WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND

WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND

BLUE RIBBON BOOKS, Inc.

New York City

COPYRIGHT, 1931, BY HORACE LIVERIGHT, INC.

Published, July, 1931
Second printing, July, 1931
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FOR THE BRASS RING

CONTENTS

NUM

CHAPTER ONE

BOILED BOSOMS

VITH the exception of Peking, no other capital in the world equals Washington for the relentless brilliancy with which the spotlight of public attention is fixed upon the comings and goings, the cocktail parties and the amours of the petty people who run the official and social life of the capital of these United States.

If Nick Longworth came back from Cincinnati unexpectedly one autumn night to find himself locked out of his house on Massachusetts Avenue; should Dolly Curtis Gann stop to adjust a slipping stocking before a crowd of shoppers at Woodward and Lothrop's; or should Mrs. Hoover have a dispute with her secretary, Polly Randolph, over flowers for the White House table, most of the dinners and tea parties of Washington are buzzing over the incident twenty-four hours later.

There are two reasons for this. In the first place, Washington is small, and the group which runs its social and official life is even smaller. In the second place, Washington has only one industry—politics.

London, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Moscow, Vienna—all the other great capitals of the world are also vast industrial and commercial centers in which the pompous preening of society is almost swallowed up. Were the capital of the United States

located in New York, much of the material for the merry-goround of Washington would be non-existent. But the capital is not in New York. Instead, it has been plumped down in a placid agricultural community, surrounded by the remnants of a Southern aristocracy which still prides itself on its hounds, hunters and mint-juleps, and which boasts no industry other than the Bureau of Printing and Engraving plus a few river boats which chug sleepily up the Potomac, bringing oysters, Norfolk honeymooners and split pine logs.

Not only is the sole industry of the capital politics, but this industry is concentrated among a very few. Fifty percent of Washington's half million population is of a race which, except when it gathers to cheer Paul Robeson or its lone congressional champion, Oscar De Priest, is neither interested nor admitted into high society.

Broadly speaking, Washington society can be divided into two classes: Those who want to get their names in the papers and those who want to keep them out.

the ringing up or down of the curtain for the social season. They put the social lions through their tricks—pull them in and out of the social ring. They crack the whip, and they crack it with all the grimness of the tamer who must inspire fawning obedience or retire from the ring.

Ambassador, although later forced to retire, received a personal apology from Secretary of State Stimson, and the publisher of the Washington Post got a personal apology from the Philadelphia Record.

THE PRADO-POINDEXTER WAR over a servant imported from Lima by the wife of the American Ambassador to Peru, which resulted in Counselor Prado, of the Peruvian Embassy in Washington, resigning his post and taking the servant off with him to London

THE TOTO MACIA-ITALIAN EMBASSY WAR over the unimportant question of incompatibility, which resulted in the beautiful Senora Macia rising up in all her Canadian wrath, fleeing her house at midnight, and secreting her baby in Baltimore.

THE SALVADOREAN LEGATION-POLICE WAR over the failure of the latter to prevent hi-jackers from absconding with seventeen cases of liquor, and which caused Don Carlos Leiva, having been severely beaten over the head with a flashlight, to sit up in bed and issue scathing statements about repeated attempts to rob his Legation, against which the police offered no protection.

THE DAISY HARRIMAN-RAY BAKER WAR, between two of the most charming and once friendly Democrats of the capital, which resulted when the former came back from Bermuda to find that the latter had dumped 5,000 tons of dirt from the cellar of his new house in the middle of her front lawn.

None of these, of course, could compare with the Dolly Curtis Gann-Alice Roosevelt Longworth precedence war, a war which stirred Washington to the depths of its sensation-loving soul. Unfortunately, this feud, except when Edward Everett Gann calls up the Washington Daily News to complain that he is not a "meek" husband, is in a completely comatose stage. Fortunately, however, its place was taken, just before it breathed its last, by the Patterson-Longworth War.

This was not a new battle. Intimate friends of both Eleanor Patterson and Alice Longworth knew that it had been smoldering ever since their debutante days when they had competed for the most eligible men in town. One of them married a young Congressman from Cincinnati, and the other Count Joseph Gizycka, a dashing young Polish cavalryman in Emperor Franz Ferdinand's army.

Later, Cissie Gizycka came back from Warsaw once again to cramp Alice's style and in later years to tell a story on herself—which may or may not be true—about a young nobleman who sat at Alice's right at dinner one evening. After dinner Cissie monopolized him in an upstairs library. The following morning she received a note from her hostess which read as follows:

"Dear Cissie:

"Upon sweeping up the library this morning, the maid found several hair-pins which I thought you might need and which I am returning.

"ALICE."

To which Cissie says she replied:

"Dear Alice:

"Many thanks for the hair-pins. If you had looked on the chandelier you might also have sent back my shoes and chewing gum.

"Love,

"Cissie."

It was at the Republican National Convention of 1920, held in Chicago, that the first real breach occurred. Cissie Gizycka had taken a house for the period of the convention, and had invited as one of her guests William Edgar Borah, shaggy-maned and shaggy-browed Senator from Idaho. She was writing a series of human-interest stories on the convention for the Hearst papers and devoted one of them to a more than laudatory sketch of Borah. Her house-guest explained that this was highly embarrassing and cautioned her against any repetition of her flattery. A day or two later and with all the ear-marks of having been inspired by an irate Countess Gizycka, her brother's newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, pub-

WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND

lished a scathing editorial, headed "Borah and Blah." Borah's hostess had no connection with the editorial, but both he and Alice Longworth, even then one of his most intimate friends, thought she had. They never forgave Cissie.

Simultaneous with her marriage to Elmer Schlesinger, five years later, Countess Gizycka shook Washington out of its usual slumber by publishing her first book, "Glass Houses." In it she painted, so deftly that no one could mistake them and so brazenly that every one gasped, her old friend and her arch-enemy, Borah and Alice. This widened the breach beyond all repair.

"INTERESTING BUT NOT TRUE

"The news is that Mrs. Alice Longworth will not only be the confidential advisor to Mrs. Ruth Hanna McCormick, but that she will campaign publicly for her lifelong friend. Interesting but not true.

"Mrs. McCormick takes no advice, political or otherwise, from Mrs. Longworth.

"Mrs. Longworth gives no interviews to the press.

'Mrs. Longworth cannot utter in public.

"Her assistance will, therefore, resolve itself, as usual, into posing for photographs."

It had only one fault. In order to create a first-class row there must be two parties to a dispute. In this case, however, there was only one. Alice refused to hit back. She continued to grant no interviews, make no speeches. She confined her activities to the thing she has always done best, posing for photographs. There is no fun in punching a deflated punchingbag, and Editor Patterson quit.

Since then she has had to be content with giving pretentious dinner parties for Mrs. William Randolph Hearst, interviewing Al Capone and Dr. Einstein, and pretending to enjoy coarse newspaper revelries at which she tries hard to be one of the gang.

*

The part which Mrs. Longworth plays on Capitol Hill, the prestige which she commands throughout Washington, is, of course, resented by other congressional wives, most of whom lead a dull and pompous existence in the red-plush drawing-rooms of the second class hotels which cluster around the Hill, or attend excessively stodgy teas, the guest lists of which they phone at great length to society editors.

they liked Mrs. Gann more; they merely thought of her as one of their own kind.

What was not natural, however, was that Edward Everett Gann, socially unimportant brother-in-law of the Vice President, and Nicholas Longworth, standing at the peak of social supremacy, both should have aided, abetted, spurred and egged on their respective wives in a controversy which for a time rivaled a back-alley cat fight. Edward Everett Gann has been pictured as an "unassuming man" who practised law, never troubled his head about society and led a quiet, happy life until his strapping, titian-haired wife became the official hostess of her half-brother, the Vice President. Then his wife moved him from a vine-clad home in Cleveland Park to a tenroom suite at the Mayflower Hotel, and Mr. Gann's troubles began.

All this was undoubtedly true. But to assume that Mr. Gann objected to his wife's fight for her social rights is equivalent to assuming that Herbert Hoover objects to an adjournment of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of the control of t

Speaker Longworth, although more thick-skinned about the press, took the controversy just as seriously. He considered his wife's war his war, a war to uphold the dignity of the Speakership. Furthermore, it was a war on behalf of the American people. The Government of the United States, he pointed out, is vested in the people. The Constitution says so. The people

are represented by the House of Representatives. It is the body closest to the people. Over this body presides the Speaker. Therefore, the Speaker should go in to dinner ahead of every one except the President.

Longworth, however, overlooked one fact. He, as Speaker of the House of Representatives, was a tremendously powerful individual. He controlled legislation in the House. He was a busy man. He had other things to do than dine out.

Charlie Curtis, on the other hand, wields no more power as presiding officer of the Senate than that of annoying its members with his gavel, as a gnat annoys a horse. To the Vice President, therefore, is given the compensating distinction of being the Administration's chief diner-out.

Actually this is not much of a compensation. Most of the dinners he is called upon to attend are given by such distinguished dowagers as Mrs. Henry F. Dimock, who wears a plumed hat and rides about in a victoria; Mrs. Clarence Crittendon Calhoun, who claims the Earl of Mar as an ancestor and gives Scotch evenings at which she displays her Tennessee husband in kilts; Mrs. François Berger Moran, who claims to be a lineal descendant of George Washington and goes marketing in ermine; Mrs. Larz Anderson, enthusiastic joiner of all possible patriotic societies; plus other starchy affairs at which the Vice President has to sit beside the wives of the Second Assistant Postmaster General, the Commander of the Army Air Corps or the Chief of the Division of International Conferences

Smart hostesses do not fawn upon Charlie these days. His half-sister, although amiable, tries to hide her mid-western background but every so often reveals it with such abrupt indiscretions as: "Oh, Charley, come kiss me," accompanied by gestures with plump arms. Then, too, when one invites the Vice President to dinner these days it means inviting a small army, since Mr. Gann also must come along. A shadow seems to darken an otherwise scintillating party whenever the vice-presidential trio heaves into sight, and the result is that those

who crack the whip with greatest success look to livelier pastures for their dinner guests.

In the official field, grazing is not so good. Among the Cabinet members, Stimson, because he gets up at five-thirty and because of his wife's health, dines out only when diplomatic decency compels it. Secretary of Agriculture Hyde gives stiff and expansive parties at the Mayflower for which he imports potted palms from the Botanical Gardens, and the tall Secretary of the Interior, Ray Lyman Wilbur, although intellectual and witty, is more ill at ease in smoothing the rough edges off a dinner conversation than when facing a senatorial committee on the Federal Power Commission. Frequently, he does not know his guests' names and behind their backs asks whispered advice from other guests as to who they are.

Of the others, Charles Francis Adams, although as taciturn as his Northampton neighbor; Andrew W. Mellon, who loves Washington society so much he is willing to take orders from Hoover; and Attorney General Mitchell are booked well in advance. Patrick Jay Hurley, Hoover's very young, very handsome and very energetic Secretary of War, however, is the Beau Brummel of the Cabinet. Hurley studied in Washington, represented the Choctaw Indian Nation in Washington and before he had reached the age of forty-five had made about \$15,000,000, chiefly in Washington. Finally, he married tall, blonde and determined Ruth Wilson, daughter of a rear-admiral and from Washington. Hurley, therefore, despite the fact that he entered the Cabinet late, had a running start on the rest of his colleagues, as far as Washington society is concerned. In order to maintain his lead, he took a swank house next to Eugene Meyer's on Crescent Place, and every Wednesday his wife dutifully pours tea for itinerant Oklahomans and any others who may grace her drawing-room. The gathering is dull but politically necessary to Pat's vice-presidential ambitions.

It has been a long time since Oklahoma was honored by having a native son in the Cabinet and the State expects its

Ruth and Pat Hurley smiled benignly upon their neighbors and did not disclose the fact that when they first came to Washington they had been so in awe of high society that they had rehearsed their entrances and exits, their conversation and their bows, before every big party.

David Aiken Reed, especially since he built a palace in the neighborhood of Mr. Hoover's S Street home, put murals in his dining room and installed a telephone with a private number, has been in greater social demand than any of his senatorial colleagues.

Reed goes in for society as hard as he goes in for the Senate. He is indefatigable in regard to both. In the winter he dines out, in the spring he spends his Sundays yachting on the Potomac, in the summer he goes to Bar Harbor, and in the fall he shoots ducks. His wife, sweet-tempered and considerate, nurses her senatorial husband like the small boy he sometimes

Millard Tydings, brilliant bachelor, has been known to offend sedate Georgetown ladies by playing "footie" with them under the table, but among the younger set he remains the Senate's most dined-out member. He also holds the Senate's heart-throb record. He has caused more capital beauties to dream of hooking a senatorial husband than any member of that body in years. One of them even took a trip to Reno with that in mind. Probably the secret of this is the fact that Tydings gives them no encouragement. The thought of him, clad in purple dressing-gown, painting hunting scenes in his attic studio at midnight, is enough to bring out the sacrifice complex in any woman. What could be more useful than to help a lonely Senator mold his great career?

washout. The lights are turned out. There is a scream. The lights are turned on again. The prostrate figure of the murdered guest is found lying on the floor and the other guests are lined up for questioning. Then as the pièce de résistance of her evening, the hostess brings forth the leading attorney of Ohio and asks him to expose the guilty. He pokes a pudgy finger at each witness and inquires with mild mannered amiability: "Did you commit this crime?"

He has never yet found the criminal.

Piatt Andrew is the most sought-after member of the House. He is that body's most eligible and elusive bachelor. He has a mansion at Gloucester, Massachusetts, famous for a lounging room reached only by a ladder, which, to insure complete privacy, can be pulled in. His notoriety was increased when Ruth Bryan Owen, just arrived in Washington, was reputed to have thrown roses to him from the gallery of the House. The rumor that there was to be a Republican-Democratic alliance between the Representatives from Massachusetts and Florida has now been shattered.

