REPUBLICANS: Out Steps Hoover

We have fought an unending war, carried on an unceasing campaign to protect the nation. . . . Many of these battles have had to be fought in silence, without the cheers of the limelight or the encouragement of public support because the very disclosure of the forces opposed to us would have undermined the courage of the weak and induced panic in the timid. Hideous misrepresentations had to be accepted in silence.. . There has been much of tragedy but a great national victory has been achieved¯President Hoover at Des Moines.

I have believed that sportsmanship and statesmanship called for the elimination of harsh personalities between opponents.

On this journey I have received a multitude of reports as to widespread personal misrepresentations. I shall now say the only harsh word I have uttered in public office. When you are told that the President has sat in the White House without troubling to know your burdens, without heartaches over your miseries, without using every ounce of strength and straining his every nerve to protect and help, without putting aside personal ambition and humbling his pride of opinion, then I say to you such statements are deliberate, intolerable falsehoods.—President Hoover at Fort Wayne.

Out of the White House where he was buried in work, into the midWest where he was born in want, a harassed and long-suffering President last week carried his case for reelection. For three years he had hugged his desk tighter than any chief executive ever did. The country had lost sight of him as a human being. Since his renomination in June he had left the burden of his campaign to nonelective Cabinet members who could not ask for votes in their own right. All their warm words failed to bring to life the silent, remote figure in Washington. Now, barely a month before the election and with the political tide running against him, he at last took the stump in his own behalf. As he crossed the line into his native Iowa, he thawed to the welcome of friends, recalled the old swimming hole of his childhood, greeted his old schoolmarm (see p. 29). As he journeyed back to Washington he lashed out with new spunk and spirit at his opponents.

Reno’s Parade. The farm issue—Iowa’s hottest—was realistically pointed up a few hours before President Hoover’s arrival in Des Moines. Milo Reno, farm strike leader, assembled 2,000 shabby men, women & children, paraded them through the city in 40 trucks bearing such signs as:

“We want living prices, not credit.”

“In Hoover we trusted; now we are busted.”

“Hoover, Hyde, Hell and Hard Times— The Republican 4-H Club.”

Through a chill twilight President Hoover was driven from a suburban station into the heart of town. Large crowds, respectful but not enthusiastic, lined the pavements. They clapped some, cheered a little.

Heckle-Proofed. From Iowa’s 102 counties careful Hooverizers had picked 10,000 good Republicans who were admitted only by card to the Coliseum—a friendly, heckle-proof audience. The President’s appeal to them, always earnest, sometimes touching, was for understanding and appreciation. Out of its sing-song monotony his voice occasionally lifted to a tremulous note.

In familiar vein the Hoover speech slurred over the speculative expansion of the Coolidge era to blame “shocks from abroad” as the major cause of U. S. troubles. The President ticked off the battle sectors: “We have builded the foundations of recovery. . . . Had it not been for the immediate and unprecedented actions of our Government, things would be infinitely worse today. . . . Let’s be thankful for the presence in Washington of a Republican Administration.”

Gold Gibraltar. The Coliseum crowd was keyed to a high pitch of expectancy when the President turned to the gold standard and added: “Much of what I will tell you has been hitherto undisclosed.” Thereupon followed the well-worn story of the Moratorium, foreign raids on the dollar, the flight of $1,000,000,000 in gold from the U. S., the Administration’s fight (with the Glass-Steagall bill) “to hold the Gibraltar of world stability.”— In this account the only real surprise for well-posted citizens came when President Hoover declared: “These drains had at one moment reduced the amount of gold we could spare … to a point where the Secretary of the Treasury informed me that unless we could put into effect a remedy, we could not hold to the gold standard but two weeks longer.” That the country was perilously close to going off gold last winter and spring most informed persons suspected; that it was a matter of 14 days few realized.*

“Give ’em hell, Hoover,” roared the Coliseum crowd when the President turned his guns on the Democratic leadership of the last House under John Nance Garner. He flayed his opponents for having no relief program, for producing “pork-barrel legislation in the sum of $1,200,000,000 for unnecessary public works,” for supporting the cash Bonus bill, for whittling his economy proposals from $300,000,000 to $50,000,000, for passing a price-fixing bill to create a “rubber dollar” [i.e. the Goldsborough bill], for proposing to make the Federal Government “the most gigantic pawnbroker of history.”

Two New Ones. Because Iowa leads the U. S. in the production of corn and farm mortgages President Hoover rounded off his speech with a farm relief plan which would win or lose him the State. Two proposals were, for him, brand new:

1) “Difficulties have arisen from the so-called stabilization provisions [of the Farm Board Act]. Even indirect purchase and sale of commodities is absolutely opposed to my theory of government. . . . The act should be revised and this [price-pegging] proposal should be repealed. . . .

2) “I am prepared to recommend that any annual payment on the foreign debt be used for the specific purpose of securing an expansion of the foreign markets for American agricultural products.”

“I come to you concluded President Hoover, “with no economic patent medicine especially compounded for farmers. I refuse to offer counterfeit currency or false hopes. I will not make any pledge to you which I cannot fulfill.”

“More, More!” The President’s first speech helped to buck up Republican campaign morale. Republican editors talked of a turn in the tide. But while President Hoover was speaking at Des Moines two Democrats, by shaking hands at Albany, stole the next morning’s headlines. Grain prices broke to the season’s low while the stockmarket suffered the sharpest decline in nearly a year.

President Hoover’s return to Washington became a series of rear-platform appearances. At Fort Wayne he had come close to crying “Liar!” at Governor Roosevelt. At Johnstown, Pa. a man in the night crowd at the train’s end yelled out: “We heard you at Des Moines. Give us three more like that and it’ll all be over.”

President Hoover: “Do you want some more?”

The crowd: “YES! YES!”

*When this Democratic measure to substitute lRS bonds for excess gold behind U. S. currency was first put forward. Secretary Mills insisted its scope was purely domestic, denied that its real aim was to meet foreign demands for gold. —Senator Carter Glass last week contradicted the President, declared that though he had been in the midst of last winter’s financial fight, he had heard no Administration spokesman express alarm about the gold standard.

Foreign debt principal now goes to public debt retirement, interest to general operating expenses of the Government. Last April Alfred Emanuel Smith proposed: “Let us say to the nations who owe us money that we will forget all about it for 20 years and will write off as paid each year 25% of the gross value of American products which they buy from us.”