Hoover Halfway

This week Herbert Clark Hoover, 31st President of the U. S., stood at the halfway mark in his first and perhaps last term. Behind him lay two years of the hardest work this hard-working man had ever done, of noisy quarreling with a cantankerous Congress, of heartbreaking economic misfortune, of a blighting natural curse, of a gradual loss of popular favor. Ahead of him lay a rocky road to 1932 when he would either vindicate himself by renomination and re-election or go into the discard of defeat as a presidential failure.

Two years in the White House have greyed his hair, accentuated the pastiness of his complexion, deepened the lines in his round boyish face, so easy to caricature, so hard to paint. He has worked off 15 Ib. of fat. His health has been uninterruptedly good, thanks to a stern physical routine. Two dozen months of the White House spotlight were enough to generate an embryonic halo about the head of Calvin ("Weaned-on-a-pickle") Coolidge, a previously insignificant politician who had cautiously climbed the Massachusetts "escalator." Two dozen months of spotlight put completely in the shadow Herbert Hoover's world-significant career, and robbed him of whatever sentiment had been attached to his name. Losing faith in the Press, he has come to think of himself as a martyr in a hair shirt, misunderstood and misinterpreted by the People.

As impossible of fair historical evaluaation is his two-year record as was the battle of Gettysburg at noon on the second day. Like other Presidents, he has been unmercifully berated by his opponents; like them also, he has had his fair share of shouting supporters. Last week in the House New York's fire-eating little Representative Loring Black voiced the extreme Democratic view when he declared: "The outstanding accomplishment of this Administration was a successful assault on Webster's dictionary. ... As Lincoln split rails, Hoover split hairs. . . . He would make mad faces at Congress and then send [Secretary] Walter Newton over to say he didn't mean it. ... He compromised everything, the country, Congress, his party and himself. For a while the people thought the seat of Government was at St. Elizabeth's Hospital.* As the Harding Administration gave America the era of 'official dishonesty,' Hoover has given us the age of 'intellectual dishonesty.' A typical Republican defense of the President was made the week before by Representative Franklin Fort who declared the party had given the country "the best-trained economic mind that ever came to the chair in the man who never failed, Herbert Hoover."

Far away in the President's recollection seemed the start of his climb to the White House. In retrospect the years as Secretary of Commerce were placidity itself. The Mississippi flood of 1927 furnished the immediate drama necessary to begin Hooverizing for the Republican nomination. So easily were Hoover delegates to the Kansas City Convention rounded up that the slogan "Who But Hoover?'' became irresistible logic, vanquished the "allies" (Watson, Curtis, Lowden et al) before the voting began. The Secretary of Commerce was nominated on the first ballot.

The campaign was a nightmare for the shy, beaverish Hoover who hates crowds, strangers, speechmaking, gladhanding. backslapping. Gritting his teeth behind a sickly smile, he went through it with the help of the blundering Work, the undercover Mann, the flaming Willebrandt, the thundering Borah, the uprighteous Hughes. With upturned eyes he ignored the tempestuous issue of Religion breaking at his feet. On Prohibition he said nothing. He preached a gospel of "American individualism," promised a "job for every man," grew rhapsodic over "the home," vowed that only his election could perpetuate Republican prosperity. One might have thought he was running against thin air for all the notice he took of the energetic, loud-speaking, issue-raising, far-traveling Brown Derby. His cautious, banal campaign was unsatisfying to those citizens who prefer a direct discussion of immediate issues to a lofty dissertation on the abstractions of American idealism.

The Hoover canvass closed with a triumphal trip across the continent to vote at his Palo Alto home--a formality new to the Republican candidate. There he received the returns which, by the greatest electoral college majority in U. S. history, transformed Nominee Hoover into President-elect Hoover. Tears of joy and gladness coursed down his plump cheeks under the California stars. Next came the South American goodwill trip, a prelude of grandeur during which Mr. Hoover tasted the sweets of sovereignty. Back in the U. S. he busied himself with Cabinet carpentry in Florida, fidgeted impatiently. And then that cold, rainy March 4, 1929, on the front steps of the Capitol--

Rarely if ever had a President taken the oath of office with public expectation of great achievements whipped to a higher pitch. President Hoover had been extolled as the Superman whose engineering genius would reform and elevate the Art of Government. Advertised for Washington was a New Era. With the Press trumpeting welcomes and high hope, with a Cabinet substantial though not exceptional, President Hoover took his new job with a rush of enthusiasm. He stifled a Mexican revolution with an arms embargo. He moved to conserve oil on the public domain. He banished the hypocritical "Official Spokesman" from the White House. He summoned a special session of Congress to deal with farm relief and tariff revision. He exhorted the People to war against Crime. He began to appoint expert commissions to solve tough old problems. Everybody was heartily with him, as they are with most Presidents, during this "honeymoon" period of his Administration.

