiar was he with the old warning that these 12-year-old "shacks" were the worst kind of firetraps.

While the President pondered this problem on the Rapidan, in the Capital 100 mi. away was occurring just the sort of thing that had been predicted. Fire broke out in "Tempo No. 4" quartering the Federal Trade Commission, burned savagely for three hours, gutted the tindery building, injured 20 firemen, destroyed countless Government files and documents.* Lost or damaged were the Trade Commission's records of investigations into chain stores, newsprint, power companies, cottonseed, peanuts. Replacement of some of the data from outside sources was possible, though slow and difficult. The destruction of "Tempo No. 4" gave President Hoover a new and concrete argument with which to push his building expansion program.

P: At the Hoover camp Assistant Secretary Heath got into bed, found a mousetrap and a bunch of grapes under the covers. The jokester: Dr. Joel Thompson Boone, the President's physician.

P: President Hoover and Secretary of State Stimson held conferences on whether or not to extend diplomatic recognition to Col. Luis Sanchez Cerro who had just turned Dictator-President Augusto Bernardino Leguia of Peru out of office (see p. 22). The question was ticklish. The accepted U. S. doctrine formulated in 1923 by Charles Evans Hughes as Secretary of State, was to recognize only those Latin American governments which come into power by constitutional means. A complication in the Peruvian situation was the fact that the revolutionaries held Commander Harold Grow, U. S. citizen, commander of the Leguia air forces, and were threatening to court martial, perhaps execute him. While President Hoover and Statesman Stimson decided nothing definitely, it was gathered that if Grow were freed the U. S. would devise some diplomatic formula which would construe the Cerro coup as constitutional within the terms of the Hughes doctrine.

P: President Hoover accepted the resignation of Roy Archibald Young as Governor of the Federal Reserve Board.

P: Appointed by the President as No. 2 man on the new Tariff Commission was Thomas Walker Page, Virginia Democrat, oldtime tariff economist who served (1911-12) on President Taft's Tariff Board, on President Wilson's Tariff Commission, rose to be chairman (1920-22).

* Other fires in U. S. buildings at Washington within the year: White House offices on Christmas eve (TIME, Jan. 6); the Capitol (TIME, Jan. 13).

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