(5 of 6)
President Hoover's two years in the White House have not been politically happy. Claudius Hart Huston, his handpicked chairman of the Republican National Committee, was removed by his party for stockgambling on lobby funds. Dry little Simeon Davison Fess, his successor, mangled last year's G. O. P. campaign so grievously that what little Congressional support the White House had was wiped out by the November elections. After March 4, President Hoover will be confronted by a new and serious menace in the form of the 72nd Congress from which, lacking a working Republican majority, he may anticipate only more rows, more obstruction, more criticism. To compound his other troubles he was compelled to watch his Farm Board speculate in the open wheat market contrary to his pledge of no "Government buying or selling or price-fixing." The Depression played such hob with the Treasury's finances that a Republican Administration is on the brink of its first big post-War deficit ($500,000,000). Increased taxes are inevitable. Internationally the President sought a five-power treaty for naval reduction and had to take a three-power treaty for naval limitation which will cost the U. S. $500,000,000 to build up to.
As if real troubles were not aplenty, there falls across the White House a shadow cast by a sharp-nosed little man who lives happily and writes profitably in Northampton. Mass.* Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge were never good friends. Unforgotten and unforgiven was President Coolidge's statement that of course he would not make his Secretary of Commerce Secretary of State. When President Hoover was proclaiming the Treaty of Paris in 1929 Citizen Coolidge returned to Washington to participate in the ceremony, summoned newsmen, gave an interview about himself as a "public character," played inferentially on the fact that the White House Chief Usher's name is also Hoover, stole the show. Again at the American Legion convention in Boston last October the Coolidge reception was louder and more spontaneous than that of the President of the U.S.
Loyal Hoover friends may well feel that the popular comparison of the two Presidents is manifestly unjust. They might say that if ever a President had fair weather sailing in which to do a big constructive job of statecraft it was Calvin Coolidge, but that in retrospect his Administration is astonishingly barren of permanent achievement. They might say that, with pious platitudes on his thin lips, President Coolidge capitalized on Prosperity, rode its inflationary waves to an enormous popularity. They might; but for obvious reasons, they cannot. They must bear in bitterness the growth of the Coolidge legend.
With President Hoover, Legend has worked quite differently. He suffers today from the "superman" publicity which built him up far beyond the probable level of human performance. Two years have destroyed the Hoover legend, and still obscured from public sight, is the more authentic picture: a high-minded, able, industrious, conscientious individual who is devoted to his country, to the art of Government, to children. His irrational effort to divorce government from politics explains many of his difficulties, and is, as was predicted in 1928, his most serious defect as President. For, although he calls government an art. he doggedly continues to act as if it were a science.
More remote than ever from