But an alert, active President cannot long avoid trouble. President Hoover's first came within two months of his inauguration. As part of Farm Relief, the Senate wanted an export debenture. Bold and self-confident, President Hoover scotched this subsidy plan, won much public applause. He, said his friends, would show the Senate who was master. Nevertheless, that first victory cost President Hoover the friendship and support of Senator Borah and the Insurgents. A breach in the G. O. P. was then opened that gapes wider than ever today.

Political ineptitude in Herbert Hoover was one thing the country had been loudly warned about--but in the summer of Prosperity neither leaders nor masses gave a fig for statecraft. The tariff fight first made this deficiency glaringly plain. The President had called for "limited revision" but had miscalculated the greedy demands upon his own party from industrialists for top-notch rates. Their pressure soon put Congress clean out of White House control. President Hoover was begged to use his leadership to get the tariff measure out of the ditch. At first he refused and later his half-hearted attempts were futile. For fumbling with this prime issue Democrats opened a fierce barrage upon him which, right or wrong, impressed the country. Loss of public prestige began with this tariff fight when the President could not make up his mind whether he was for high or low rates. When the bill, mired for a year, finally reached the White House in June 1930, he signed it holding his nose. To a friend immediately thereafter he said despairingly over the telephone: "I wish somebody would give me a good job as a butler."

A storm from another quarter swept over President Hoover and blackened his political sky when the stockmarket crashed in November 1929. Quick to sense its awful import, he set elaborately to work to stave off its full consequences. He summoned industrialists, bankers, railmen, union workers to the White House, got their pledges of cooperation. He established committees and commissions. To the public he recommended "that good old word--work." He cut the income tax to stimulate business. He ordered public construction accelerated to provide more jobs. He announced: "We have re-established confidence" and predicted the "worst will be over in 60 days." Now derided for what he said, he may be given great credit by social and economic history for what he did.

The "worst," however, was not over in 60 days or 60 weeks. Millions became jobless. Industry was almost at a standstill. President Hoover's political prestige was as depressed as the country itself.

Then, as if in some Greek tragedy, Nature followed the mood of human error and smote the President a staggering blow in 1930. Drought, the worst in U. S. history, came like fire to the Mississippi Valley. The President had made a great name for himself as a disaster expert and here was a major catastrophe from above for him to work on. Last August he predicted that the full effects of the Drought would not be felt until this winter, organized another commission, waited to see what would happen. When his prediction came true, he was in the midst of a catch-as-catch-can bout with Congress over Drought relief funds. Belatedly he mobilized the Red Cross, bitterly accused the Senate of "playing politics with human misery," finally compromised on food loans.

President Hoover came into office with all the earmarks of a Dry, after beating the Sidewalks of New York. His original position was that Prohibition was only an item in the larger problem of Crime and Law. To this end he appointed in May 1929, the National Commission on Law Enforcement & Law Observance. Deliberately avoided was all mention of liquor when he put it to work. By the device of this commission he was able to hold Prohibition at arms length from the White House until last January. Then it submitted its final report which showed that a majority of its membership favored a Change. President Hoover virtually swept the report into the wastebasket by a ringing Dry declaration which repudiated the Commission's work and slammed the door on any liberalization of the 18th Amendment. Despite whispered explanations and apologies from his aides, for all practical purposes he cast his political lot with the Drys for 1932.

Because every President must have able and loyal aides, President Hoover in 1929 gathered around him a group of men he called "new patriots," because they gave up good private jobs for Federal service. Chairman Alexander Legge of the Farm Board was the shining example. But before long the supply of "new patriots" ran out and President Hoover was compelled to pick run-of-the-mill applicants. He created a good impression when he sent Charles Gates Dawes to the Court of St. James's and then spoiled it by a succession of appointments which he himself probably did not regard as much better than average.

