Mr Hoover Today

...The prices of wheat, other grains, cotton and even butter have skidded catastrophically...

...With genuine cleverness they harassed the White House with details of prohibition enforcement until Mr...

...It is too early to state what this was, but a guess is in order...

...Hoover could afford to sidestep contingent issues-prohibition, the status of farm industry, international relations-regarding which the public was in some measure bothered...

...We have said previously that the naval disarmament conference, now engaging the attention of so many journalists in London, might result in the kind of triumph Mr...

...They are great talkers, diplomats of the ballot, masters of political ruse...

...Cutting down the bill for ships would help the administration in many ways...

...Hoover needs...

...At any rate, the Borahs began to emerge...

...But the discussion has worried and dribbled along until there is virtually no chance for accomplishing anything unless (irony of fate...

...and it is a herculean job to keep it even a little higher when fortuitous circumstances do not lend their aid...

...Or is there a fatality which decrees that, ever so often, a chief executive is destined to see his fondest hopes blighted...

...Whatever may be his limitations, the President is possibly the most competent and national-minded among Washington politicians...

...his development of the commission as a means of getting through some portions of the executive business...

...Then the precious jar of prosperity was left overnight without a lid, and the contents evaporated...

...Of course no power in the world could have made actual wealth equal previous speculative assumptions...

...The Republican emphasis was laid, as any reader of campaign oratory could see, less upon achievement than upon the future...

...Thus the major problem of Mr...

...One might disagree with some of his views but there was no doubting the reasoned character of Mr...

...Hoover is in genuine danger of becoming a silent and forgotten man, obscured by the trend of events and the glamour of his senatorial neighbors...

...Thus an opportunity was afforded another kind of leader, committed to agricultural and other groups only nominally in sympathy with the administration program...

...Evidences of trifling with this most precious of the nation's possessions were not lacking, but the suddenness of the disaster was nevertheless amazing...

...For the moment, it is for some such eventuality that the President must hope...

...Hoover is an engineer, who never tries even a bad joke, who cannot invent a phrase and whose mistakes as a politician are innumerable...

...But sometimes-as witness the Shearer incident, the tariff conferences and the sugar lobby-seamy aspects of the relationship revealed themselves to a citizenry always disposed to be critical...

...It rallied to their support a tremendous amount of dissatisfaction and criticism, based largely on an obsession of presidential omniscience which had obviously not been dispelled by campaign propaganda...

...They talked...

...And for all sins penance is exacted...

...Hoover's own attitude...

...There has been a general decline in all productive activity, with the bulkier industries leading the procession...

...Industrial leadership helped as best it could, the decision of the New York banking pool to take up the slack in stocks being, perhaps, the most notable single deed...

...Hoover, who had ventured to anneal obedience to Volsteadism with elemental respect for law, was reduced to a position of hiding behind the Wicker-sham commission...

...Because they stressed this central plea so firmly, spokesmen for Mr...

...Whatever we may say, the fact remains that prosperity is always only relative...

...But most especially it would strike a note of advancement, of idealism, which the music of government, grown far too stodgy and materialistic, needs badly if it hopes to keep the ear of the nation...

...One event after another proved how close was the association between the government and big business...

...The return to power of the Borah-Norris-Brookhart alliance is certainly a major political phenomenon...

...his strong appeal for obedience to the law-all these gave evidence of a forceful personality anxious to promote the nation's welfare...

...And no solution yet advanced is adequate, because none envisages as a whole the tremendous complex of overpro-ductive land and unorganized management...

...Hoover's administration may well be, after all, the farm problem...

...Who can doubt that the administration did everything possible to minimize the evil effects ? The President himself took several energetic steps, authorizing a tax reduction which now seems endangered, however, by accelerating national expenditures...

...Hoover came into office-if, indeed, they must not be traced back to the moment when Adam left Paradise...

...It may be that the outcome will be affected by some minor happening...

...The people of the United States enjoy, even in periods of depression, an economic security to which the peoples of England or France do not so much as aspire...

...Possibly the besetting sin of Republicanism has been too much matter-of-fact-ness, too much comfort in dollar bills...

...The longer feminine skirt is hailed as a godsend by the textile manufacturers...

...Nor has leadership ever been placed profitably in the hands of Congress...

...Business, like a radio set, operates on "juice," and when this had been turned off the wheels stood still...

...His personality and his utterances pledged him to the status quo as not merely desirable but also continuable...

...Coming when it did, the decline added immeasurably to the aggressiveness of his foes...

...Assigned roles as more or less complacent camp-followers during the campaign, these eminent senators came to the inaugural ball looking very like lambs...

...Then something happened...

...Whatever interpretation be accepted, the President appears unable to cope with the Borahs on their own territory...

...It is easy to reason that since the administration had effected an alliance with industrial leadership it should have been able to take some preventive action...

...We believe this would be exceedingly regrettable...

...Convinced as we are that many powerful American industrialists are unselfishly interested in the welfare of their country, we find nothing abnormal in this association...

...But though the recession in automotive, building and similar demands has resulted in a considerable amount of unemployment, farm business is still harder hit than industry...

...His attentiveness to Latin-American conditions...

...Why not maintain an administration which had proved its skill...

...The causes of financial decline are as yet obscure, but doubtless they were already embryonically present when Mr...

...Why not send the President on another speaking tour, giving him the opportunity to address his fellow-men in terms which might have seemed injudicious while the vote gathering was in progress...

...Was it lack of inclination or of ability...

...The new President began well, revealing himself as a master of a certain kind of tactics...

...He had forged to victory as the great conserver of a position to which the nation had attained in the post-war decade and from which his countrymen had no desire to recede...

...Tomorrow was the main topic of conversation...

...He has the desire to work hard, to advance the common good, to satisfy in so far as he can the legitimate demands of his countrymen...

...Aristide Briand should manage to inject new life into the veins of what has become a very old body...

...Who knows but what some still unimaginable vogue of a fuller feminine form may restore the prestige of candy, butter and eggs...

...In six or seven weeks they had tied the tariff into a knot, refusing to the President not merely the power of revision he had sought but all right to intervene as the rightful master of debate...

...Our standard of living constantly tends back toward the world average...

...Unfortunately all such arguments are basically unsound...

...Hoover, however, seems to have been unaware of what to do with them...

...The administration, like the country at large, was committed to the belief that industrial leadership, in control of grand-scale enterprise, remained the arbiter of national policy...