This week Herbert Clark Hoover, 31st President of the U. S., stood at the halfway mark in his first and perhaps last term. Behind him lay two years of the hardest work this hard-working man had ever done, of noisy quarreling with a cantankerous Congress, of heartbreaking economic misfortune, of a blighting natural curse, of a gradual loss of popular favor. Ahead of him lay a rocky road to 1932 when he would either vindicate himself by renomination and re-election or go into the discard of defeat as a presidential failure.
Two years in the White House have greyed his hair, accentuated the pastiness of his complexion, deepened the lines in his round boyish face, so easy to caricature, so hard to paint. He has worked off 15 Ib. of fat. His health has been uninterruptedly good, thanks to a stern physical routine. Two dozen months of the White House spotlight were enough to generate an embryonic halo about the head of Calvin ("Weaned-on-a-pickle") Coolidge, a previously insignificant politician who had cautiously climbed the Massachusetts "escalator." Two dozen months of spotlight put completely in the shadow Herbert Hoover's world-significant career, and robbed him of whatever sentiment had been attached to his name. Losing faith in the Press, he has come to think of himself as a martyr in a hair shirt, misunderstood and misinterpreted by the People.
As impossible of fair historical evaluaation is his two-year record as was the battle of Gettysburg at noon on the second day. Like other Presidents, he has been unmercifully berated by his opponents; like them also, he has had his fair share of shouting supporters. Last week in the House New York's fire-eating little Representative Loring Black voiced the extreme Democratic view when he declared: "The outstanding accomplishment of this Administration was a successful assault on Webster's dictionary. ... As Lincoln split rails, Hoover split hairs. . . . He would make mad faces at Congress and then send [Secretary] Walter Newton over to say he didn't mean it. ... He compromised everything, the country, Congress, his party and himself. For a while the people thought the seat of Government was at St. Elizabeth's Hospital.* As the Harding Administration gave America the era of 'official dishonesty,' Hoover has given us the age of 'intellectual dishonesty.' A typical Republican defense of the President was made the week before by Representative Franklin Fort who declared the party had given the country "the best-trained economic mind that ever came to the chair in the man who never failed, Herbert Hoover."
Far away in the President's recollection seemed the start of his climb to the White House. In retrospect the years as Secretary of Commerce were placidity itself. The Mississippi flood of 1927 furnished the immediate drama necessary to begin Hooverizing for the Republican nomination. So easily were Hoover delegates to the Kansas City Convention rounded up that the slogan "Who But Hoover?'' became irresistible logic, vanquished the "allies" (Watson, Curtis, Lowden et al) before the voting began. The Secretary of Commerce was nominated on the first ballot.
The campaign was a nightmare for the shy, beaverish Hoover who hates crowds, strangers, speechmaking, gladhanding. backslapping. Gritting his teeth behind a sickly smile, he went through it