CAMPAIGN: Symbol

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Last week for Herbert Hoover a cycle of history came full circle. Bombs fell on Helsinki and Bolshevism again marched West.

Among the wobbling governments of post-War Europe, when revolution or relief were the alternatives, he had packed a lifetime of experience: cabling pleas for food, studying revolution in Hungary as the Bela Kun* Government rose and fell racing around a Europe where panics and crises, revolution and breakdown flared in the first days of peace. Through ten of those 20 years he had been Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce organizer of Mississippi flood relief. His reputation as a humanitarian and an administrator was unequalled. Through the next ten years that reputation had been overlaid by another: he had been the President and ex-President, as soundly defeated as any in the history of the U. S., his personality and his political philosophy buried under a mass of invective that had held him personally responsible for the Great Depression. Last week the cycle closed: on the stage of history was a conflict and a need that none better than he understood.

He issued an appeal, got newspapers to accept contributions for Finnish relief, telephoned an address to a mass meeting in Manhattan. He wrote: “America has a duty to do its part in the relief of the hideous suffering of the Finnish people. Our people should have an outlet in which to express their individual and practical sympathy. . . .

“I fully realize the present needs of many of our own people and also of the Polish people as well, the committee of which I am also a member. I would not wish any contributions to this fund for Finland to lessen the support of all these needs. But . . . Americans should also make sacrifices for them.”

Quiet. Seven years ago next March Herbert Hoover left the White House. On a grey, gusty afternoon he stood stoically on the rear platform of the train that was to take him away from Washington, facing a subdued crowd that had gathered to see him leave. His pale face was heavily lined; to newspapermen still sensitive enough to recognize a human tragedy in a political battle, he seemed, not like a statesman who has lost, but like a man who had suffered some personal grief as real as the death of a friend. The inauguration ceremonies were over; the ex-President waited heavily through this last ritual of his office. With the train’s first movement he turned quickly and went into his private car. His secretary, who feared that he was at the edge of collapse, thought that the train had started not a moment too soon.

Only tough old John Quincy Adams had gone out of the Presidency so thoroughly unpopular. Hoover had labored mightily, with a stubborn and inflexible conviction in the Tightness of his course, only to see his work go down in public ruin. And no U. S. politician except Adams, calmly stepping back to the House of Representatives to make his experience count, had recovered in political or human terms from the consequences of such a defeat.

In his years in the White House, when he had had trouble sleeping, it had been Mr. Hoover’s habit to turn on the light and read for an hour or two—reading methodically through all the works on a particular period in the history of Egypt, all the volumes of Hakluyt’s Voyages—as if he hoped to calm his mind with facts. Back at Stanford he prowled through the massive accumulation of facts in the Hoover War Library—the extraordinary collection then stored away in the basement of the Stanford library, with 175,000 books and pamphlets on World War I, the secret files of the German Intelligence Service, the world’s largest collection of works on Communism, the documents of all the propaganda agencies working in Paris during the Peace Conference.

He walked in the hills behind Palo Alto with Stanford’s President Ray Lyman Wilbur, went fishing at the drop of a hat. He took long motor trips, helped raise money for Stanford, talked with old pedagogical friends like Professor Murray (classical literature), Professor Lutz (history), and answered letters that poured in, 1,000 a day.

Five months after he left the White House, he said: “What do I do all day? I get up fairly early and take a look from the Palo Alto place into the Santa Clara Valley. It’s very pleasant. Then I have breakfast and a walk. Then I get my mail and read the newspapers. Then I take another long look down the valley, thanking Providence I’m in California.”

Question. Last week, when Republican leaders assembled in Washington, correspondents were surprised to find that the biggest question was: What will Herbert Hoover do? General agreement was that at next year’s convention he will control at least 200 of the 1,000 delegates. Of course the Republicans agreed that 1940 would see the New Deal’s end. But general agreement, not only in Washington D. C., but in Oregon, Illinois, Minnesota, Kansas, etc., was that, with stage set, audience waiting, superspectacle prepared—with a fine cast of characters, a wonderful story, a happy ending—the star performer was poison at the box office.

