Grubbing around among the oratorical remains of the 1932 campaign for flavor and facts, future historians are likely to pluck out and re-examine as the most authentic and complete summation of the Democratic case last week's radio speech by Virginia's testy little Senator Carter Glass. The 74-year-old Lynchburg publisher got out of a sick bed to answer President Hoover's stump speeches. Senator Glass is a political snapping turtle but no Republican has dared call the "Father of the Federal Reserve" a "wild man."
He served through the thick of last winter's bi-partisan Congressional struggle to keep the U. S. from going over an economic precipice. An expert on banking and currency, he packed into his speech all the things other Democratic stumpsters had been unintelligibly mouthing for weeks.
He began with what he called "suitable restraint": "Neither Hans Christian Andersen nor Carl Grimm in appealing to the fancies of children ever overtaxed his imagination as President Hoover repeatedly has done in his endeavor to regain the lost favor of the American people. Contrasted, with his addresses, Aesop's Fables deserve to rank as accurate history."
Senator Glass argued that in the Depression of 1921-22 the U. S. liquidated the War which had no more to do with the current Depression than "the wars of the Phoenicians or the conquest of Gaul by Caesar." Republican administrations, he declared, encouraged an "orgy of stock speculation" and President Coolidge "figuratively jumped into the stockpit and cheered on the gamblers." Billions of dollars of foreign securities "now practically worthless" were dumped on the U. S. market. The State Department "without sanction of law" usurped the function of passing on these loans and was therefore "implicated" in the disaster. When the Senate unanimously ordered it to desist as financial censor, Secretary Stimson brushed aside the order "with a contempt that entitled him to impeachment." Declared Senator Glass:
"When that Florentine spendthrift Lorenzo the Magnificent held sway over Continental Europe the average diplomat thought there was nothing better in life than a successful lie. The State Department in Washington has not yet learned that there are few things worse in life than a stupid lie."
After the Crash, according to Senator Glass, President Hoover called "mass meetings" at the White House as "psychological poultices" but set his face against any definite legislative action.
President Hoover did not have "one thing on earth" to do with devising the R. F. C. which was a "complete paraphrase" of the War Finance Corp. set up by Democrats. Declared the Senator: