Chapin for Lamont

With "extreme regret" President Hoover lost a fourth member of his original Cabinet last week. Chicago's Robert Patterson Lamont resigned as Secretary of Commerce.* Next day Charles Michael Schwab, Bethlehem Steel's chairman, announced that Mr. Lamont would be elected president of the American Iron & Steel Institute (see p. 35).

To head the Commerce Department, closest to his heart of all executive agencies, President Hoover turned to Detroit, picked breezy, bustling, ambitious Roy Dikeman Chapin, board chairman of Hudson Motor Car Co. Long have Mr. Chapin's friends known of his yearning for high public office. Now 52, he started as a youngster in Ransom E. Olds's automobile factory, photographing Oldsmobiles for the catalog. At 24 he was the Olds sales manager, drove the first car from Detroit to New York in one week, the tonneau piled high with spare parts. He helped organize the Hudson company, became its president in 1910, board chairman in 1923. The Essex "Terraplane" is Mr. Chapin's latest mechanical achievement. A persistent agitator for good roads, he headed the Highway Transport Committee of the Council for National Defense during the War. He married Inez Tiedeman, daughter of a Savannah capitalist, who bore him a handsome row of six children. He lives at swanky Grosse Point Farms, plays among the sea islands of Georgia.

Compact, kinetic, quick-spoken, the new Secretary of Commerce is a typical high-pressure salesman, called to Washington to sell U. S. business the idea of economic recovery. Most Cabinet officers, including Mr. Lamont, have lapsed into cautious silence after.being badly burned by fruitless predictions of rapidly returning prosperity. Undaunted by their experience, Mr. Chapin last week began his job even before he took office by rushing into print with a splurge of economic good cheer.* To spellbound newshawks he ejaculated:

"There's a general feeling of optimism in the air. You can almost reach out and touch it. The Depression has run its course. The upturn has come. We go ahead in spurts. It's time to spurt again to new levels of prosperity. Adjustment, that's the word. Therein lies the solution to most of our problems. The United States has a large volume of buying power unused. Buyers have been afraid to spend their money. The job is to unleash the buying power."

Politically, President Hoover let Secretary Lamont go because the Chicagoan was of small practical help toward carrying Illinois. Mr. Lamont's Cabinet service was quiet, plodding, unspectacular. The President needs a more active, hustle- bustling figure to dramatize any business recovery, no matter how small, which might come before election. Mr. Chapin's appointment not only seemed to clinch Michigan for the Hoover-Curtis ticket but, of more importance, to open the automobile industry's money bags to the G. O. P. campaign.

* War's Good died (1929); Labor's Davis entered the Senate (1930); Treasury's Mellon became Ambassador to Great Britain (1932). Point Farms, plays among the sea islands off Georgia.

* Last week President Green of the American Federation of Labor estimated that 600,000 workers lost their jobs in June, that the June 30 total of unemployment was 11,023,000, that at the present rate over 13,000,000 will be jobless by January.

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