THE PRESIDENCY: The Hoover Week: Feb. 15, 1932

Last week President & Mrs. Hoover held the fifth and largest of the White House winter receptions. Present were officials of the Treasury, Post Office, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce and Labor Departments. Mrs. Hoover appeared wearing a white and blue dimity gown modeled in the fashion of 1870 and copied from one of her mother’s photographs. 41, President Hoover busied himself with his anti-hoarding campaign (see below). ¶ Entertained at a White House dinner was Speaker of the House John Nance Garner uncomfortable in a new dress suit, together with Henry Ford, Walter P. Chrysler, William Wallace Atterbury, Melvin Alvah Traylor, James Watson Gerard, sundry other tycoons and their ladies. ¶ President Hoover asked Congress to appropriate an additional $1,450,000 with which the Department of Agriculture might fight grasshoppers. ¶ Assistant Secretary of the Navy Ernest Lee Jahncke of New Orleans took Louisiana’s new Democratic Senator Huey Pierce Long to the White House to meet President Hoover. Emerging from the Executive Offices, Senator Long was asked what he thought of the President. “Considering the miserable party he represents.” said he, “he is about as good as any of them.”

¶ President Hoover set aside by proclamation the period between Feb. 22 and Thanksgiving Day as a time for celebrating the 200th Anniversary of George Washington’s birth (see p. 29). ¶ The President signed the $126.000.000 first deficiency bill.