President Hoover's two years in the White House have not been politically happy. Claudius Hart Huston, his handpicked chairman of the Republican National Committee, was removed by his party for stockgambling on lobby funds. Dry little Simeon Davison Fess, his successor, mangled last year's G. O. P. campaign so grievously that what little Congressional support the White House had was wiped out by the November elections. After March 4, President Hoover will be confronted by a new and serious menace in the form of the 72nd Congress from which, lacking a working Republican majority, he may anticipate only more rows, more obstruction, more criticism. To compound his other troubles he was compelled to watch his Farm Board speculate in the open wheat market contrary to his pledge of no "Government buying or selling or price-fixing." The Depression played such hob with the Treasury's finances that a Republican Administration is on the brink of its first big post-War deficit ($500,000,000). Increased taxes are inevitable. Internationally the President sought a five-power treaty for naval reduction and had to take a three-power treaty for naval limitation which will cost the U. S. $500,000,000 to build up to.

As if real troubles were not aplenty, there falls across the White House a shadow cast by a sharp-nosed little man who lives happily and writes profitably in Northampton. Mass.* Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge were never good friends. Unforgotten and unforgiven was President Coolidge's statement that of course he would not make his Secretary of Commerce Secretary of State. When President Hoover was proclaiming the Treaty of Paris in 1929 Citizen Coolidge returned to Washington to participate in the ceremony, summoned newsmen, gave an interview about himself as a "public character," played inferentially on the fact that the White House Chief Usher's name is also Hoover, stole the show. Again at the American Legion convention in Boston last October the Coolidge reception was louder and more spontaneous than that of the President of the U.S.

Loyal Hoover friends may well feel that the popular comparison of the two Presidents is manifestly unjust. They might say that if ever a President had fair weather sailing in which to do a big constructive job of statecraft it was Calvin Coolidge, but that in retrospect his Administration is astonishingly barren of permanent achievement. They might say that, with pious platitudes on his thin lips, President Coolidge capitalized on Prosperity, rode its inflationary waves to an enormous popularity. They might; but for obvious reasons, they cannot. They must bear in bitterness the growth of the Coolidge legend.

With President Hoover, Legend has worked quite differently. He suffers today from the "superman" publicity which built him up far beyond the probable level of human performance. Two years have destroyed the Hoover legend, and still obscured from public sight, is the more authentic picture: a high-minded, able, industrious, conscientious individual who is devoted to his country, to the art of Government, to children. His irrational effort to divorce government from politics explains many of his difficulties, and is, as was predicted in 1928, his most serious defect as President. For, although he calls government an art. he doggedly continues to act as if it were a science.

More remote than ever from the Plain People, Herbert Clark Hoover still has unbounded faith in himself and the ultimate justification of his own policies and methods. What gives him courage and turns his face hopefully toward the future is the certain knowledge that better economic times will bring him better political times. Well within the realm of possibility --in fact most Republicans count on it-- is a mighty upturn toward prosperity which will blot out the President's misfortunes and missteps of 1930-31 and restore him, sobered from his bout with adversity, to the peaks of popularity in time for the 1932 election.

The Hoover Cabinet of 1931:

State--Henry Lewis Stimson of New York.

Treasury--Andrew William Mellon of Pennsylvania.

War--Patrick Jay Hurley of Oklahoma.

Justice--William DeWitt Mitchell of Minnesota.

Post Office--Walter Folger Brown of Ohio.

Navy--Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts.

Interior--Ray Lyman Wilbur of California.

Agriculture--Arthur Mastick Hyde of Missouri.

Commerce--Robert Patterson Lament of Illinois.

Labor--William Nuckles Doak of Virginia.

U.S. Ambassadors today (all appointed by President Hoover):

Cuba--Harry Frank Guggenheim.

France--Walter Evans Edge.

Germany--Frederic Moseley Sackett.

Great Britain--Charles Gates Dawes.

Italy--John Work Garrett.

Japan--William Cameron Forbes.

Mexico--Joshua Reuben Clark Jr.

Peru--Fred Morris Dearing.

Poland--John North Willys.

Spain--Irwin Boyle Laughlin.

Miscellaneous appointments by President Hoover:

Chief Justice of U. S.--Charles Evans Hughes.

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court --Owen Josephus Roberts.

Tariff Commission Chairman--Henry Prather Fletcher.

Solicitor General of the U. S.--Thomas Day Thacher.

Civil Service Commission President-- Thomas Edward Campbell.

Chief of Staff, U. S. A--General Douglas MacArthur.

Chief of Naval Operations--Admiral William Veazil Pratt.

Governor of the Federal Reserve Board --Eugene Meyer Jr.

*The Government's Institution for the insane in Washington.

*Last week at Newport News, Va., Mrs. Coolidge christened a new Dollar liner the President Coolidge.

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