Not a Dream

For more than six decades the little (pop. 791) Iowa town of West Branch has listened to old Newt Butler tell the same story--how he licked Herbie Hoover in a scrap at the swimming hole. Last week, as ex-President Herbert Clark Hoover returned to West Branch to celebrate his 74th birthday, Newt reminded his old schoolmate of the bout. Hoover just grinned.

Some 10,000 other lowans flocked to the trim Quaker town to honor its only famous son. Hoover dutifully examined the two-room frame cottage where he was born, nodded as the old wooden cradle was pointed out to him, took a drink from a gourd at the wooden pump out back. Did it all look familiar? Hoover smiled, explained candidly: "I left this home when I was four years old and moved to a house across the street. I don't remember anything about this house."

Social Security. Under the weeping willow trees outside, Hoover sat down with state functionaries to an Iowa lunch of fried chicken, corn on the cob and a huge birthday cake, while spectators gawked from beyond the low fence. He visited the old Quaker cemetery, where some dozen Hoovers are buried under the red cedars, and for a long moment stood with his head bowed before the grave of his father and mother. On a platform looking out over sun-splashed fields of the finest corn in lowans' memory, Hoover spoke. He recalled leaving West Branch at the age of ten to live on his uncle's farm (his father died when he was six, his mother when he was nine), the long round of farm chores, the unending making of provisions for the next winter. "In those primitive days," he said, "social security was had from the cellar, not from the federal government." He recalled how he earned his first money: "I entered into collective bargaining by which it was settled that I should receive one cent per hundred for picking potato bugs in a field in sight of this stand. My impression then, and now, is that it was an oppressive wage rate."

Hallowed Word. Then he turned serious. "I have had every honor to which any man could aspire. There is no place on the whole earth except here in America where all the sons of man could have this chance in life ... I have worked in governments of free men, of tyrannies, of Socialists and of Communists. I have met with princes, kings, despots, and desperadoes. I have seen the squalor of Asia, the frozen class barriers of Europe. And outstanding everywhere to these great masses of people there was a hallowed word--'America.' To them, it was the hope of the world . . . Here alone are the open windows through which pours the sunlight of the human spirit. Here alone is human dignity not a dream, but an accomplishment."

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