Mrs. Owen, daughter of William Jennings Bryan, has been played up to Washington hostesses as the Congresswoman with sex appeal. Mrs. Owen is a grandmother. Before reaching the age of discretion, she eloped with a missionary named Leavitt, and later, exquisitely unhappy, was taken by her mother to Egypt where she met and married a British officer, Major Reginald Owen. Her oldest children grew up unaware that they bore the name of Leavitt. Mrs. Owen stays reasonably late at parties, is not a bad dancer and refuted the

charge of being the only British subject elected to Congress. Since her defeat for the United States Senate, the Widow McCormick has consoled herself with introducing a debutante daughter to high society and building a whoopee house in the garden of her Georgetown home, in which she dances with Congressman Simms, another lame-duck. Mrs. McCormick prefers to dine at home rather than at large, and gives intimate dinner parties, to which she invites a mixture of Senators, newspapermen and would-be intellectuals, serving them with tomato-juice cocktails and champagne cider. Chiefly because her late husband, Medill McCormick, was a famous wet, she is the strictest dry in Washington society.

Among the few exceptions are Admiral William V. Pratt, who is so original in his thinking that he is always about five laps ahead of the State Department and ten ahead of the Navy; General Douglas MacArthur, young, bald, and a great glad-hander, whose promotion to be Chief-of-Staff brought fleeting pangs of pain to the present Mrs. Lionel Atwill (the former Mrs. MacArthur); General Charles Laurie McCawley, charming and diminutive Marine Corps officer; and Colonel Louis McNulty Little, who, with his wife, the former Elsie Cobb Wilson, make one of the most delightful couples in Washington.

With them, although not strictly military, should be included Trubee Davison, and David Sinton Ingalls, Assistant Secretaries of War and the Navy for Aviation. Together with Lou Douglas, lone Congressman from the State of Arizona, they are seen at most of the smart dinner tables and even more frequently in each other's company.

Trubee Davison has started early to do what his late father, partner in the firm of J. P. Morgan, always wanted to do—use his wealth and ability in some public service. As a result, Trubee works at his "little cabinet" job as if it were the most important in the world and the Air Corps is devoted to him. His wife, once Dorothy Peabody, is the daughter of the head of Groton where Trubee went to school, and she has never been able quite to get accustomed to spending money after the manner of those born with silver spoons in their mouths. As a result she requisitions army trucks and soldiers to move her household goods and sends army airplanes from her Long Island home to bring silver she has forgotten to take with her from Washington. She smokes a pipe through preference rather than affectation and is an extremely efficient mother to four small children.

Trubee, sometimes inclined to be as precocious as his six-year-old, has developed the trick of getting himself out of a locked mail-bag, which he will demonstrate when sufficiently urged. Once when his neighbor, Mrs. Maud Torr, had gone off to the movies, leaving her husband, Secretary of the British Embassy, enthralled with the brilliant chit-chat and suppressed desires of Nancy Hoyt, Trubee decided to play the rôle of Protector of the Home. Getting Lou Douglas to drag him, locked inside his mail bag, into the Torr home, Trubee flounced all over the room, upset chairs, knocked down the fire screen trying to extract himself. Finally, red-faced and almost suffocated, Douglas had to extract him. The trick catch on the lock had slipped.

The social sterility of the official field causes the capital's most successful whip-crackers to do a great deal of shopping on the outside. Their constant problem is to find a combination of State Department, diplomatic, congressional, George

town and journalistic dinner guests who will put sufficient snap into the evening without precipitating any severe social ructions. Each hostess usually has her own dinner pets, with the result that people find themselves gravitating into groups whose members see increasingly more of one another, and, perhaps as a commentary on their breadth of vision, never seem to be bored.

There are, of course, groups within groups, cliques within cliques, and overlapping of cliques and groups, but probably the three most interesting and well-recognized of these self-gravitating sets are those who until Nick's death played for high stakes under the slap-dash inspiration of Laura Curtis and the Longworths; those who go in for political conversation at the prodding of Mrs. Borden Harriman and Mrs. Frank West; and those who go in for conservative drinking, conservative dancing and conservative love-making when sufficiently chaperoned by the younger Britishers, the Canadians and the H.B.V.'s.

Other ladies who move only in the highest circles have equally amicable arrangements worked out with their husbands, provided they still retain such appendages. Among these are Mrs. Truxton Beale, who, although devoted to her aging

Alice Dows and Marie Beale both moved with grace and dignity in the Laura Curtis-Nick Longworth set, and, along with Cornelia Mayo, were sometimes referred to as Nick's girls, although the first two never asked the Speaker's intervention to get them an invitation to a costume ball.

In the same set also move Mr. and Mrs. John Philip Hill, the former being Baltimore's most ardent wet and the man who, by fermenting grape juice in his cellar and daring the prohibition officials to prevent him, won back for the American people their biblical right to make wine out of water.

Ellen Warder Leonard, sister of Alice Garrett, American

The end came with their marital break. Together they were a power in Washington. Diplomats, the State Department, even the White House, feared them. Alone they are nothing—nothing more than divorce and alimony news blurted out on the front page of the McLean newspapers.

Daisy Harriman has a disposition so magnanimous that she has seldom been known to say an unkind word about any one except members of the reigning Republican Party. But there are two things Daisy loves almost as much as she does the Democratic Party. These are: to bait Tom Walsh and to give deliciously scrambled dinner parties at which the Republican Administration is dissected piece by piece and pronounced unfit ever again to regain the voters' confidence.

There was a day when Washington expected Daisy Harriman to marry Senator Walsh. There was also a day when Daisy herself thought rather seriously about it. At first it was his mustache which deterred her. It was of the long, weeping-willow variety so fashionable among prospectors who have long been away from both civilization and scissors in the Senator's home state. It used to strain the vegetables from the soup and gather globules of mayonnaise that glistened in the candle-light. Finally Daisy persuaded the Senator to trim it. There is a suspicion among her friends that she achieved this only on the promise that she would marry him and that, after achieving it, she went back on her word.

Walsh was decidedly difficult after this and it took Daisy several years of persuasion to score with him again. Her next goal was his great protruding eyebrows that jutted out from his forehead as sagebrush off a cliff. They gave his eyes a cadaverous effect, and when he hammered on the table and demanded the facts regarding Teapot Dome, it seemed to

Harry F. Sinclair that Walsh was looking at him from a long way off and peering right straight down into his harassed soul.

But Daisy didn't appreciate this, and eventually she took her own scissors and sheared the Senator, as Samson was shorn of yore.

Most of them will not admit they are intellectuals. They affect a sense of humor about life, but if they ever got frank with themselves they would confess to a considerable amount of intellectual egocentricism. And, as a matter of fact, they come closest to being the only intellectuals able to exist in the rarefied atmosphere of social Washington.

Social life among the younger set is never static in the capital. It ebbs and flows. Debutantes bud, blossom, marry

and move away, to come back years later when they are divorced, to settle down and eventually take over the place of some exalted society whip-cracker who has retired from the ring. In the same way, the fledglings of the State Department's white-spat corps are ordered to Callao, Singapore and Cape Town, to come back years later as always available last-minute dinner guests for distracted hostesses. In general, however, it is safe to assume that the perennial Leander Goodhart McCormick and his charming wife Janet will always be on hand, and that the really select members of the younger crowd will be dominated by the attachés of the British Embassy, the Canadian Legation and the H.B.V.'s, which used to be considered very shocking and very secret initials, but which now are blurted out across any dinner table as the "High Bosomed Virgins."

CHAPTER TWO

ROM the point of view of the Diplomatic Corps, Washington is the most unique capital in the world.

It is, for instance, the only capital where the Minister of Guatemala is more important to a foreign office than the Ambassador of Spain.

It is, for instance, the only capital where the Minister of Nicaragua is more important to a foreign office than the envoys from Finland, Latvia, Esthonia, Lithuania and Denmark, all put together.

It is for instance, the only capital where the Minister of Panama may sit absolutely quiet in Washington and receive a telegram from his Supreme Court asking him to assume the Presidency of his country.

The secret of this, of course, is the United States' Economic Empire to the south. The total number of American dollars invested in the banana and coffee plantations of infinitesimal Guatemala just about equal those invested in the mines and street railways of much vaster and more populated Spain. And, in addition, Guatemala is much nearer the Panama Canal. Spain may suffer a revolution and it will not even occur to the State Department to send cruisers and marines. But if revolution breaks out in Guatemala, not only does the State Department immediately suffer a gunboat complex, but it

also notifies the revolutionary leader that he cannot become President.

There are five other Central American countries, plus three in the Caribbean, plus twelve on the South American continent and Mexico, whose envoys get flowers, fruit and polite messages every time their President has a birthday, they leave on a vacation, or their wives give birth to twins.

All this, of course, is a mere matter of business routine. After the State Department closes its doors at four-thirty, its socially minded young men, with the exception of Francis White, who cannot help himself, are to be found, not in the homes of Latin-American envoys, whom they fête by day, but cocktailing and dining among those diplomats who seldom have to concern themselves with affairs of state but are skilled in saying the right word at the right time.

Washington's Diplomatic Corps, therefore, might be divided into two parts:

Or to paraphrase, the Corps might be divided into those who dine out and those who work.

This, however, would not be strictly accurate. There would have to be noted such distinguished exceptions as:

The British Ambassador, Sir Ronald Lindsay, who is invited out both because he is charming and because he represents His Majesty's far-flung Empire, and yet, despite all that, manages, in a dull, British sort of way, to turn out a reasonable amount of work.

The Cuban Ambassador, Orestes Ferrara, who is invited out because of his wit rather than the importance of his country, but who none the less works early in the morning and late into the night.

The Bolivian Minister, Diez de Medina, whom scarcely any one invites out, and who, having no work to do, manages to get involved in all kinds of remarkable and compromising situations.

For purposes of strict accuracy, therefore, it is necessary to divide the Diplomatic Corps into four groups, which, except

when they attend the Secretary of State's breakfast on New Year's Day or the Diplomatic Reception at the White House, have about as much in common as Dolly Gann and Alice Longworth. They are:

The Latin Americans, whose leading Ambassadors rate just as high officially but not socially as the Big Five of Europe.

The Asiatics, who keep very much to themselves.

The Balkan, Near East and the Border States, beneath whose appearance of boredom run some of the most bizarre lives in Washington.

*

Nor would Sir Ronald Lindsay ever make the mistake of leaving Washington for the North Shore, as did Sir Esme in 1927, just on the eve of a naval conference which, due partially to his absence, was to make Anglo-American history by marring Anglo-American friendship. Lindsay has made only one break so far and that was a very minor and rather amusing one which occurred when he met Drew Pearson, of the Baltimore Sun, in the halls of the State Department, and, thinking he was an assistant of Secretary Stimson's, told him about the very confidential steps Great Britain and the United States were taking to bring France and Italy into the London Naval Conference. Pearson never published the news until some days later, when he received permission from both Ambassador Lindsay and the State Department, but for the moment, Sir Ronald was as embarrassed as a third secretary who has spilled ice cream down the neck of his Ambassadress.

Lady Lindsay is a nervous and irritable lady who spent one of the hottest summers Washington has ever known moving furniture to the new British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue and telling curious people who insisted on getting early glimpses of the establishment to "please do not track up the rugs" or "please don't move those chairs," with the result that by midsummer she had to be taken to Long Island in an ambulance.

The British Embassy, until a Socialist Government came into power, used to be the social arbiter of Washington, and a bid to dine there was more coveted by some than an invitation to the White House. Those days are now about as antiquated as the White House cocktail parties of the Harding administration, due not only to the advent of the Labor Party but also to the departure of Sir Adrian Bailey and Henry Hopkinson, who, having no great talents in any other direction, concentrated upon dinners and debutantes. The British Embassy for the most part is now a cold and silent tomb perched upon the hill, to be lighted up only for such formal and stodgy occasions as diplomacy requires.

The other leaders of the Smart Set within the Diplomatic Corps include von Prittwitz of Germany, de Martino of Italy, Claudel of France, and, until the hurried exit of Alfonso, Padilla of Spain. Next to Claudel, the most celebrated of these is the small and wiry little personage who bears the name Nobile Giacomo de Martino, Ambassador of the Royal Italian Government.

The type of celebrity Martino has achieved is vastly different from Claudel's. It verges on notoriety. He won it, first, through the Fascist League of North America and its persecution of Italians in the United States; second, through Major General Smedley D. Butler, U.S.M.C.

Like many men of small stature, Martino makes up for his height by his pugnacious persistence. Long before General Butler put him on the map with the general public, Martino had come to have the same relation to State Department officials as a mosquito to a malarial patient.

He called at the Department on every possible occasion and pretext. If he could find no pretext, he called to chat about the weather. It is no exaggeration to say that he called and still calls more frequently than all the other members of the Diplomatic Corps put together. He subscribes to a most comprehensive clipping service and whenever he finds that an editor, even in Sioux City or Okmulgee, is maligning his

Fascist chief, Martino trots down to the State Department to complain. The fact that the State Department's reply is always the same—"The United States has no censorship as you do in Italy"—does not deter Martino a bit. He always comes back for more.

The State Department, therefore, did not show one glimmer of surprise when Martino turned up one morning with a clipping from the Philadelphia Record reporting that the most distinguished officer in the Marine Corps had branded the Dictator of Italy as a hit-and-run driver. The Record happens to have the smallest circulation of any Philadelphia newspaper. If Martino had not brought the clipping down to the State Department, probably no more than a mere handful of people would have noticed Butler's accusation. After he called, several million became firmly convinced that Mussolini did run over a child and did exclaim: "What is one life in the affairs of

But for Martino that clipping was a great opportunity. At last he had the State Department where he wanted it. No longer could Bill Castle turn him off with the reminder that there was no censorship in the United States. This was a commissioned officer in the service of the United States who had spoken. It was not only a great opportunity, but it was heaven-sent. The Fascist Consul in New York had been dimming Martino's luster. He had been getting credit in Rome for being the real Ambassador to the United States. Martino needed some such incident as this, and, sparing no cable costs, he promptly wired his Fascist Chief all the details.

