"Hoover Plot"

President Hoover has not yet been burned in effigy at Moscow, differing in this respect from Aristide Briand, Sir Austen Chamberlain* and the President of China, Marshal Chiang Kaishek. But last week both Mr. Hoover and ex-Chairman Alexander Legge of the U. S. Federal Farm Board became in Moscow popular candidates for stuffing & burning. Reason: "The Hoover Plot against the Soviet Union."

Discoverer of the plot was one Wilson, correspondent in Manhattan of Pravda. Pravda means "Truth." Pravda is the official Soviet daily of the Communist Party. What Wilson cabled to Moscow, Pravda printed as news.

Wilson reads elderly Economist Roger Babson's forecasts. The one about WAR some months ago (when Mr. Babson caused the entire front page of his confidential bulletin to appear in red ink) greatly excited Wilson.

Cleverly Mr. Babson had not said when or where the war would start or who would be the belligerents; but cleverly Wilson pieced everything together, starting with Mr. Babson's tip that "surplus stocks of grain, cotton, rubber, sugar and other goods" were producing economic stresses, and that stresses have produced wars.

By shrewd work, according to his story last week, Wilson discovered that Mr. Legge, while chairman of the Farm Board, had not only bought huge stocks of wheat and cotton but also that "Legge stored these supplies in Atlantic ports, although this was more expensive than storage in interior depots."

From this Wilson concluded that President Hoover had assigned Mr. Legge to assemble edible supplies for a French Army that was to invade Russia. During the Great War, as Wilson found out, "Legge was food and raw material director of the United States and chief of service of the armies of the anti-German coalition."*

In Pravda, Sleuth Wilson's expose was headlined "How the United States Prepared Intervention." The lead:

"It can now be affirmed with full foundation that military intervention against the U. S. S. R. [Union of Socialist Soviet Republics] was projected by the French General Staff for 1930-31 and sanctioned by the Hoover group in view of the necessity of solving the basic problem of American economics--to market vast stocks of raw materials and raise the prices of agricultural products."

Thoroughgoing, Wilson also explained how the French plot was foiled, though every Moscovite already knows. It was foiled, the people of Russia are told to believe, by the Ogpu (Soviet Secret Police) who exposed during the "propaganda trials" at Moscow last year the invasion prepared at Paris. During those trials there was no mention of President Hoover or Mr. Legge; but astute Wilson has now supplied them as the missing links.

*Long after he retired as British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and became politically impotent, effigies of Sir Austen continued to be burned in Russia, first because his monocle is a bourgeois-British symbol (British Laborites do not wear them) and second because Sir Austen's rush of teeth could easily be exaggerated by Soviet effigy-stuffers into something quite repulsive.

*Mr. Legge's official Wartime jobs were: Vice Chairman of the U. S. War Industries Board and head of its Requirements Division; Manager of the Allied Purchasing Commission.

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