Books: Before the Hurricane

THE MEMOIRS OF HERBERT HOOVER, The Cabinet and the Presidency (405 pp.) —Herbert Hoover—Macmillan ($5).

Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of Commerce was one of the many who wondered what the President really meant by the phrase, “I do not choose to run.” Since Herbert Hoover’s friends were urging him to run himself, he tried to get Silent Cal to talk. Ohio Congressmen, Secretary Hoover explained, were planning to enter Hoover’s name in the Ohio primary. Replied Coolidge: “Why not?”

To this day. Hoover is not sure what Calvin Coolidge’s 1928 intentions really were. But the Hoover boom grew, almost without effort on Hoover’s part. He had no official preconvention campaign manager, and he made no political speeches before his party met at Kansas City and nominated him on the first ballot. The election was a sweep: 40 states for Hoover (including such Democratic strongholds as Texas, North Carolina and Virginia), only eight for Al Smith. “I came to the White House with a program of vigorous policies,” adds Herbert Hoover. “But instead of being able to devote my four years wholly to these purposes I was to be overtaken by the economic hurricane which sprang from the delayed consequences of the first World War.”

The So-Called Bankers. In this second volume of his memoirs, the ex-President deals only in passing with the economic hurricane which began in 1929. A third volume, The Great Depression, will deal with it in full. The Cabinet and the Presidency takes up where Volume I (TIME, Oct. 22) left off, with Hoover’s return from his World War I relief missions; it tells of Herbert Hoover’s eight years as Secretary of Commerce under Harding and Coolidge and of the not unimportant but less dramatic undertakings in his four years as President. It is, as the author admits, “a text composed mostly of grim economics”—postwar reconstruction, reclamation, foreign loans, disarmament negotiations, labor relations, child welfare and a myriad of other projects of whose origins and achievements the ex-President writes with stolid earnestness. But the book has its sprightly surprises and rewarding glimpses of men and problems as Herbert Hoover saw them.

Here, for example, is Herbert Hoover, often dubbed by his critics a pillar of the Old Guard, on the subject of railroad presidents who opposed his efforts at settlement of the 1922 railroad strike: “It was a suggestive thing that the railway presidents who led the opposition had their offices in New York City. They have mostly gone to their graves unknown to all the public except the sexton, or they still dodder around their clubs, quavering that ‘labor must be disciplined.’ ”

And on bankers: “It is a safe generalization for the period to say that where industrial leaders were undominated by New York promoter-bankers, they were progressive and constructive in outlook. Some of the so-called bankers in New York were not bankers at all. They were stock promoters . . . Their social instinct belonged to an early Egyptian period.”

The Tenth Trouble. To Warren Harding he remained loyal and sympathetic even after it had become politically careless to show such sentiments. “Had it not been for the continuous exposure of terrible corruption by his playmates,” writes Hoover, “he would have passed into memory with the same aura of affection and respect that attaches to Garfield and McKinley . . . He had a real quality in geniality, in good will and in ability for pleasing address. He was not a man with either the experience or the intellectual quality that the position needed.”

Between Hoover and Coolidge there apparently was respect but little warm devotion. Silent Cal always hated to act in advance. One of his sayings was: “If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.” “The trouble with this philosophy,” Hoover found, “was that when the tenth trouble reached him he was wholly unprepared and it had by that time acquired such momentum that it spelled disaster. The outstanding instance was the rising boom and orgy of mad speculation which began in 1927, in respect to which he rejected or sidestepped all our anxious urgings and warnings to take action.”

Of all who worked with him, Hoover seems to have been impressed most by Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon. “He was in every instinct a country banker . . . He had no use for certain varieties of New York banking, which he deemed were too often devoted to tearing men down and picking their bones.” After the stock market broke. Mellon said of the New York speculators: “They deserved it!”

The Rare Doily. Hoover also liked the man he licked in one of the bitterest of American presidential campaigns. “Governor Alfred E. Smith,” he writes, “was a natural-born gentleman. Both of us had come up from the grass roots or the pavements, and from boyhood had learned the elements of sportsmanship.”

Against the grain of contemporary belief, Hoover expresses the conviction that Al Smith’s Catholicism had no important bearing on his defeat. “The issues which defeated the governor were general prosperity, prohibition, the farm tariffs, Tammany and the ‘snuggling up’ of the Socialists. Had he been a Protestant, he would certainly have lost and might even have had a smaller vote.”

Rarely does the ex-President let the story of his twelve years in Washington get in the way of statistical detail, but occasionally a light note slips in, e.g., the time that hornyhanded Senator Norbeck of South Dakota, in the midst of a powerful political delivery at dinner, placed his ice cream on one of Mrs. Hoover’s prized Belgian lace doilies and gulped down doily and all. But in the four presidential years, which plunged, only a few months after Inauguration Day, into the opaque depths of the Great Depression, there was a minimum of things to laugh about. Still, nothing in those days of disaster seems to have changed the political philosophy or destroyed the self-confidence of Herbert Hoover. Says he, 23 years later: “I am so immodest as to believe that had we been continued in office we would have quickly overcome the depression and approached economic and social problems from the point of view of correcting marginal abuse and not of inflicting a collectivist economy on the nation.”