No one, therefore, was more pleased with himself than the persistent little Ambassador when he came to the State Department to receive Secretary Stimson's note of "deep regret." He fell all over himself in his haste to get to the cable office and put the results of his victory on the wires to Rome.

His smug self-satisfaction lasted but two days. The court martial ordered by the Navy Department proved a boomerang. It hit back at Mussolini with a thousand times the force

*

And when the Ambassador went away on vacation—which he did regularly and at some length, Amiable Otto was in his element. He raked up armfuls of distinguished German visitors to present at the White House. He sent lengthy cables to the Foreign Office, reporting in detail what President Hoover told each visitor. And he sent even lengthier cables reporting

Or so he thought.

His father-in-law was one of Prussia's prosperous barons of big business. His brother had designed the German grey-hounds, Bremen and Europa. He himself had been offered a \$60,000 job with a German-American business house. Nothing, apparently, could block the onward march of his ambition.

But something did. Either Von Prittwitz was more powerful than any one dreamed, or else Kiep's cable bills were higher than the Foreign Office could stomach. At any rate, he was demoted to be Consul General in New York, where he pretends to be highly pleased with an East Side pent house, submits reports which have to be approved by his arch-enemy, the Ambassador, and takes frequent and wistful trips to see his old friends in Washington.

Whether he is responsible for it or not, Von Prittwitz heads

the most efficient Embassy in Washington. No article unfavorable to Germany is written without the Embassy spotting it and approaching the author, if he is approachable, with a dinner or luncheon invitation. Rudolf Leitner, an Austrian, is unquestionably the brains of the Embassy, being ably supported by Emil Baer and Johann Lohmann. The staff is one of the hardest working and least social in the capital.

Probably the opposite is true of the Spanish Embassy, which, as before noted, is about as important to the State Department as the Guatemalan Legation, but which maintains eight full-fledged secretaries and attachés, as against Guatemala's two. The answer is that Spanish prestige requires an Embassy and, therefore, also, the military attachés, naval attachés and all the social personnel and paraphernalia that go with it.

Despite all its trappings, the Spanish Embassy is pleasantly and naturally social, and probably will continue to be just as much so under a republic as under a monarchy. Ambassador Padilla had little to do except look over his Madrid cable every morning, twirl his black mustache and announce excitedly: "Spain is quiet." Once in a long while he went down to the State Department to denounce the Treasury Department's restrictions against Spanish cork or to complain bitterly to Bill Castle that Spain should have been a charter member of the Kellogg-Briand Outlawry of War Society. Two or three times each winter he sallied forth to the Metropolis for an opening of the New York opera.

His one really great accomplishment was in forcing the State Department, after one hundred and ten years of obstinacy, to promise damages for Andrew Jackson's raid into West Florida in 1814, when Florida was then sovereign Spanish territory.

But on such rare occasions as Senor Don Alejandro was thus occupied, the social life of the Embassy ran smoothly and charmingly under the guidance of his son and two daughters, of whom Rosa, the eldest, was one of the most attractive girls in Washington. They gave dull and formal dinner parties in

the winter and made up for it in the summer by doing the devil's dip at Glen Echo or staging midnight parties around the fountain that cools the Embassy patio. After all—Spanish temperament is very warm—and it has been a long time since the war of 1898.

*

THERE are numerous diplomats who wedge their way into the Smart Set, not through the weight and prestige of the governments they serve but through: one, the power of their money: two, the charm of their personalities: or three, the at traction of their reputations. Representative of these three categories in their respective order are Count Szechenyi of Hungary, Michael MacWhite of the Irish Free State, and Davila of Rumania.

Szechenyi is the leader of a little group of diplomats, who, headed by the Red-baiting Bill Castle, have taken a solemn vow to wage unceasing international guerilla warfare against radicals. Szechenyi it was who prompted the State Department to bar for so many years the harmless Count Karolyi who later won the pity of lecture-loving old ladies when Secretary Stimson finally admitted him to the United States. And Szechenyi it was again who, when fourteen Jewish working girls came over from Baltimore to parade in front of his legation, jumped into his high-powered roadster and disappeared down Sixteenth Street.

Michael MacWhite has no mission in the United States

As a representative of the Irish Free State at the League of Nations for many years, MacWhite always refused to use English. Whenever he addressed the League Assembly, as he frequently did, he used French, because, as he explained it, "I can't speak my own language, and I'll be damned if I'll speak English."

Such a man performs exactly the duties the Free State Government and Irish-American Societies want an Irish Minister to perform, and as a result he is constantly on tour.

Charles A. Davila is socially there. As to how he got there, there are various stories. Some attribute his arrival to the contrast of his brown shoulders with his snow white bathing suit as he lounges in the sand at Bailey's Beach. Some say it is the same charm which won for him a betrothal with Belle Baruch, daughter of Bernard Baruch, or again the charm which beguiled the New York chorus lady who later cost him such embarrassing litigation.

Davila happened to come to Washington because as a member of a Rumanian financial mission in Paris, he wood and won—temporarily, at least—Miss Belle Baruch, whose father was one of the monied mainstays of the Wilson Administration. Miss Baruch was not satisfied with the prospect of marrying a mere financial attaché. She was interested in bigger game, and, so the story goes, promised to wed the young Rumanian if he bagged a major diplomatic post. Davila promptly telegraphed Bucharest, reporting that he was engaged to the daughter of the influential Mr. Baruch and suggested that in view of the American prestige, which would undoubtedly accrue through this alliance, the legation in Washington should be his. Either the telegram was garbled or else the Foreign Office did not know its United States Senate, for Bucharest decided that any one who married the daughter of the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee certainly should be sent to Washington. Later, Cretziano, who objected to being ousted from his comfortable post by such a youngster, had the pleasure of writing to the Foreign Office somewhat as follows:

"I beg to inform you that Senator Borah, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, has no children. It seems incredible, therefore, that the newly appointed Minister is to be married to his daughter."

It happened this way: Davila suggested to a lady with a willing disposition that she go out and buy herself a trinket—a ring, perhaps—anything reasonable. The lady went out, but on the way consulted a male friend who was experienced in these matters, and received the suggestion that she borrow from him a ring belonging to another woman to whom he had advanced \$500. The lady with the willing disposition was then to collect from Davila to the tune of \$1,000 and bring the ring back. All went well except for one hitch. The lady

*

THE line of demarcation between the Smart Set which dines out and the Latin Americans who work at home is not a straight one. It wavers in the cases of Ambassador Tellez of Mexico, Davila of Chile, Ferrara of Cuba and Amoral of Brazil. The first three are men of exceptional ability, considerable charm, and represent countries whose good will is supremely important to the Latin-American policy of the United States. Ambassador Gurgel do Amoral differed from them only in that his duties never sat very heavily upon his shoulders. He would rather feed his cats than read dispatches from Rio. In fact, he would almost rather feed his cats than make love, which any one who knows Amoral's past may consider an extreme statement.

The Ambassador is a colorful, soulful figure who moved with starched precision across Washington's official stage. He is charmingly, even naïvely, of the vieille noblesse. He bows exquisitely from the waist. His pet abominations are motorcycles and flies. In these, his maturer years, his chief love is cats.

Amoral's affection for cats began as a small child. His father preferred dogs. His mother favored cats. Gurgel, torn between two desires, finally decided that cats needed protection from their enemies. His mother's pet cat, Nyssah, was torn to death by two dogs when she lost her balance and fell from the wall of the Amoral home in Rio. Another pet Bilontra, was instantly killed by a Great Dane. Saddened by their fate, young Amoral determined to be the champion and protector of all persecuted pussies in the future. He has kept his word. In Hyde Park, London, two of the Ambassador's cats rest under marble slabs. In Berlin a granite shaft adorned with a medallion in bronze commemorates a cat named Menina. When, in reward for Amoral's too great loyalty to the late Government of Brazil, the revolutionists demoted him to Tokyo, Flit, his pet pussy, went with him.

Only two rules govern Amoral's feline existence: no cat shall eat mice, and no cat has more than one life.

*

During that hectic period prior to 1923, when Charles Evans Hughes and Charles Beecher Warren were trying to jockey Mexico out of the victories won by her revolution in return for American recognition, there sat in the Mexican Embassy in Washington a black-haired, black-eyed youngster named Manuel C. Tellez, who, as far as Mexico was concerned, ran this end of the show.

Finally, after Hughes backed down, and—without a settlement of the petroleum or agrarian controversy—recognized Mexico, this youngster was selected to stay on in the Embassy at Washington as Ambassador. That selection nearly provoked a social revolution in Mexico City. The Washington post was looked upon as a prize political plum. A dozen or more politicians, some of them powerful, were clamoring for it as just reward for their aid to Plutarco Calles and the Revolution. But Calles wanted a man who knew how to handle the State Department and, despite the youth of the nominee, despite the clamor in Mexico City, Calles stuck to his original decision.

44 WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND

Two years passed—two years of bitter controversy. The irate and irascible Frank B. Kellogg had written note after note—all private—to his Ambassador in Mexico City, James R. Sheffield. They were filled with invective. Sheffield answered back in kind. Suddenly the notes fell into the hands of the Mexican Government. Tellez brought them down to the State Department and politely handed them back to Mr. Kellogg. The latter raged. His face was crimson. He claimed the notes were forgeries. Tellez knew they were not. Privately, Kellogg suspected Tellez of stealing them. He ordered every scrap of waste paper burned before it left the State Department. He ordered an investigation of his clerks, his diplomatic couriers, his translators. Tellez was one of the most suspected men in Washington. Members of the State Department scarcely would speak to him. Kellogg handed him a note, announcing that Mexico was on trial before the world. But he stayed on.

To-day, Ambassador Tellez—Dean of the Diplomatic Corps—still a young man—stands at the head of the line when the diplomats greet the President on New Year's morning. He is the first to enter the dining-room at almost every official dinner. He outranks the Senate, the Cabinet, the Secretary of State, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

*

of the Latin-American type, which means an AA rating for phlegmatic inertia. Career diplomats of any nationality are bad enough, but the Latin-American variety mixes all the laziness of the professional dilettante with none of the social charm of his European colleague.

Malbran is now on his second tour of duty in Washington. The first tour ended in a way that few people know about and Malbran hates to recall. His pay was cut off by President Irigoyen; no diplomatic dispatches were routed to him by the Argentine Foreign Office; and he was left high and dry in Washington, not knowing whether he was Ambassador or totem pole.

An Ambassador does not object, usually, to being transferred, and sometimes, provided he can rise up in his wrath and get a lot of publicity for himself by a war of words with his home government, he does not even object to resigning. But to be totally ignored, to have the State Department take pity on your ignorance by sending you copies of the correspondence received direct from Buenos Aires, to have all your colleagues smile knowingly behind your back—that is the worst fate that can ever befall a diplomat. And that was the fate that befell Malbran. Loyal career man that he is, however, he has now swallowed his pride and is back in Washington working once more for the glory of his country and \$25,000 a year.

Among the other Latin-American diplomats the most outstanding are the suave and urbane Don Manuel de Freyre y Santander, Ambassador of Peru, who needs only a monocle to make him the most complete Englishman in the United States, and who, although very new to Washington, is rapidly becoming one of the social satellites of the Corps; the ashenfaced Diez de Medina, of Bolivia, described by one of his colleagues as having the rank of Minister, the brains of a third secretary and the habits of a military attaché; and the tall and gawky Juan B. Sacasa, Minister of Nicaragua.

Sacasa had one of the greatest triumphs of his life when

he walked into the White House to present his credential as Minister to the United States. Three years before that triumphal entry, Sacasa, then Vice President of Nicaragua, had cooled his heels in the ante-room and corridors of the State Department for months trying to persuade its officials that he, rather than Chamorro, the revolutionist, should be recognized as President of Nicaragua. He failed to get anything more than sympathy, and returned to Nicaragua. En route he stopped in Mexico and, having become friendly in Washington with Ambassador Tellez, he got from President Calles more concrete encouragement—arms and ammunition. The rest of the story was blazoned black and bold in the headlines of the newspapers of that day—how Frank B. Kellogg sent fifteen warships and five thousand marines to quell Sacasa's forces, and how Henry L. Stimson finally went as peacemaker, pledging supervision of the election by which Sacasa's Liberals won a sweeping electoral victory, Jose Moncada becoming President, and Sacasa, Minister to Washington.

The Latin-American members of the Diplomatic Corps for the most part are able men and work hard. They have to Next to the President and one or two Cabinet officers, they hold the most important post in their government. They represent their nation of one or two or perhaps ten million people at the capital of the mightiest nation in the world, a nation which controls most of the world's gold, a nation whose tariff may overnight ruin their export trade, a nation whose State Department may cause revolution by the mere refusal of a loan, a nation which has proclaimed a Monroe Doctrine by which it sets itself up as the protector of all the Western Hemisphere, a nation which, in short, holds all but the three largest governments of Latin America literally in the palm of its hand.

No wonder then that Washington's Latin-American Diplomatic Corps works hard. No wonder, also, that when they seek recreation they herd together, rarely mingling with their European colleagues or the State Department's social satellites. A powerful enemy develops the herd instinct.

*

From a social, political and economic point of view, most of the diplomats representing the Asiatic, Balkan, and so-called Border States might just as well pack their rugs in moth balls, discharge their cooks, and cut down their national budgets by the cost of one Washington Legation per year. Except for the telephone girls in the Hotel Mayflower, almost nobody in the United States, not even the State Department, knows that there is an Albanian Minister in Washington. The same is true of the Latvian, the Lithuanian and the Finn, except that they lack even a following of telephone girls, unless they have been more subversive about it than most people guess. The same would also be true of the Siamese, were it not for the fact that a maladroit policeman seized a truckload of Siamese liquor about two years ago and kept the poor little Minister, Major General Prince Amoradat Kridakara, on the front pages so long that he scarcely had time to recover before the arrival of his King for eye treatment subjected him to a fresh deluge of publicity.