Nevertheless, it was as plain as a New Deal deficit to a Republican wheelhorse that in his exile Herbert Hoover had made himself a symbol of the Republican Party. To the dismay of many an ardent Republican, to the positive frenzy of some, in spite of the efforts of a few, he had gone up & down through his seven years with the fortunes of the party itself. Dignified, unbending, difficult in his personal relations, vulnerable to attack, sensitive to slights, losing votes by his stiffness as fast as he won them by his integrity and intelligence, he remained the symbol of Republicanism—just as he had been the symbol of its defeat when the pent-up storm burst on his head in 1932. Left-wing Republicans looked on him as The Man Who Came to Dinner—when slights did not work, they tried to make him an Elder Statesman; when he still refused to go away, they agreed hastily that he was the ablest U. S. Republican, while they canvassed busily for somebody else. In spite of all, last week in Washington the biggest question among Republicans remained: What will Herbert Hoover do?

Answers. Presumably he will go on doing what he has been doing recently. He has been driving his tan Cadillac from one small California town to the next, accompanied by the two Aliens (no kin): Ben, 56, grey-haired, heavyset, silent, long (and wrongly) considered Hoover’s ghost writer, and Jacob, dark, short, relative newcomer to the Hoover circle. He has been making speeches, like the one to the college branch of the Young Republicans at San Francisco, where he described his talks with Polish and Finnish Government leaders like Kyösti Kallio and Rudolf Holsti (see cut). And he has been keeping in touch with the Republican “Circles” that he has been organizing since he returned from Europe in 1938. These Circles are groups of 20, organized by counties, each officered only by a secretary. Each county Circle creates a town or district Circle, making a minimum of 400 Circlers in each county. Purpose: to gather at dinner to listen to Herbert Hoover whenever he comes through, to back up other Republican organizations, to oppose the New Deal. There is a Circle in each of California’s 58 counties, with others in nine Western States, a few in the East that lie dormant for long periods, come back to life when the ex-President appears.

Last week correspondents making a hasty check-up heard strange and contradictory reports. In the State of Washington they heard G.O.P. bigwigs proclaim: “He has learned more since being out of office—about his nation, his party, the world—than he ever did in office or all his years before the Presidency.” In Oregon, where Hoover often goes to fish with his old friend Homer Bunker, president of the Coos Bay Lumber Co., and Arthur Priaulx (rhymes with Creole), publisher of the Eugene News, they heard he has been in & out of the State often, but not among the politicians.

In Colorado, they heard from Frank Fetzer, 240-lb. chairman of Denver’s Republican Club, that Colorado Republicans now found Herbert Hoover’s speeches “inspirational but sobering,” were still discussing his visit last August. In Missouri, they found G.O.P. leaders who called Hoover’s increased political stature extraordinary, heard that what most pleased Republicans was the conviction that Herbert Hoover is the one Republican who makes Mr. Roosevelt uneasy in his political mind. Everywhere it was admitted that Mr. Hoover had his uses in G. O. P. adversity. Everywhere his prestige—and with it, the prestige of the party—was rising. A Washington State G. O. P. man summed up Republican feeling about Mr. Hoover: “We cannot win without him as a counsel, or with him as a candidate.”

Republicans eager to steal the New Deal’s thunder minimized the Hoover prestige, magnified the Hoover unpopularity. They dismissed Hoover’s county organizations, said it was just the ex-President going round and round in little circles. And in California, even Hoover aides and allies indignantly denied that the ex-President’s activities were political, pictured him as the intellectual leader of a cause. As for thunder-stealing, said they, the New Deal’s thunder was now a low faint rumble far over the hills. But everybody recognized that, whether talking politics or philosophy, the ex-President was spending his time these days with sturdy, middle-of-the-road Republicans—the Homer Bunkers, Frank Fetzers, Art Priaulxs —who seemed to stand not for big business ideas or reform, but for fishing, making money, listening to Herbert Hoover, and voting for the G. O. P.

Philosophy. Time was when listening to Herbert Hoover was a role for the intellectuals and the economists. In his devastating The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Economist John Maynard Keynes had harsh judgments to make on most of the public men of the post-War days. But of Herbert Hoover he wrote: “This complex personality . . . with his habitual air of an exhausted prizefighter . . . imported into the Councils of Paris . . . precisely that atmosphere of reality, knowledge, magnanimity and disinterestedness which, if they had been found in other quarters as well, would have given us the Good Peace.”

