Mr. Stimson's Defense
MR. STIMSON'S DEFENSE contrast between Republican campaign assur ances and the present reality is pretty vivid. Such impressive blocks of black and white set opposite each other speak as no...
...Criticism of the President ought not, therefore, to be specifically directed to his work...
...As a candidate he had done little beyond endorse the routine of government procedure during the preceding ten years...
...Great interest attaches, therefore, to the Republican defense...
...His picture, drawn one thinks with something more than a sense of party loyalty, allowed us to see a quiet, hard-working man behind a desk, conscientiously struggling to do what he had promised...
...The speaker began by outlining the extant depression and drawing a map to reveal its virulence throughout the world...
...If proof were needed to show that publicists and literary men are chiefly barometers of public sentiment and not calm scrutinizers of facts, it could be found in the circumstance that most of these have drawn the President in unrelieved sepia...
...But they testified overwhelmingly to that inability to comprehend and lead public opinion which, in a time of cilamity, is a great presidential misfortune...
...During more normal eras the people have been satisfied with a great deal less...
...And Mr...
...Signs of this approaching storm were not absent during the three years which preceded the last election...
...He was visualized as a humdrum little office-manager, dedicated to improving the filing system while the business was being wrecked...
...Can one assert that he is to blame because the citizenry tacitly took it for granted that Mr...
...What if one of our more boisterous senators had resided in the White House during months past...
...Of these there are more than is usually supposed...
...Hoover keeps still, and the conclusion is he has nothing to suggest...
...In Germany a glamorous nonentity like Herr Hitler can raise 1,000,000 votes by speaking out the things which impatient young fellows have on their minds...
...He has stuck to the job and shut up...
...Hoover did was a mistake—because no progress toward the millennium resulted...
...And he has remained as uncommunicative as a general staff after a defeat...
...In a way that picture has real greatness which we honor...
...Regarding all this Mr...
...Indeed he misreads the signs of the times...
...Though the bottom has fallen out of a lot of ventures from which many have gained bread and butter—and though as a result there is muttering and cursing in plenty—the man at the helm has said nothing to make life easier for himself, nothing to create false hopes or illusions, nothing in the least calculated to give him the appearance of Oedipus Rex...
...He has neither gambled nor dreamed...
...Hoover, himself uneasy as his trip through Latin America indicated, came into office...
...At a moment when world relations meant almost everything to business, he let the Senate speak and bought the "flexible clause" at auction for the highest rates yet levied against various kinds of foreign merchandise...
...Stimson's address was devoted to listing all the achievements of the President...
...Many of those in high authority foresaw at least a little of what was coming...
...Consciously or otherwise, it has expected the President to say them...
...Of course, the situation might have been much worse...
...Such impressive blocks of black and white set opposite each other speak as no words could, and the citizen— even the voting citizen—has his hand cupped over an ear...
...When he could have said something telling and possibly Rooseveltian about religious prejudice, he wrote a billetdoux...
...Stimson was probably correct when he asserted that "no President in recent years, if at any time, has so completely translated his campaign pledges into performance...
...But it must be borne in mind that really very little was promised...
...None of these things were grave mistakes, endangering the welfare of the nation...
...In the United States the public has had many things on its mind...
...And there is something to that...
...Coolidge often utters platitudes, but a host of people are governed by platitudes...
...With regard to prohibition—which the majority was already secretly repudiating—he said that disobedience to this law meant disregard for all law and order...
...The marvel is that none of them frankly stated that the outlook was bad, that the debts piled up by a decade of unsatisfactory post-war reconstruction were piling up and that the country would have to dig out its cyclone cellar as best it could...
...They did nothing of the kind...
...STIMSON'S DEFENSE contrast between Republican campaign assurances and the present reality is pretty vivid...
...The underlying pragmatism of the American mind was revealed in the assertion that everything Mr...
...On the whole this is not a malodorous catalogue...
...Hoover would do certain things they liked—and he couldn't do ? A political era is always partly psychological...
...The first long-range attempt at this was made by Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, addressing the New York state Republican convention...
...As a matter of fact he appears to have made practically no blunders...
...But to return to achievements: reduction of the debt and the taxes, growth of the merchant marine, partial reduction of naval armament at the London Conference, some diplomatic successes in Latin America, the establishment of the Farm Board, the enactment of a "flexible clause" in the nation's tariff legislation, the appointment of diverse commissions...
...They declared that Republicanism had always meant prosperity and would continue to mean that...
...Stimson, naturally enough, had little to say...
...When American labor had consented to waive the policy of strikes during the hard stretch, he replied to them by urging Judge Parker for the supreme bench...
Vol. 12 • October 1930 • No. 23