Dr. C. C. Wu,* Debuchi's colleague from the Asiatic mainland, is much more in the limelight. This is both because the limelight brightens his soul as sunlight builds bonny babies and because he is more at home in Washington than in Shanghai, Peking or Canton.

Ahmet Muhtar, Ambassador of Turkey, has been a great disappointment to the pious wives of all Congressmen who wanted to meet a man with a harem. Not only does he lack the four wives prescribed by Mohammed for all good Moslems, but he has no wife at all. Furthermore, he is a washout as a table companion as far as most congressional wives are concerned, for he talks about as much English as they do French.

^* Dr. Wu has now resigned in protest against American shipments of munitions to the Chinese Government to be used against his fellow citizens in Canton

The Information Bureau of the Soviet Union has no diplomatic rating, but it is called, by those who know anything about it, the Soviet Embassy. Boris E. Skvirsky, its chief, is an employee of the Soviet Foreign Office and draws his salary from it just as does any Soviet Ambassador to any other part of the world. He came to Washington ten years ago as the representative of the Far Eastern Republic of Siberia, in an effort to put Soviet Siberia's claims before the Washington Conference. Although he failed in that, he has been here ever since, and this fact alone, taking into consideration the Red Menace investigation of Ham Fish and the anti-Russian complex of the State Department, is sufficient indication of his success.

Probably because they have nothing else to do, the envoys of the Balkan and Border States—those who are neither in nor out of high society—lead the most bizarre lives in Washington. The Persian and the Albanian, although ostensibly with little in common except Charley Hart who has been American Minister to both countries, have the reputation of staging parties equalled only along Broadway or the Bosporus. Bey, the old Egyptian Minister, is still being mourned by the capital's greatest guzzlers. Charalambos Simopoules, the Greek, and his wife, play for the highest stakes in town and are fully able, if they wish—and some of their friends ruefully contend that they do wish—to make enough each week to pay the upkeep of their legation.

Faik Konitza, the Albanian, and Mirza Davoud Khan

Young Firouz wrote to the United States Customs officials stating that the Minister was taking advantage of his diplomatic immunity to smuggle opium into the United States. He even informed the customs authorities that a consignment of the drug was arriving at such and such a date. Then, according to Mirza, young Firouz had his friends in Persia send a package of opium to the Minister. The package arrived, was seized by the customs, and Mirza was confronted with the evidence. He pleaded a frame up and was recalled, together with Firouz. And so passed from the diplomatic stage one of those benign and soulful figures which Washington always associated with pickled onions and rouge inscriptions on the starched bosoms of sleeping plenipotentiaries.

CHAPTER THREE

THE PRESIDENT

Mo man ever came to the Presidency with a greater opportunity for constructive and courageous administration than Herbert Hoover.

The national temper, the economic and political situation were over-ripe for a vigorous and positive leadership. The country was ready, as it had rarely been, for a man of principle, purpose, and will.

Liberal leaders had acclaimed him. Far and wide he was hailed as an executive and a doer. He was not a professional politician. He did not come from a class that produced politicians. He was an engineer who apparently had done well at his work.

His public service was heroic. The whole world had applauded his great humanitarian exploits. He had fed starving millions, succored whole nations. He had taken a small, little-known department, and made it the most potent and widely advertised agency of the government.

About his various food administrations there was also much that was highly debatable. Farmers accused him of having deliberately favored grain operators as against their interests. Even Old Guard Republican leaders, such as Representative William R. Wood, of Indiana, Chairman of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, had risen on the floors of Congress and bitterly assailed his management.

In Europe it was related of his food administration that he and his subordinates had used vital food resources, given by a generous people to feed starving women and children, as a weapon to crush the uprisings of oppressed masses throwing off the yokes of the masters who had precipitated the catastrophic World War.

There was the fact also that while making the Department of Commerce a mighty instrument of trade and business he had sat silent and unperturbed among Cabinet colleagues whose gross crimes and corruptions are unparalleled in the history of the country.

But all this was brushed aside in the trusting belief that he was a man of action, of broad vision, of force of character and mind. Not even a Presidential campaign, significant only in its grim evasion and covert bigotry, could dissipate the profound confidence in his inherent integrity and ability.

The American people believed in Herbert Hoover, the hero. They believed in him as the Great Engineer, the Great Administrator, the Great Humanitarian, the Great Idealist. They believed in him so earnestly that he was able to do the impossible in Presidential history: come back after having been discarded by the politicians.

The people elected him President by the greatest majority in a national election. They installed him in the White House, cast in a lofty rôle. They were ready to follow him in a courageous, independent, enlightened administration. He had but to lead the way.

He began his term with a Congress overwhelmingly Republican in both branches. Twenty months later a disillusioned and bitter electorate swept these majorities away and placed the control of the national legislature in the hands of his opponents.

He took over the reins of a party flushed with victory and high in morale. To-day, it is furtive, besmirched, and disorganized, filling the Nation with the stench of its Claudius Hustons and Robert V. Lucases, whom he himself installed as the managers of its affairs.

A year later millions were walking the streets out of work. Thousands of factories have been shut down. Thousands of concerns and businesses have gone into bankruptcy, and hundreds of banks have crashed and failed. Agricultural prices have sunk to the lowest levels in thirty years. Exports have fallen off hundreds of millions of dollars and throughout the

length and breadth of the land there is want, hunger, despair, and tragedy.

When disaster overwhelmed millions of his own countrymen in the city and on the farm, he suddenly developed austere scruples. To feed the hungry by funds from the Federal Treasury was undesirable "charity" and a "dole." To do so by pitiful breadlines, by private and inadequate local charity, was not.

Violently and frantically he set his face against a Federal grant. While millions starved he talked of "self-reliance." And when finally he was compelled to give way and permit some relief, at least to drought-stricken farmers, he adamantly refused to allow the use of the word "food" and insisted upon "security" for the pittances reluctantly loaned them by the richest country in the world.

His whole record throughout the great national disaster is

*

Such irreconcilable Hoovercrats as Senator Simeon D. Fess, fawning chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Will Irwin, his old classmate at Leland Stanford University, attributed his collapse to bad breaks, the drought, the stock crash, politics. But to the country at large the mystery of why a man apparently so preëminently qualified and so successfully advertised as the executive of executives should have so completely missed fire remained unsolved.

The answer is fourfold. The Hoover myth, the picture of the great engineer, qualified beyond all others to lead the Nation, was built up by one of the most skilful propaganda machines in the history of American politics.

Third, when the fact dawned on him that the United States was a Democracy and he tried to play politics, he surrounded himself with politicians of the lowest order and who have made his Administration famous for its political ineptitude.

Lastly, and perhaps the most important answer to Herbert Hoover's failure is the fact that deeply ingrained in his make-up are two unfortunate characteristics, fear and vacillation, which, coupled with a petty personal temper, sorely try even his most loyal friends.

That Herbert Hoover was beset by this petty temper was not disclosed to any except those who knew him intimately until after he received the Republican nomination for President. Then with the spotlight of public curiosity focused upon him as never before, his fatal weaknesses of character began to come to light publicly.

Under these circumstances it is inevitable that sooner or later every fault and blemish, every whim and eccentricity of a man's life will be uncovered, particularly if he has such vital inadequacies as Herbert Hoover had to hide.

Mrs. Hoover was self-appointed master of ceremonies. After all, it was her home and if it was going to be photographed, she wanted it done right. She ordered photographers over here, there and everywhere. She wanted chairs placed this way and benches that. Nothing seemed to please her. The photographers

Finally, despite his audience, Mr. Hoover turned to his wife. "You'd better run in the house now," he grumbled. "That will be all."

Mrs. Hoover looked a little startled. Then remembering how many people there were present, she smiled.

"All right," she replied cheerfully, and obeyed.

"I don't see how any intelligent person, especially a member of the Stanford faculty, could so misunderstand the issues of the campaign," he exclaimed indignantly, a dark scowl passing over his face.

A somewhat similar incident occurred when Mr. Hoover returned to his S Street home in Washington. One of his neighbors on S Street is Frederick A. Delano, prominent architect and once head of the opium commission to Persia. Mr. and Mrs. Delano are old friends of the Hoovers, and, after the latter's return to Washington, they called to pay their respects.

Tea was served. The conversation was vivacious. All went well until Fred Delano remarked:

"I must be quite frank with you, Mr. President. I voted for Al Smith. But now that you're elected, I'm extremely glad and I want to congratulate you."

Since entering the White House, Mr. Hoover has repeatedly revealed streaks of temper and pettiness.

One of his favorite pets was a massive police dog named "King Tut." The dog had the freedom of the White House grounds and frequently ran and walked with the President when the latter went back and forth between the residence and the executive offices.

One day the President on his way to lunch observed King Tut playing with one of the White House Guards. The President whistled. The dog looked up but did not come. Mr. Hoover whistled again. Still the dog remained with the guard. Mr. Hoover turned on his heel and went on.

The article also called attention to the fact that Herbert Hoover, Jr. was employed with this firm.

At his next press conference, the President completely lost control of himself and denounced the article with a passion which few who know him have ever seen him display.

All these and many similar incidents, showing a streak of pettiness seldom before witnessed in the White House, contributed to the dissolution of the Hoover myth.

Every possible trick, every new device, known or capable of being invented by skilled publicity agents, had been invoked to make Hoover the Superman, the Great Executive, and a reputation thus made was all the more easily washed away.

from an incident which occurred in his office at the Department of Commerce. Mr. Hoover had been notified a few hours before that the Kansas City convention had nominated him for the Presidency and the photographers flocked in for a picture.

Mr. Hoover sat at his mahogany desk. No papers cluttered its shining surface. No mail remained to be answered. There was a silver inkwell, a row of push buttons. That was all. The stage was set for the filming of a picture of the Great Executive.

The cameramen took their first snap from a moderate distance, then picked up their tripods and swooped down for a close-up. The new nominee threw his hands in front of his face and fled from the room.

No close-ups for him! He knew his publicity game. He knew that in close-ups his face looked weak and flabby. It was not the face of the Great Executive, the Strong Man.

He started out with his memorable announcement that the Presidential yacht, the Mayflower, would be scrapped. He explained that he took this step because the ship was too expensive and also because the men who manned her were needed in the service. Immediately after, he took not only the eighty marines who served on the Mayflower—and who were needed in the service—but twice that number to build his Rapidan

fishing camp, and later had a company of army engineers from Fort Humphreys sent in to build roads for the place.

By this time, however, the press in general and Congress in particular had become suspicious of his high-sounding words and had begun to inquire for themselves just what the facts were. In the case of the alleged suspended cruisers, reporters for the New York Evening Post and the New York Sun discovered that no orders had gone out to the Navy Department to stop work on them, but, on the contrary, all preparation for the construction of the vessels was going forward as per schedule.

His statements summing up the work of the London Naval Conference, in which he undertook to make the upward limitation agreement appear as a momentous reduction achievement, aroused widespread protest. He undertook to set up the wholly false comparison of the extreme big-navy figures of the unsuccessful Geneva Naval Conference, held three years previous, with the lesser tonnage of the London Treaty.

long committee hearings and the Senate debate on the pact. At the beginning of the last session of the Seventy-first Congress, the President announced that the Treasury deficit would be about \$185,000,000. A week later, when the Budget was published, it disclosed that actually the deficit was estimated as likely to be more than \$500,000,000.

The time between the President's announcement and publication of the official estimate was so short that one of two conclusions was unavoidable: either Mr. Hoover was woefully ignorant of the fiscal affairs of the Government or was playing politics with figures.

Members of President Wilson's White House staff relate that during the War any unfriendly remark made in Congress about Mr. Hoover was sure to mean a visit from him. He would complain bitterly to Mr. Wilson and frequently threatened to resign unless protected from such congressional outbursts.

During the Coolidge Administration, when Henry C. Wallace was Secretary of Agriculture, Mr. Hoover once complained

to Coolidge that Wallace's farm journal was attacking him. Coolidge, however, looked bored. He told his Secretary of Commerce about his own discovery—that it was much more comfortable not to read "things that are agin' you."

How Mr. Hoover came to build his political reputation on the shifting and uncertain sands of a propaganda machine is easy to understand. He had been doing this all his life.

The secret of his success as an engineer was promotion. Actually his work was not engineering. At the height of his business career he was receiving \$5,000 a year as "mining expert," and \$95,000 a year as a "financial expert."

When he retired from "engineering" he did so to become the organizer of his own concession-holding ventures in foreign lands. From an office in London he promoted a long list of mining enterprises, listed by the British Mining Manual of 1912 as the Burma Mines, Ltd., Inter-Argentina Syndicate, Ltd., Inter-Russian Syndicate, Ltd., Russo-Asiatic Corporation, Ltd., Yuanmi Gold Mines, Ltd., Babilonia Gold Mines, Ltd.

It was as a thirteen-year-old youngster in Oregon that Herbert Hoover first learned to become a promoter. He was associated with his uncle in jobbing off now relatively worthless real estate in Salem, Oregon, during one of those "California-Florida" land booms which are always promising an Eldorado to the American people. His uncle's company was out to sell land. It found it was losing sales to rival companies. Young Herbert conceived the idea of meeting newcomers at the station, settling them in private boarding houses, thus giving his uncle's salesmen an opportunity to talk to them without competition.

With the commission young Herbert got from renting the rooms, he helped finance himself through college. From that time on, he never ceased promoting.

*

It is not difficult to understand why Herbert Hoover has played politics ineptly, why he does not get along with people, and why he has surrounded himself with yes-men.

It was in these circumstances that Herbert Hoover developed the habits of autocracy which have so handicapped him in the White House. Because he had the power to command, he never developed the power to lead. His word was law. Once, expounding his views on labor troubles to a friend, he told how he had always found that chaining a Chinese coolie to a stake for a day in the hot sun was conducive to good discipline and a minimum of strikes.