But by the time Herbert Hoover’s Challenge to Liberty appeared in 1934, intellectuals by & large dismissed it as little more than an ex-President’s attempt to defend his administration. That it incorporated Herbert Hoover’s articulation of an intelligible theory of government, that his theory was deeply rooted in U. S. traditions, made little difference. Unlike other theoreticians and politicians who balked at this or that aspect of the New Deal, criticized methods, personalities, mistakes, costs, the ex-President made a flat issue of the New Deal’s fundamental philosophy. It was not merely mistaken, said he. It was wrong. Said Herbert Hoover:

“Throughout the world the whole philosophy of individual liberty is under attack. In haste to bring under control the sweeping social forces unleashed … by the World War, by the tremendous advances in productive technology during the last quarter century, by the failure to march with a growing sense of justice, peoples and governments are blindly wounding . . . those fundamental human liberties which have been the foundation and inspiration of progress.”

The issue, said he, was not whether abuses could be remedied, and new productive forces organized. It was whether the job could be done by free men. Through history the U. S. system of government, and the rights guaranteed by it, have been invaded by “economic agencies” on one hand, and by greed for bureaucratic and governmental power on the other. Battles against business exploitation proved that the U. S. had no system of laissez faire; battles like that against the spoils system demonstrated the American system’s “live sense of opposition to the subtle approach of political tyranny.”

Said Hoover of quick remedies: “I have no word of criticism but rather great sympathy for those who honestly search human experience and human thought for some easy way out, where human selfishness has no opportunities, where freedom requires no safeguards, where justice requires no striving. . . . Such dreams are not without value and one could join in them with satisfaction but for the mind troubled by recollection of human frailty, the painful human advance through history, the long road which humanity still has to travel to economic and social perfections. . . .”

With the New Deal’s emergency measures for recovery he would not quarrel. But because a nation’s greatest moral, spiritual, economic and governmental change is involved in a shift in its fundamental social ideas, the big question remained: Does the New Deal represent such a shift? Said Herbert Hoover: “This is solely an issue. Honest men will treat it as such.” Analyzing New Deal policies in currency, in finance, in agriculture he found such a change; a similar change in its insistence that the U. S. social system is outworn and in its tendency to increasing regimentation, towards delegation of power to the executive. The New Deal involved no revolution: it was dangerous, on the contrary, because “In our blind groping we have stumbled into philosophies which lead to the surrender of freedom.”

Just as U. S. history proved that freedom released man’s creative impulses, led to the development of productive forces, stimulated inventions, spurred the commercial development of them, European experiences under Fascist and Communist dictatorships proved that freedom was never lost by a direct assault. He wrote: “The drama moves swiftly in a torrent of words in which real purposes are disguised in portrayals of Utopia; [in] slogans, phrases and statements destructive to confidence in existing institutions; demands for violent actions against slowly curable ills; unfair representation that sporadic wickedness is the system itself; searing prejudice against the former order; dismay and panic in the economic organization which feeds on its own despair.” And in Europe’s dictatorships “those desperate people willingly surrendered every liberty to some man or group of men who promised economic security, moral regeneration, discipline and hope.”

Personality. After the Hoover legends of the past ten years, Republicans meeting him for the first time are surprised to discover that he is a very able man and promptly conclude that he is badly maligned. He does not do the things that politicians are supposed to do: he cannot tell a joke, seldom even laughs at a good one and cannot go through the complicated ritual—throwing back the head, slapping the thigh—which immemorial tradition holds is the proper U. S. politician’s response to a bad one. His handshake is no heartier than the usual political handshake deserves to be. To reporters who pry into his political plans he talks on & on—about the need to develop new inventions, the need to build 550,000 new houses, how much more employment was provided by the aggressive commercial development of the gasoline engine than by the land grants. This leads them to report that he has no sense of humor.

At 65, he looks younger than when he left the White House. He is red-faced, cherubic, and still wears the high collars, high shoes, the slightly pained and embarrassed smile that have always made him an easy target for cartoonists. His only political characteristic is that he smokes cigars. But he hates to be photographed doing it. He sometimes drinks a cocktail. Reporters who interview him now find that he has few doubts—of himself, of his ideas, of the U. S., of the prospect that the G. O. P. can defeat the New Deal in 1940. The apostle of confidence has never lost his own.

*Its records are at Stanford University in the Hoover Library of War, Revolution and Peace.