National Affairs: Brand’s Alibi

In 1925, Charles Brand, a recent addition to the House from Ohio, wrote to Secretary of Commerce Hoover and said that, although he thought his own name was being considered, he felt like asking President Coolidge to appoint Mr. Hoover as Secretary of Agriculture. “I don’t know any one who fits the place so well as you,” wrote Mr. Brand.

In 1928, Mr. Brand attacked Secretary Hoover as “the supreme opponent of agricultural prosperity for the last ten years.”

Sere, august Representative Burton of Mr. Brand’s home State promptly called attention to Mr. Brand’s inconsistency (TIME, March 26). It seemed a flagrant case of bootlicking by Mr. Brand in 1925 and hamstringing in 1928. Mr. Burton called it “vicious.” Mr. Brand left the floor of the House flabbergasted, humiliated, speechless.

Three weeks after the event, Mr. Brand issued an alibi (see LETTERS). He had “gone over” his back files. “I find,” he said, “that I was advocating, as a means of agricultural relief, the production of sugar and wool in the United States that we were purchasing abroad.” Mr. Hoover said something to the same effect at that time so Mr. Brand thought Mr. Hoover would make the best Secretary of Agriculture possible. Later, he discovered that Mr. Hoover’s ideas did not coincide with his own. “So my hopes for Mr. Hoover were blasted,” said Mr. Brand.

Further researches revealed to Mr. Brand that Mr. Hoover “saw fit to manipulate the buying forces” during the War, preventing farmers from getting more than $2.20 per bushel for wheat when “otherwise the price would have been $5 to $10 per bushel.”

Coincident with the release of Mr. Brand’s alibi, Dr. Harry Augustus Garfield, president of Williams College and during the War, chairman of the Fair Price Committee, issued a statement: “Mr. Hoover had absolutely no part in this matter.”