How ruthless was Herbert Hoover's business conduct in China has been told in the High Court of Justice, Chancery Division, London, in the suit brought against his firm in 1905 by Chang Yen Mao, Director-General of mines for the Chinese Government. Chang accused Hoover and his associates of euchring him out of some valuable mining property, and Mr. Justice Joyce in rendering the decision against Hoover and his company said:

"Incidentally it appears by a letter of Mr. Hoover that he actually took possession of some title deeds of the property by main force. Under the circumstances, I am of opinion that to

WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND

And in conclusion, the Judge added these significant words:

A man cannot spend some twenty years of his life experiencing this unnatural relation toward his fellow-men without becoming permanently influenced by it, without becoming dictatorial, autocratic and a perpetual dependent upon the right of "hire and fire."

When thrown in contact with equals, with men whom he could not discharge, he has failed abysmally. This factor is perhaps the greatest reason for the political turmoil which has attended every month of his administration.

Finding that he could not "fire" a Senator or a Representative, the President has alternated between abject surrender and weak, stupid bluffing, in which he has never yet been successful.

latter's attempt to take control of New York State patronage and ribaldly reassured his colleagues.

During the Arkansas food-relief controversy in the closing days of the Seventy-first Congress, Republican leaders refused to assume the responsibility of assuring the Democrats that the proceeds of the compromise \$20,000,000 appropriation would be used for "human" relief as well as "animal" relief. Senator McNary, who had been double-crossed by the White House on the same issue at the beginning of the session, bluntly sent word to the President that he was through pledging his word for him and that if the President had any promises to make the would have to make them himself.

It was also during the course of the two months' struggle over the food-relief issue that there occurred the astounding spectacle of the President issuing a statement defending his policy and attacking the opposition, and when they turned on him and lashed him mercilessly, for a week straight, not one responsible Republican leader in the entire country rose to say a word in his behalf.

He has been cowed by petty state and local politicians into making appointments he was against. In Pennsylvania they bullied him into naming Albert L. Watson and, in Kansas, Richard J. Hopkins to Federal judgeships, despite the fact that his Attorney General pronounced both unfit for the Federal bench.

The Old Guard high-tariff gang cowed him into signing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act which in a thousand ways violated every view he had ever held on the tariff and which

So abject and tortuous has been the President's course, that even such slavish Republican newspapers as the Chicago Tribune, the New York Evening Post and the New York Herald Tribune have denounced and berated him with bitter indignation.

Instead of merit, ability and character, political expediency alone has counted with him. His record in judicial appointments is unsurpassed for mediocrity and partisanship. As Minister to Canada, he sent a blatant super-patriot known among his fellow-service men as "Boob" McNider. As Ambassador to Berlin, he sent Senator Frederic M. Sackett, a machine politician who dared not face a reëlection contest in Kentucky. As Ambassador to France, he sent Senator Walter E. Edge, whose ownership of the Dorland Advertising Agency, vigorous competitor of the French official agency, somewhat embarrassed Franco-American relations.

A vacancy on the Supreme Court of the United States he attempted to use to strengthen a collapsing political machine in the South, and the International Joint Commission, which he had declared he would reorganize to carry out important American-Canadian negotiations, he has completely debased

Not only did he surround himself with one of the most mediocre, and most servile Cabinets in history, but during the first two years of his incumbency, he appointed three National Republican Committee Chairmen: Hubert M. Work, a blunderer; Claudius Huston, a lobbyist; and Simeon D. Fess, an Anti-Saloon League-ridden and reactionary Senator.

While Mr. Hoover has some precedent for playing politics with this type of appointment, there has been no President in recent history who has reached into the departments of his Cabinet officers and dictated the appointment of their assistants.

In 1920-'21-'23-'24 Mr. Hoover specifically and categorically associated himself with recommendations for the establishment of exactly such an employment bureau system as Senator Wagner proposed.

In 1920, as Chairman of President Wilson's Industrial Conference, Mr. Hoover recommended "enactment of appropriate legislation by Congress making provision for an employment clearing house under Federal control." In 1921, as Chairman of President Harding's Conference on Unemployment, he recommended an "adequate permanent system of employment offices." In 1923 as Secretary of Commerce, he appointed a committee on business cycles which recommended "a national system of employment bureaus." In 1924 he appointed a Committee on Seasonal Operations which endorsed the previous recommendations.

He rejected the Wagner Bill, despite the repeated pleas of Colonel Arthur Woods, Chairman of his Unemployment Committee, that it be approved. He did so on the ground that the bill would abolish an already existing system that the year before had found jobs for 1,300,000 workers. That both statements were false was proven by the fact that exactly six weeks after he had killed the bill, he became alarmed at the growing volume of denunciation of his action, and undertook to set up, by Executive order, very much the same system.

The Wagner Bill specifically provided that the existing United States Employment Service should not be displaced until the new and more desirable system was in operation. Furthermore, the old Federal service had not found work for 1,300,000 applicants in 1930.

ing employment, such as in industry, business, and offices, the Federal agency accomplished practically nothing.

The 1,300,000 that the President claimed for it was a deliberate misrepresentation. Six hundred thousand of these jobs were actually found by State Employment Bureaus whose only connection with the Federal system was through the designation of one of their staff as a Federal Employment Supervisor, for which he received \$1 a year.

Of the same character was the President's refusal to permit Senator Wagner to be chairman of a special committee the Senate authorized on his motion to inquire into unemployment insurance measures. It is an unwritten Senate rule that the sponsor of a special committee is always named its chairman. In recognition of this precedent Vice President Curtis appointed Wagner as the first man on the committee, thus confirming his right to the chairmanship. But when Wagner, and the two Old Guard Senators named as his associates, met to organize the committee, they shamefacedly informed him that the President was opposed to his being chairman and they would have to unseat him. Being docile party hacks they proceeded to carry out their instructions, thus robbing Wagner of the opportunity of doing the constructive work he had planned.

One day young Bertie, standing beside the steaming caldron of tar and wondering whether it would burn, tossed a flaming stick into it. The conflagration which resulted destroyed his father's plant and nearly wiped out the little town and his father's store.

how the store, and perhaps the town had been saved. The fire, it was thought, had been caused by the unwatched kettle of tar, which must have boiled over. Bertie said nothing. If he had been asked, he would have told what he had done, but no one asked him.

"He sat unnoticed, eating silently. He was sorry and terrified, yet he was glad. It was such a strange feeling that when he had gone to bed he lay awake for a long time, hearing the katydid in the wild crab-apple tree outside his window. He had done a frightening thing; the shock of it was still in his nerves and the crime of it on his conscience, but he had not meant to do wrong. He had been innocently experimenting, and the result was not entirely disheartening.

"'Anyway, I found out what it would do,' he thought. 'I found it out all by myself.' He wondered if he would be punished if he told. He thought not. But he decided that it was

est to keep his own counsel in the matter.

The story is one of the most revealing incidents in Herbert Hoover's life. It gives the key to many qualities in his character which both his friends and his enemies have been trying to explain.

It explains his vacillation, his indecision, the worry through which he passes before making up his mind. It explains his hesitancy in facing issues, a hesitancy which sometimes borders on outright cowardice. It explains why he privately denounced the oil scandals of the Harding Administration and yet sat unmoved throughout that régime, never denouncing it publicly. It explains why he hesitated three days before accepting the rôle of Belgian Food Administrator which the Allies had offered him. It explains his basic intellectual timidity, his inability to grapple in a straightforward and forthright manner with vital issues, why he is always resorting to such indirect devices as commissions to relieve him of the responsibility of acting on controversial questions.

It explains also why on such a moot question as prohibition, he has never once said one word that positively and definitely stated whether he is wet or dry. Senator Carter Glass of Virginia once offered to pay \$1,000 to any one who could produce a single categorical dry declaration by the President. Several years have passed since then but no one has ever claimed the reward.

From his "noble experiment" reply to Senator Borah, in the pre-nomination campaign in 1928, to this day the President has never made a positive statement of his stand, either for or against prohibition. Throughout his campaign he lurked behind the screen of enforcement, while his managers and spokesmen gave assurances to both sides, representing him dry to the drys and wet to the wets.

From this policy he has never deviated. Every dry-by-implication statement he has made has been followed immediately by an under-cover wet "interpretation." This occurred when he gave out his pronouncement on the Wickersham Commission Prohibition Report and after his acceptance speech, at Palo Alto, California, in the summer of 1928.

The day following his expression on the Wickersham Report select correspondents were called to the White House and there given a distinct wet interpretation of the declaration.

On the power issue the President's course has been even more tortuous and reactionary. He is wedded to private, monopolistic ownership and control of this great and vital industry. Yet, during the whole of his 1928 Presidential campaign he was grimly silent on this major problem—with one local exception.

When he spoke at Elizabethton, Tennessee, he made a veiled reference to government operation under certain conditions. Muscle Shoals is a matter of greatest moment to this section.

Press associations and newspapermen, upon his return to his campaign headquarters in Washington, inquired as to the accuracy of the story. After several hours of conferences with political and campaign advisors, the President issued a statement in which he declared that "there is no question of government ownership (of Muscle Shoals) as the government already owns both the power and nitrate plants."

Not a word was to be found in the statement about government operation, which was the question raised, and not ownership. The tenor and implication of the statement, however, indicated approval of government operation of Muscle Shoals. The message was so accepted by the public and the press and not denied by Hoover.

Yet, from then on, he covertly fought and opposed every effort to enact a sound government-operation program for the great plant. Through his control of the House of the Seventy-first Congress he obstructed and sabotaged such legislation as long as he could, and when, finally, after months of laborious negotiation, powerfully assisted by the defeat for reëlection of his spokesman in the House on the question, an acceptable measure was enacted, he vetoed it in a message filled with misstatements and misrepresentations.

His course on governmental regulation of utilities has been equally devious.

Addressing the annual convention in 1925 of the National Electric Light Association, the trade organization of the utility industry, he insisted that there had been outrageous exaggeration concerning the need for control of public utilities. Such supervision in "purely local affairs," he contended, would prove a menace to individual initiative.

This anti-Federal regulation pronouncement in 1925 was a reversal of views he expressed when he addressed the Association Conventions in 1922 and 1924. Then he saw a hopeful rôle for the national government in coördinating and strengthening the regulations of power developments that were outside the jurisdiction of the individual states.

Between his 1925 speech and 1929, he maintained a tight silence on the question of regulation. Not even his Presidential race could force him to speak out on so important a subject. Lacking any other information, it was generally taken for granted during these years that his views were unchanged and that he was against Federal regulation.

But in his message to Congress in 1929, he again turned a hand-spring, this time going back to his more liberal ideas of 1922 and 1924. He conceded that there were instances of inter-state character that were beyond the control of the states and recommended to Congress that it extend the authority of the Federal Power Commission.

Having reversed his reversal, the President promptly shifted his policy once again. This time he did it covertly and by indirection.

Through a member of his Cabinet he attacked the idea of Federal regulation while personally, by means of weak appointments, he stultified the effectiveness of the Federal Power Commission, whose creation he had recommended to Congress for the purpose of strengthening governmental control.

Attorney General Mitchell cooperated in this undercover drive by rendering an astounding legal opinion in which he undertook by interpretation to repeal practically every portion of the Federal Water Power Act set up by Congress over two decades ago for the protection of the public.

This amazing attack on a statute he was sworn to safeguard and defend by the highest legal representative of the government raised such a storm of protest that the old Power Commission did not dare proceed on it as Wilbur had intended.

Judge George W. Woodruff, Solicitor for the Department of Interior under President Roosevelt and one of the authors of the Water Power Act, declared that if the opinion was allowed to go unchallenged it would sweep away twenty-five years of effort to protect the interests of the present and future generations in vast water power rights.

regarding either Wilbur's or Mitchell's action.

*

In the long and tragic travail of the economic depression, the most tragic thing was the President's fear of admitting that a great disaster had befallen the country. For months, while gloom, unemployment, and deflation settled on the land, he refused to admit their reality or do anything fundamental about the situation. His approach to the problem was wholly that of the boomer, the bull-market operator, concerned only with his own political interests and willing to resort to any device or misrepresentation to further them.

Facts, statistics, plan, organization—there have been none, and when proposed by others have been rejected and stifled, secretly when possible, openly when that was impossible.

One policy alone has dominated his course: not to do or say anything that would reveal the truth about the great catastrophe. Suppression and inaction have been his unshaken rule.

The detailed record of this effort tells the story eloquently:

On December 14, 1929, Mr. Hoover declared that the volume of shopping reported to him indicated that the business of the country was "back to normal." That was some six weeks after the stock market crash.

A year and five months later Mr. Mellon, addressing a group of international bankers in Washington, and apparently free for the moment from White House restraint, frankly admitted: "I have no means of knowing when or how we shall emerge from the valley in which we are now traveling."

In February and early March, Secretary of Commerce Lamont, acting on White House orders, took up the burden and on three occasions solemnly gave assurance that "there is nothing in the situation to be disturbed about."

All this time, according to the most reliable labor statistics available in the United States at present, those of the New York State Labor Bureau, factories were closing down in increasing numbers and the unemployment line was steadily lengthening.

On March 16, Julius H. Barnes, close personal friend and under-cover agent for the President, as Chairman of the President's National Business Survey Conference, declared "that the spring of 1930 marks the end of a period of grave concern." Barnes failed to add however that others would follow of even greater gravity.

On May 2, the President, with the expiration of his "sixty days," trimmed his sails very sharply. In a lengthy pronouncement he conceded that things were rather disturbed, but was still irrepressibly optimistic. "We have been passing through one of those great economic storms which periodically bring

hardships and suffering to our people," he admitted. "While the crisis took place only six months ago, I am convinced we have passed the worst and with continued unity of effort we shall

rapidly recover."

nate" employment activities.

Three months later the Census Bureau announced that a special unemployment survey it had made showed an estimated 6,050,000 out of work.

The President's actions leading up to his signing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act probably were the most vacillating of his entire career. Three days before he announced he would approve it, one of his secretaries categorically informed reporters that the President had not made up his mind about the measure and would make no decision until it had come to him from Congress and he had sent it to the various departments and received their formal views on the matter.

