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> Such curiosa as the propaganda distributed at the Paris peace conference by the delegate from Pontus on the Euxine Sea, who requested the restoration of the kingdom of Mithridates the Great, destroyed by Julius Caesar in 47 B.C.; the rare official Italian inquiry into the Caporetto disaster; the unpublished memoirs of Haile Selassie.
New material for these collections is constantly being gathered. World War II caught Hoover collectors looking for data on Naziism and Fascism. Shiploads of their findings are tied up in Europe waiting for peace.
The Library also has an expanding file on Communism in the U.S., and, adds Hoover without pausing, "we also have a wonderful collection on the New Deal including some things you cannot find in Washington."
So much of the Hoover collection was secured by timely salvage operations and from official sources that most of it was free. Partly financed through Stanford University, it is endowed with a $500,000 fund and several special gifts. The building, for which $600,000 was raised, is "supposedly earthquake-proof." The seven floors of stacks in the library tower (a reproduction of the cathedral tower at Salamanca) get no sunlight but are strongly and uniformly illuminated by prismatic globes, to the wonder of Engineer Hoover.
One section of the Library fills him with a wonder that is more Dantesque—the propaganda section. It contains, he says, "probably more lies, half-truths and untruths" than any other similar room in the world. What deeply troubles Herbert Hoover, who knows in a personal way something of the vicious effects of lies, is the inability of propaganda-poisoned people any longer to know when they are being poisoned. He sees in the Library's propaganda section evidence on a vast scale of "the mind's total abdication from truth." If he is right, the Library may prove to be a monastery in a dark age, where scholars may help man to understand his ancestors' errors and reason to regain her throne.
* An 1848 German anarchist song: Blood must flow! Blood must flow! Blood! Blood! Blood!