Progress Without Dynamite

No U.S. President since James Buchanan had lived to such a ripe age. It was natural that Herbert Clark Hoover's 75th birthday last week should become something of an occasion. A controversial figure, Herbert Hoover, for many U.S. citizens, was still the symbol of inaction in a great national emergency and thus a symbol of the first Depression. For many others, the elder statesman who, in his 703 had labored long to reorganize sprawling U.S. Government departments, was a living expression of such old-fashioned virtues as simplicity, sanity and thrift. For his birthday, congratulatory messages from Congress, U.S. boys' clubs and European foreign offices poured in to his old home at Palo Alto, Calif., where he was to spend the day. His two sons, five (of his six) grandchildren and 10,000 friends joined to welcome him back to Stanford University, where he had graduated with the university's first full-fledged class of 1895.

Sobering Statistics. Addressing an overflow crowd in the Laurence Frost Amphitheater, Hoover wore a soft collar instead of his once-familiar high, stiff one, but there was nothing soft-collared about his message. "We're on the last mile to collectivism," he declared. "Dynamic progress is not made with dynamite. And that dynamite today is the geometrical increase in the spending of our governments."

He added some sobering statistics:

P: Twenty years ago, all varieties of Government cost the average family less than $200 annually. Today it costs about $1,300. The U.S. citizen now has to work an average of 61 days a year to pay for his Government.

P: Twenty years ago, there was one Government employee to about every 40 of the population. Today there is one to about every 22.

"Maligned distortions drug our thinking," said Hoover. "The slogan of the 'welfare state' . . . has emerged for a totalitarian state . . . These slogans and phrases and . .. vague promises ... frustrate those basic human impulses to production which alone make a dynamic nation."

Still Kicking. Three days later, returning East aboard a Union Pacific streamliner, the ex-President was stricken with a gall bladder attack. He had to wait five painful hours until a doctor could meet the train at Elko, Nev., give him shots of morphine, sulfa and penicillin. While ambulances and doctors stayed alerted all along the railroad to Chicago, Hoover, after a few hours' sleep, recovered fast enough to resume his gin rummy with his secretary. To a reporter who called on him, he said crisply: "I guess you just wanted to see if I was kicking. It'll take more than this to finish me."

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