This story was printed far and wide. Seventy-two hours later, while the Act was still unfinished legislation in Congress, the President let it be known that he would approve it. The reasons he gave for bowing before a tariff act every one knew he bitterly resented were thus characterized by Senator Pat Harrison on the floor of the Senate:

"This statement is unworthy of the President. It is one of

the most intellectually dishonest statements ever to come from the White House."

The final story of Herbert Hoover is yet to be told. Only time will make available the mass of secret documents and the details of his business career, now so zealously guarded, by which the complete picture can be filled in. Only time also will tell the final story of how Herbert Hoover was pushed into a plan to postpone German reparations and Allied debt payments; a plan which Owen D. Young had worked out and which Henry L. Stimson, coöperating with the British government, had urged upon his chief in the White House; a plan which was finally put over on Herbert Hoover through the combined efforts of Charles G. Dawes, Dwight W. Morrow and Andrew W. Mellon plus a dozen New York bankers who clamored at him in person and by long distance telephone for nearly a month. Finally, his confidence restored by a trip to the hospitable Middle West, Mr. Hoover adopted the plan and was never more surprised in his life when it was heralded as his master stroke.

Whether it will carry him on to reëlection, only time can tell. But time long after that will tell the story of one of the super-promoters of the age.

It will be the story of a paradox. A man who, despite the handicap of a fundamental timorousness, was able by a consummate sense of publicity to create the illusion of heroism and greatness and to attain for a time world acclaim.

It will be the story of a man who had the genius to create a great rôle, but lacked the essential requisites of character to enact it. It will be the story of a success which failed because it succeeded too well.

Had Herbert Hoover never gained the Presidency, he might well have remained a shimmering hero. The illusion he so skilfully wove never would have been shattered. But before the ruthless realities and the merciless tests of that office his fundamental inadequacy of character undid him and he stands to-day stripped of all his carefully conjured glories.

CHAPTER FOUR

EGG CHARLEY

OR a third of a century, in the House and in the Senate, Charley Curtis, of Kansas, drew his salary and mileage, spread abroad in unrestrained generosity the garden seeds and moral documents paid for by the Treasury, planted his share of patronage where it served him best, upheld loyally the hand of the President—if he was a Republican—and in all other ways was a steady, dependable, unquestioning Party plug, dull, regular, and conforming, no worse than the rest of the pack and in some ways a lot better.

By political standards, he was a pretty square shooter. He didn't pose as a sage or a superman; he didn't steal; he never went Red hunting; and if he waved the flag and occasionally declaimed sonorously about home and mother he was at least not of the smug type of Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, the Mellon political and legal bodyguard, nor of the buffoon ilk of Senator Tom Heflin.

Coming from Kansas, he was a voting dry, of course. But he made no secret of the fact that he was fond of a good game of draw poker, and nothing gave him greater pleasure than to take a \$1.25 pot from Senator "Jim" Couzens of Michigan, who, despite his \$40,000,000 Ford-made fortune, would always howl in anguish.

skill in profanity was widely recognized and he was an enthusiastic and regular patron of the ponies.

In those carefree congressional days Charley liked nothing better than to chin with the boys in mocking manner about the social game in Washington, about which he troubled himself not at all and in which he felt like a fish out of water. The pushing and climbing of some of his colleagues and of the other strutters in the official arena were a source of much amusement to him, and his comments thereon were tart and devastating.

But while on the surface he was always a placid, humble,

unchanging, decent fellow, his long years in Washington finally left their mark on him.

In his old age he was stricken with soaring ambitions and they began to plague him. His humility turned to gall.

A life-long inferiority complex, arising out of his Kaw Indian descent, began to be complicated by the recurrence of a childhood fairy story that every American may hope to be President.

This fixation took hold of him as his physical powers declined, and in a short time it had flamed into an irrepressible libido.

The idea of aspiring to the Presidency came to him quite suddenly. Mediocrity in the Presidency had become the fashion and he was not only mediocrity incarnate, but, as politicians go, more or less honest—a combination far from common, and one, just then, urgently needed by the Republican Party.

If Harding and Coolidge could reach for the purple, why

He was not—at least, not then—a man given to thumping his chest in self-righteousness, but his comfortable little paunch and his soft, round, copper-brown jowls covered a dogged heart and a determined jaw. Once the fatal aspiration to imperial grandeur was implanted in his psyche, it possessed him completely.

When, in 1924, some one proposed that he be made Cool-

In a quiet, skilful way he set about restoring himself in the favor of the White House. When, after the 1924 election, it became apparent that Coolidge and Dawes loved each other like a pair of strange cats, Charley utilized to the full the advantage the place as Senate floor leader gave him and set about making himself solid. No painted warrior on the trail ever trod a more wary and skilful path than he in the puerile wrangling between the Senate and the little Yankee carpet-bagger.

When, early in 1927, he became ill, he brooded darkly over the possibility that death might intervene between him and his goal. He doctored grimly, and despite the call of a trying legislative situation, dropped everything and hustled off to Florida to nurse himself back to health.

All this time Charley was still keeping within the bounds of reason. The Presidency he thought of only as a wistful possibility. His real and immediate goal was the Vice Presidency.

But when Coolidge outsmarted himself with his famous "I do not choose to run" statement and the bewildered Republican zealots took his words for what they appeared to say and the race for the 1928 nomination was thrown open, Charley's final efflorescence rapidly set in.

One by one such appalling candidates as Jim Watson, Willis of Ohio, and the egregious Goff solemnly strutted forward and set up their claims. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at that Charley, observing their gall, suddenly ran amok—and promptly passed from reality altogether.

His madness, to be sure, was not altogether without its logic. With Coolidge out, and such men as Watson, Willis, and Goff accepted as serious contenders, he reasoned, there was a real chance for him, too.

Thus he reasoned—at first. But as the fight developed, ambition soared and raged within him. His walk may be the waddle of a fat old squaw, but brave warrior blood of the Red man of the plains courses in his veins.

Charley, in the hectic days of the spring of '28, actually came to believe that he would be President. Watson, Goff and Dawes might secretly consider themselves outside long-shots, but not Charley. He knew that he was a man of destiny.

So Charley set about to hack, hammer and wangle his way to the White House. He wrote thousands of letters enthusiastically extolling his virtues and proclaiming his availability. He opened headquarters in various States. He formally joined

To nominate Hoover, he said, publicly and privately, would be to place a hopeless burden upon an already overladen party. Hoover was intolerable, unspeakable, unthinkable.

That Hoover finally beat him he has never forgiven—and never will now that every day of Hoover's administration brings further proof to Charley that everything he said about him in the nomination campaign has been more than realized since he took office.

Indeed, if they had gone over to him at the right moment at Kansas City, he might well have been chosen. Stranger things have happened at Republican conventions

Many reasons give Charley cause to believe that way. To begin with, Hoover was a minority candidate when the delegates assembled at the convention. Outside of the paid Negro cohorts from the South, carefully garnered by the sly C. Bascom Slemp and the mysterious Claudius Huston, and closely guarded after a Lowden kidnapping raid the day before the convention opened, he had only a few States actually pledged to him.

Then, after a few ballots with Hoover losing ground,

House leader, who panted and groveled for the place, couldn't even muster their own delegations.

So, after a night of futile searching, conferring and dickering, made notable by the pursuit by the reporters of blundering old "Doc" Hubert Work, Hoover's Campaign Manager, as he tried to sneak up and down the stairs of the Muehlbach Hotel in an effort to evade them, Hoover and the convention bosses threw up their hands and turned to Charley—as a last resort.

Next morning Borah piously mounted the rostrum and nominated him, to a pathetic scattering of applause.

And then Charley, like the true party wheel-horse that he is, swallowed his bitter words of a day or so before, and began the bleat he mouthed so dolorously all through the campaign: "And now I want to tell you about a man whose heart beats for the woman and the child, a man who, blah, blah, blah... Herbert Hoover... I thank you."

But in realization came also frustration and therein is to be found the clew to the strange mood that came over Charley when he assumed the Vice Presidency.

In his improved raiment, his measured whispering, his determined reserve, his rabid clamor for full official honors upon any and all occasions, he has but one thought—the Presidency.

That is the secret of Charley as he is to-day. If the White House portals should ever actually open to him, he would be the most presidential President in the history of the land.

The wash tub and the kitchen range are not unknown to Dolly. The delicate nuances of society are of little moment to her. What Dolly wants she wants, and with Brother Charley as Vice President the esoteric superiorities of Senate ladies, Cabinet ladies, and Diplomatic dames awe her not at all.

Dolly, well over two hundred pounds and arrayed like Solomon when in all his kingly glory, is determined to have her rightful place and there is no squeamishness about her as to how she gets it.

And if she and Charley should by chance ever take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, with what relish would they both pay off scores! Many a society matron would pay dearly for the cutting jibes and smarting flippancies they now so gayly hurl at the pair.

But it is not alone brotherly love and gratitude that inspired Charley to make his crusade for a due and proper recognition of the eminence, importance and dignity of the Vice Presidency. Deeper and profounder motives set him off.

No one knew better than he how useless and utterly ornamental the office really is. His years in the Senate and as a floor leader had left him no doubt on that score.

Also, as a Senator and floor leader, he had countenanced no change of the Vice President's lowly status. But once in the rôle himself, he saw things in a different light.

As Vice President, Charley approached the office from the angle of his Presidential fixation.

The Vice Presidency at best is a gamble. Its incumbents live only to fill a dead man's place. A few win; most don't. But the percentage is encouraging enough for the politician to take a chance, idle and utterly inconsequential as the life is.

Some of the Vice Presidents, such as Tom Marshall, fill the place with a philosophical detachment and amusement. Others, like Dawes, play a deeply-hidden but nevertheless potent rôle in legislative affairs. Both courses are impossible to Charley; the first, because he isn't detached or philosophical and has lost all sense of humor; and the second, because the political situation is against him.

Charley had merely loaned his official car to a group of Senate malcontents who called on Hoover to inquire how he stood on the Debenture Plan. To be asked to state his position, bluntly and unequivocally, was shock enough to the President. To learn that this outrage had been conveyed in Charley's official car was well nigh unforgivable.

at least be a stern and unbending disciplinarian in the Senate and a defiant defender of Vice-Presidential rank and precedence there and elsewhere, particularly at social dinner tables.

He is profoundly and earnesly distressed at the condition in which he found the Vice Presidency, and until he goes up or out—the former preferably, of course—he intends devoting his time and strength advancing its fallen and sadly neglected estate.

If, by God's will, he must be content with the Vice Presidency, this labor of love and patriotism will be his self-sacrificing and lofty contribution to his native land. Laughter and raillery will daunt him not.

He proposes to force the Senate to decorum if he has to shatter gavels as fast as they can be made, and official society will bow to the majesty of his rank if he has to embarrass a thousand Secretaries of State.

"Might as well settle this thing once and for all," it is related he told a friend in a confidential moment. "You can never tell what will happen, and we might as well get this thing straightened out now."

It is what the psychologists call a defense mechanism, of course. But, as Charley might well say if he knew about such things, who is there without one? He is Vice President, and wants to be President. The odds are against him, for he is sixty-nine and Hoover is only fifty-five.

To the social Old Guard of Washington, Charley and Dolly may be a riotous joke. But for the Vice President and his hefty and militant sister the others are a pack of snooty, strutting swells, who faze them not at all and with whom they are prepared to exchange blow for blow regardless of the shrieks of merriment from the onlookers and the outraged scowls of the stiff-backed Hoovers.

Principle is principle, and Alice Longworth and her crowd will take place after Charley and Dolly or, by God, they won't take place at all. In the Senate, Charley harries the chamber, demanding silence and order with a zeal and clamor that frightens the galleries and enrages the Senators, and in the evening, accompanied by the redoubtable Dolly, he raids and ravages dinner tables to satisfy their craving for precedence.

What matter if the world chortles in derision? By his vigor of conduct and the magnificence and array of his residences and office establishments shall they know him.

To the left are the chambers of his secretarial staff, of a number befitting so exalted a dignitary. These offices and ante-rooms are also equipped with new and lavish furnishings. To the right of the reception-room is Charley's official salon and the crowning glory of Capitol Hill.

Its back is almost six feet in height, and is of carved and filigreed wood. At the top, in gilt letters, are the words, "The Chief." In the center is a plaque of carving. Around the rim of this piece of artistry is inscribed, also in gold lettering, the fact that the chair is the gift of the Original Curtis Boys and Matthew Quay Glaser.

as normal size, and as gaudy and ornate as a movie palace.

Charley takes a deep and stirring pride in the establishment. The interested caller is carefully shown all its wonders, and he modestly explains that it was all his own idea. Other Vice Presidents have had luxurious quarters, but it was he who con-

Presidents have had luxurious quarters, but it was he who conceived the idea of blocking up a whole corridor to make a throne room and of fitting it out with regal magnificence.

For years, as a member of Congress, Charley resided in an unostentatious dwelling in a modest residential section in Washington, but, elected to the Vice Presidency, he found it shabby and too meager.

Nothing less than the imperial suite of the fashionable Mayflower Hotel would do for him and the Ganns, meaning Dolly. There is a Mr. Gann, of course, but officially he is wholly inconsequential.

There is a good deal of mystery about this ten-room hotel apartment. For a while the story about town was that Charley got it rent free. When his social-precedence crusade was in its first bloom, reporters made inquiries of the management about the matter.

The hotel people were reluctant to discuss it, but persistent interrogation elicited certain details. It was learned that the regular rent of the apartment is \$25,000 a year, but that since royalty comes to the capital only rarely, it had been used but infrequently.

From information obtained as to the number of days in the average year it had been occupied, the reporters calculated that it brought in about \$7,500 annually. Taking Charley's and the manager's word that he really did pay rent, it was concluded that this figure was approximately what he got the suite for.

In fact, so satisfied is the management with the arrangement, that it is understood to have offered Charley and Dolly a private elevator. That is, when they entered one of the lifts it would go up or down to their destination without stopping for other calls. But Charley, ever the man of the people, declined this undue ostentation.

When the reporters approached Charley about the question of rent he went straight up in the air.

Charley also strongly intimated that he knew the source of all these malicious tales. And nothing would give him greater pleasure, he added, than to break their necks.

His days may be taken up with vigorous gavel wielding and every night of the season filled with a dinner engagement, but these are empty satisfactions to a man of his habits and instincts. Even under ordinary circumstances to be relegated to the Vice Presidency would be a hardship to a man who, for a third of a century, was an active participant in the political mêlée.

When the Senate ladies haughtily refused to make Dolly, as she demanded, the president of their exclusive luncheon club,

friendly relations between Charley and a number of husband-Senators naturally did not flourish.

The Indian in him just can't help cropping out when a chance arises to hammer them out of order and curtly command them to take their places and keep quiet. The Senators in turn resent the rebuke, with the result that a below-the surface but nevertheless most active feud rages between them and the Vice President.

As a speaker, Charley was a total loss, but what he lacked in

oratory or logic, he more than made up in showmanship. He didn't miss a trick, and, with the aid of the accommodating reporters acompanying him, he now and then got quite a play in the papers.

There was the time he pinched a few fingers in the door of an automobile and then bandaged his whole hand, hung it in a sling from around his neck and heroically announced that though stricken low nothing could keep him from his onslaught upon the foe. That play was worth quite a spread, with pictures.

Then there was the time he underwent a disconcerting heckling from a farmer who insisted on asking particularly obnoxious questions about Charley's and the Republican Party's record on fulfilling pledges to render aid and succor to agriculture. Angered by the effectiveness of the quizzing, Charley roared out that there was no use answering, as the interrogator was "too damned dumb to understand."

The Republican press made much of this incident, but no mention was ever made of the aftermath. The Smithites in the rural districts took to appearing at Charley's meetings with signs reading, "Farmers, you are too damned dumb to understand." Charley didn't like that at all.

When he first took to the stump he traveled in an ordinary Pullman car. But Sister Dolly waxed indignant at this, and one day hied herself over to "Doc" Work's office, where she bitterly berated the apologetic campaign director for the indignity that was being heaped upon Charley.

So Charley was given a private car, a press agent, a barker—introducer, was his official designation—and an Indian Princess.

Also his visage, with his scraggly mustache carefully and

neatly trimmed by this time, was plastered up by the side of Hoover's on all the official posters. Press associations were invited to send staff men on the car, and thus equipped, Charley finished out the campagin.

At the big evening meetings, held indoors, Charley had another effective gag. After the introductions, he stepped forward to speak; the band in the hall—primed in advance for the stunt—would break into "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Charley would instantly stiffen to attention and, of course, whe mob would have to get out of its seats. When the music ceased, Charley would then pull a line that never failed to get a big hand.

"I want to thank the musicians," he would say, "for playing our glorious national anthem. I would far rather start my speeches to the strains of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' than to those of 'The Sidewalks of New York.'"

The campaign was the cause of Charley's being invested by reporters with the curious title of Egg Charley.

Since then some of the Washington correspondents have

debased the designation to other purposes, and it has now come to mean among them a certain state of alcoholic exuberation. Charley, it should be stated in all fairness, is in no way associated with this later development.

In the beginning, applied to him, the nickname arose out of a sort of satirical affection for him among the reporters who covered his Vice-Presidential medicine show. Being a staunch and unswerving Republican, he is naturally a high-tariff zealot. In all his speeches, he made much of the great benefits that have come to one and all from this great boon to mankind.

Getting down to particulars, he would relate in detail the important part he played from time to time in making possible its manifold blessings. There was the instance, he would tell, when the farmers came to him and begged him piteously to protect them from the ruinous inroads of oriental dried and frozen eggs. He was, it appeared, deeply moved by their pleas and indignation flamed in his breast against this subtle yellow peril.

But Charley was not to be taken in.

Always he would begin the recital of this saga with a fierce shout: "And what about eggs...?"

The effect of the outcry was always encouraging.

"And what about ...?"

He always caught himself in time and would veer off to something else.

Before he went on the stump, Charley had made few speeches in his life. In his twenty-odd years in the Senate he had not made over a half-dozen, if that many. In his campaigning in Kansas, his electioneering was almost entirely glad-hand and personal-contact work.

But what he lacked in eloquence he more than made up in sudden outbursts. It was as if he would get peeved with himself and bored with the crowd and take it out in an outbreak of roaring.

*

THERE was a bit of Jacksonian touch to his beginnings, but he didn't live up to the promise of his early youth. He was a regular from the start. On his mother's side his ancestry goes back to White Plume, Chief of the Kaw tribe of Kansas Indians, to Pawhuska, a famous fighting Chief of the Osage tribe, and to a French trader, one Louis Pappan.

There is a legend that while he was a boy on the reservation, the peaceful tribe heard that the Cheyennes had gone on the warpath, and that Charley was sent to summon aid. It is his sole martial adventure.

Later, he became a jockey and his love for horses remains one of his happiest traits. All his life he has been a frequenter of race-tracks, and be it said for him that this is one habit he has not changed since becoming Vice President.

Bruce named names, and the fight was on. Charley vehemently denounced the accusation as a canard. The men mentioned were interviewed and they too denied the story. Charley really is not a drinking man. After his illness several years ago he was advised by his doctors to take a small drink daily

In his personal life he has been as regular as in his political affairs. His one vice is a fondness for watching the thoroughbreds run. He never bets.

Charley got into politics soon after putting out his shingle as a lawyer. Topeka, though dry, had a hundred flourishing and wide-open saloons. The good folk grumbled loudly thereat and threatened a reform ticket.

The local bosses and saloon-keepers, casting about for a safe candidate who would at the same time mollify the respectable element, hit upon the youthful and ambitious Charley. They knew him for a good fellow, quiet and modest but no fanatic, and they felt they could safely entrust things in his hands.

So, backed by the wets and the drys, Charley was elected. He promised to enforce the law, which didn't disturb the politicians and satisfied the drys.

He served in Congress, with the exception of a two-year period when the Populists defeated him, continuously from 1893 until his election to the Vice Presidency in 1928. He came to the Senate in 1907.

most persistent sponsors of the cloture rule permitting a limit on Senate debate by means of a two-thirds vote.

It is his firm belief, borne out by extensive experience, that everything can be fixed by friendly and confidential getting together. As, of course, it usually is—despite the seas of words.

Charley, as floor leader, had no illusions about his colleagues, but as long as he was one of them he didn't high-hat them. He got along agreeably with Republicans, Democrats and Insurgents.

Norris once said of him that "Charley Curtis' word is as good as gold."

Charley didn't know anything about the gold standard but he was fast on figuring out ways to fix things up. He suggested that the job be taken out of the hands of the crowd and turned over to a select and trusted committee.

Of course, he voted for the War, and like all the other regulars, said nothing about the Harding Administration's scandals. He followed Lodge in fighting the League of Nations, and Coolidge a few years later in voting adherence to the World Court—with reservations.

He believes unquestioningly in the Republican Party, a high tariff, the flag, home, mother and the irresistible efficacy of small favors to constituents. Since his elevation to the Vice Presidency he has added slightly to this store of beliefs by becoming convinced of the social eminence of the office.

All his life, indeed, Charley has devoted himself to doing favors for good Kansas Republicans. His appeal has always been personal. In that capacity he is an affable, efficient, useful man, and as long as Kansas was his field and Congress his goal he could handle the situation.

Of late, a new cause for alarm has stricken him. A strong suspicion has arisen in his mind that if Hoover is renominated, he may not be his running mate.

The Hoover faction have made no secret of their disapproval of Dolly's social ambitions and Charley's outcries about precedence. Charley was only a makeshift in 1928 and, with time to prepare for the 1932 convention, they might well shelve him, if they can safely do so.

Charley is too clever a politician not to know what is going on in the Hoover camp. Neither he nor the President has any affection for each other. The whole matter rests on whether it profits Hoover more to keep or to drop Charley. Should he decide on some one else, Charley would have to go.

The realization of this situation adds no happiness to Charley's days. He can hope only that Hoover finds himself so beleaguered that he can't take any chances and will have to hold on to him.

But Charley is taking no chances. In this racking dilemma he is preparing for the worst by refreshing his wide Kansas contacts. Should he lose out on the Vice Presidency, Charley is determined not to languish but to seek his old Senate seat. A Democrat holds that now, but Charley is not discouraged. The seeds, the handshakes, the scores of favors of the past he is sure will not be forgotten.

In the meantime, he is carrying on unabated his labor of love of trying to make the Vice Presidency a potent and respected estate.

"Good-night," said Mrs. Ruth Hanna McCormick, and an old friend of Charley's, one evening in response to his thanks for a pleasant visit at her home. "Come again, Charley."

CHAPTER FIVE

WRONG-HORSE HARRY

FTER Herbert Hoover had spent two months of rather cramped and sometimes seasick life aboard a battleship for the purpose of wooing Latin America, he came back to the United States and appointed, as the member of his Cabinet responsible for continuing this courtship, the one man whose name more than any other was anathema to all Latin America.

The day the news leaked out that Henry L. Stimson had been appointed Secretary of State, the press associations which feed the great newspapers of Buenos Aires, Santiago and Rio de Janeiro with some three thousand words of North-American news daily, devoted exactly that number of words to direct quotes from Henry L. Stimson's book on Nicaragua. The book was written as propaganda for the State Department in

order to whitewash its maladroitness in that country, and was intended only for consumption in the United States. It did not go down well below the Rio Grande.

Probably there are few Secretaries of State who have got off to a less propitious start than Henry L. Stimson. In the first place, he was late arriving in Washington. After winding up his work as Governor General of the Philippines and after a slow trip across the Pacific, he found the Hoover Administration already four weeks in office with the State Department machinery, which Frank B. Kellogg, after two years of travail, had whipped into comparatively efficient shape, going at top speed. A revolution was ramping up and down Mexico. Europe was in the throes of formulating the Young Plan. Elihu Root had been in Europe drawing up a protocol by which the United States might slip quietly into the World Court; the League was preparing to convene its Preparatory Commission on Disarmament and the Coast Guard had just sunk the Canadian rum-runner, I'm Alone, two hundred and fifteen miles off the Louisiana Coast, in a manner which promised to make prohibition history.

Into all this, Henry L. Stimson, accustomed to working five-hour days, a multitude of servants and the leisurely ways of the tropics, was suddenly plunked. The result had to be either complete stoppage of the fast-whirling machinery of foreign affairs, or else the spectacle of Henry L. Stimson bumping along over the cogs trying to keep pace with the wheels.

One of the first obsessions he acquired after arriving in Washington was that certain people, more particularly the press and the bureau of press relations, were lying awaken ights planning to knife him when his back was turned. As a result he issued an order that no news could be released to the press without his approval. And such fear did the new Secretary of State inspire in his subordinates that in one case such routine handouts as a birthday message to the President of Uruguay and an announcement of American participation in a Pan-American Infant Hygiene Conference were held up two days awaiting Mr. Stimson's return from a week-end.

Week-ends of the British variety, which begin early Friday and do not end until Tuesday morning, were Mr. Stimson's regular diversion during his first summer in Washington, and they contrasted rather disastrously with Frank B. Kellogg's habit of fretting and fuming at his desk literally day and night without vacation for four years.

Despite this, it was Mr. Stimson's constant but good-natured complaint that Mr. Hoover was working him too hard. Mrs. Stimson was not so good-natured about it. She told her friends that Mr. Hoover was a slave driver. Comparatively speaking, he was. The gentleman who sat in the White House across the street had become accustomed, as a big corporation head, to prodigious effort and he expected it of others. Mr. Stimson's long week-ends got no Presidential sympathy.

Nor did they get much sympathy from any one else. On one particular Saturday morning when important news regarding revision of German War payments to the United States had been received at the State Department, Mr. Stimson informed the press that he could not meet with them at the scheduled hour because he was engaged in "work for the President." Half an hour later, he appeared on the White House tennis court clad in immaculate flannels. The President was not there.

106 WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND

Next morning the newspapers published a detailed account of the importance which Mr. Stimson attached to his membership in the "Tennis Cabinet"; how he had hired, at State Department expense, an extra Negro messenger whose job it was to bring his tennis clothes down to the Department in the afternoon and lay them out in the dressing room adjoining his office, and how the Secretary, after donning them, put himself at the head of the "Tennis Parade"—Regnier his aide, Keatley, his personal stenographer, and Roach, his valet,—while guards saluted and salaamed.

Finding that things were happening all around him, about which he knew nothing, Secretary Stimson issued an order that each political division of the State Department should report to him daily on the work it had accomplished. Non-political divisions, such as the Passport Bureau, the Visa Office, the Personnel Office, that of the Solicitor, he required to report twice a week. The result was that on Wednesdays and Saturdays almost every one in the State Department was so busy writing reports to the Secretary that nothing much else was accomplished. The stenographic division was swamped, and Mr. Stimson himself carried home with him a stack of reports which every one surmised were thrown in the waste basket like so many uncorrected examination papers.

All of which did not add materially to the efficiency of the State Department and created the general impression among his subordinates that Henry L. Stimson was a high-handed executive with military ideas and a propensity for giving orders which he had inherited from his days as Secretary of War.

Two years have passed since that hectic period. The State Department functions much more serenely now. Its personnel have more confidence in their chief and chafe less at his whims and eccentricities. But even to-day, Henry Lewis Stimson remains an enigma to most of those around him. He favors universal military conscription, yet was the most hard-hitting enemy the militarists had when they opposed a naval reduction treaty. He paid \$800,000 for a palatial estate in fashionable Northwest Washington, yet he believes in the redistribution of wealth and advocates increased income taxes for the wealthy. He is cold, aloof, criticized as being snobbish, but does the most generous and thoughtful things for those around him. He is a strange mixture of conservatism and liberalism, of pacificism and militarism, of gentility and democracy.

The secret of this contradiction is Stimson's family. He has never been able to forget the proud part it played in the founding of these United States. He tries to forget; he tries to mix with his fellow-men; but never has he been able completely to divorce himself from the inherent instinct that he is of a race born to rule.

This instinct was first planted when John Stimson, fifth great-grandfather of Henry Lewis Stimson, born in England in 1605, came to America in the Truelove, settling at Watertown Farms. His son, George Stimson, having moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, took down his rifle and powder horn to fight the Indians in King Philip's War. The latter's grandson, also named George, served as a Captain in the French and Indian and in the Revolutionary Wars, later returning to Windham, New York, in which State the Stimsons ever since have dabbled in politics, made money and been proud to live.

The first Henry Stimson, great-grandfather of Henry Lewis, born 1772, was one of the few Stimsons who has not been a fighting man. However, Stimson's father, Lewis Atterbury,

made up for it by serving as a Captain and aide-de-camp in the Civil War.

By this time the family had accumulated a considerable fortune. Henry Clark Stimson, grandfather of Henry Lewis, born 1813, had become a wealthy banker and railroad president just at the period when the Morgans, the Harrimans and the Hills were making railroad history in the United States. Stimson's father, therefore, was under no compulsion to earn a living. He studied medicine, became Professor of Surgery at the Cornell Medical School and eventually built up a lucrative practice among New York's Four Hundred. He was known as New York's most fashionable physician and was as popular for his yacht racing as he was for his prescriptions. Few were the summers when he did not enter his yacht in the Trans-Atlantic race. For a while he held the record for this contest.

Young Henry Lewis Stimson was born into a stultifying world of wealth and luxury. He had no particular reason for worrying about the problem of making a living, and his early youth was not calculated to inspire such worry. While an undergraduate at Yale, he spent his vacations in what is an expensive luxury even for the sons of Eli—big-game hunting. He made annual excursions to the Rockies or to Canada and later gained some reputation for himself as the first white man to climb "The Chief" in the Glacier National Park. He interspersed these hunting trips with vacations in New Brunswick, Quebec and Switzerland, where he climbed the Matterhorn and the Rothhorn. Graduated from Yale in 1888, Stimson was, with two exceptions, like any other rich man's son who has a pipe-line to his father's purse and a desire to satisfy his curiosity.

These two exceptions were: family pride and an uncle.

Family pride has been the outstanding characteristic of all Stimsons since John Stimson crossed from England in the Truelove. Next to the pride they have taken in their family they have been proud of their country and their State. The State of New York they have considered a community cor-

Henry Albert Stimson, now ninety years old, and uncle of Henry Lewis, had felt this way. But instead of giving his life to the healing of the sick and the racing of yachts, as did Henry Lewis's father, he had dedicated it to the work of the Lord. He raised seven children, preached from pulpits in Minneapolis, St. Louis and New York, and became the outstanding and most liberal Congregationalist divine of his day.

In the life of Henry Lewis Stimson, his namesake, the Reverend Doctor Stimson played a great part—probably the most important part any individual has played. Young Henry Lewis took his problems to his uncle. They saw much of each other. Even to-day, when the present Secretary of State makes hurried business trips to New York, he seldom fails to spend an evening with the aged divine, and his uncle in turn never hesitates to sign his name to lengthy petitions urging the Secretary of State to take certain steps in international relations which other members of the State Department consider rank heresy.

Dominant in his character was the inbred belief that being a Stimson, blessed with the privileges of wealth and prestige, he was born to rule. This rule, however, thanks to the teachings of a kindly uncle, was to be beneficent and for the good of the people. Mixed up with this were all the characteristics which ordinarily accrue from a life of luxury. Stimson was mentally and physically lazy. He had never been compelled to work. He was surrounded by conservative friends and

many of those important positions which, to the initiated, appear to be the reward of great merit plus the discernment of God. It was Elihu Root, a former Secretary of War, who recommended young Mr. Stimson for that post in 1911. It was Elihu Root who suggested him to Theodore Roosevelt as District Attorney for Southern New York in 1906, and, probably most important of all, it was Elihu Root who gave young Stimson his first job.

Also from an old and distinguished New York family, Root believes that old and distinguished New York families should stick together, and when Henry Lewis was 26 years old, a graduate of Yale and of Harvard Law School, Root took him into his law firm. Root's solicitude permitted young Stimson to marry Mabel Wellington White, who can trace her ancestry back even further than Stimson's to the first voyage of the Mayflower. Stimson did not particularly need to work to support a wife, but it was considered the more respectable thing to do. As soon as Stimson entered Root's firm, therefore, the marriage took place.

The cases which came across Stimson's desk as a member of the firm of Root and Clarke were the usual routine work of championing big business upon which most New York law firms fatten, and there was no indication during this period that young Mr. Stimson was any less conservative or more idealistic than the average scion of wealth and aristocracy.

After twelve years of private law practice, however, Theodore Roosevelt, himself a scion of wealth and aristocracy, believing as Root did, that such scions should stick together, appointed Stimson, still in his thirties, District Attorney for Southern New York. For the first time, Stimson showed flashes of the liberal background his uncle had helped instill in him. It was in the heyday of Roosevelt's trust-busting boom and Stimson, inspired by all the righteous wrath of his Puritan soul, went for the Sugar Trust. Having made a name for himself on this, he prosecuted Charles W. Morse, accused of misappropriating funds from the National Bank of America.

The result would have been laughable had it not been so tragic. Here was a wealthy young aristocrat never having felt the pinch of hunger, never having soiled his hands with manual labor, never having mingled with his fellow-men, pitted against a rough-and-tumble political fighter in an election whose success depended upon winning the toughest elements of Brooklyn and East-Side New York. His cultured accent, his uneasy platform presence, his cold personality, almost every detail of his manner betrayed his birth and breeding, gave his electorate an impression of a young aristocrat who condescends to rule, and who, though he may be a good ruler, condescends.

The opposition press called him the "human icicle." Then, after a half-dozen speeches, during which Stimson never varied his theme of "I stand squarely behind the policies of Theodore Roosevelt," and after Roosevelt had referred to him endearingly as "his" candidate, the nickname was changed to "Our Harry."

tary of State he is constantly inviting people out to his colonial residence to chat and get acquainted. On these occasions he tries with almost visible effort to pull himself out of his shell, to radiate charm and personality. But he is a slow and diffident conversationalist, would rather sit in front of a fire with Mrs. Stimson and a book, and, on the whole, he fails. In Washington, the Diplomatic Corps, the State Department personnel, his Cabinet friends, all respect him and like him in a mild sort of way, but there is no enthusiasm. The inescapable fact is that Henry L. Stimson was born an aristocrat, and despite a kindly democratic soul, he never has been nor ever will be able to escape from perpetually giving the appearance of an aristocrat.

Although Stimson served for only two years as Secretary of War, he probably enjoyed it more than any other office he has held. The army at that time had not reached the impressive peace-time proportions that it has since the "war to end war," and the Department to a considerable extent ran itself. Something which he may have inherited from the ancestors who fought in the early wars of the nation has always endeared the pomp and ceremony of military life to Henry L. Stimson, and in the War Department he felt very much at home. Also, he liked the high-ranking Generals who surrounded him. He considered them extremely capable and let them run his Department pretty much as they pleased.

Stimson demurred. But he did not demur very vigorously. At heart he was flattered that the long list of services which the Stimsons had rendered their country was to be made longer. So he made only one condition with the President, namely, that he, Stimson, should have complete authority to do whatever he found necessary once he arrived in Nicaragua. Coolidge agreed.

Mr. Kellogg, however, was not so amenable. While Stimson was on the high seas, Mr. Kellogg began to fidget. He began to conjure up all kinds of mistakes which the Special Representative of the President might make when confronted with the pitfalls of Nicaraguan jungles and politics. Finally, fidgety Mr. Kellogg sent a telegram to head off Mr. Stimson at Managua. The telegram surrounded him with buts, ifs, whereases and warnings against the further use of American armed force in Nicaragua and against any pledge to guarantee Nicaraguan elections. Mr. Stimson, however, completely ignored this. He sent a telegram to the White House saying that he still assumed full authority to do whatever he considered expedient, and once again Calvin Coolidge replied in the affirmative.

Whether Mr. Stimson was wise in using this force and in making this pledge is for historians to decide. There is no question, however, that he substituted a definite policy for one of Kellogg vacillation and there is no question, also, that Calvin Coolidge was pleased. It was because Mr. Coolidge was pleased that he sent Mr. Stimson to the Philippines, where a somewhat similar mess needed to be straightened out.

No situation could have been better ordered to the kindly despotism of the Stimson family than that which existed in the Philippines at that time. For six years the Philippines had been handled with the mailed and military fist of General Leonard B. Wood. Wood had been abrupt and peremptory. He had vetoed the bills of the Philippine legislature on a wholesale scale and almost without explanation. He had surrounded himself with the famous "Cavalry Cabinet"—military men who had become so biased against any human being with a brown skin that their advice was impossible. They believed that the way to keep a native in his place was to apply the tip of the toe to the seat of his pants. They drew a strict color line even to the point of prohibiting football matches between Filipinos and white service teams, for fear white prestige would lose "face" by defeat. Filipino political leaders—even the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House—were considered too lowly to attend Government House receptions. They had so many mistresses, it was explained, that it was socially impossible to decide upon the correct wife to invite.

Mr. Stimson started from the premise that the Philippine Islands existed chiefly for the benefit of the Filipino people, not for the benefit of American business, not for the purpose of giving the United States a naval base in Pacific waters, and not for the aggrandizement and glory of the American empire. Once the Filipino politicos appreciated that premise, they were with him one hundred per cent. Mr. Stimson initiated a régime of full and frank discussion. His aim was to secure what he wanted by persuasion and coöperation rather than by force. On the whole he was successful. But at heart always the aristocratic despot, he never relinquished his final whip hand. If after discussion, argument and persuasion, he could not get

His first act was to fire the Cavalry Cabinet. His second was to invite Filipinos and their wives to Government House. The American colony never forgave him, and any Governor who offends the American colony can be rated, ipso facto, as having independence, courage and the interests of the Philippine people fundamentally at heart.

When he finally sailed away from Manila in the spring of 1929, there was no question that Henry Lewis Stimson left behind him one of the best jobs he had ever done.

*

AFTER Secretary Stimson had weathered a rather severe initiation during his first few months in the State Department, the weird mixture of liberalism and conservatism, of pacifism and militarism, which makes up his character, began to crop out

It occurred at the first diplomatic tea held at Woodley. It is the usual custom at these functions for the wives of the various Assistant Secretaries to assist the wife of the Secretary of State in pouring. These ladies are Mrs. Wilbur Carr, Mrs. William R. Castle, Jr., and Mrs. Frances White—all charming, acquainted with the Diplomatic Corps, and socially secure. Mr.

A lot of things happened that aren't supposed to happen at the usual well-oiled diplomatic tea. For one thing, Captain Regnier, Stimson's young and precocious military aide, did the announcing and got the Minister of Bolivia mixed up with the Minister of Sweden, which was no compliment to the latter. And when the Italian Ambassadress wanted her car she had to wait thirty minutes for it. But for the most part, the party delighted a great number of people who do not usually experience much delight at diplomatic receptions and it performed the wholesome function of putting the career rorps decidedly in its place.

*

WHILE Henry Lewis Stimson was being labeled revolutionary and radical by the career corps in regard to Count Karolyi Liberia and Russia, he was being bull-headed, militaristic and inept in handling a score of other things, including Brazil Fascism and Major-General Smedley Butler.

Fundamentally, Mr. Stimson is as honest as he tries to be fair. He has two definite handicaps, however. One is an exceedingly bad memory. The other is a temper. On occasion, Mr. Stimson has completely lost control of the latter. He has sputtered, fumed and issued red-hot statements which focused public attention upon his difficulties. Very few people in the United States ever would have heard of the Washington Post's insult to Prince de Ligne, the Belgian Ambassador, had not Stimson publicly denounced it. Nor would any one have cared a tinker's dam whether he was properly consulting with the Secretary of the Navy during the Japanese naval negotiations,

It was not a faulty memory, however, that has sometimes caused Mr. Stimson, his back to the wall, to issue what is referred to in polite circles as a diplomatic denial, but which among the more hard-fisted is known as an ordinary variety of cheap garden lie.

Every foreign office in Europe issues them—on the average of two or three times a week. But American diplomacy has so boasted of its own chastity and Mr. Stimson has been given such a character of aristocratic saintliness, that it surprised some of his friends to hear Rear-Admiral Hilary P. Jones inform a Senate committee under oath that he had told Mr. Stimson he would not go to London, whereas Mr. Stimson had previously told the press that Admiral Jones had told him no such thing. Again it jarred some of those not conversant with the wiles of diplomacy to hear Mr. Stimson say that the Canadian Minister, Vincent Massey, had never expressed alarm over American tariff increases, whereas Senators Borah and Watson said that Mr. Stimson had told them quite a contrary story.

Unfortunately, Mr. Stimson was right but didn't know it. The United States and Brazil both had ratified a multi-lateral treaty some four months before making such an embargo obligatory, but Mr. Stimson didn't know it existed and the bright young men who advise him had forgotten about it.

Thereafter, Stimson's old nickname was changed to "Wrong-Horse Harry."

He has been trying to explain his Brazilian mistake ever since. During the course of one of these explanations, before the Council of Foreign Relations, Mr. Stimson cited the arms treaty as justification for his embargo, but failed to mention the rather relevant point that he did not know of its existence at the time.

It was also bull-headedness that got Secretary Stimson into such a mess with those two poles of personality, Benito Mussolini and Smedley Butler. Stimson had supported Hoover in his demand that the stormy petrel of the Marine Corps be court-martialed instead of merely reprimanded as punishment for calling the Premier of Italy a hit-and-run driver.

After the court martial had been ordered and there had been ample time to gauge the nation-wide abuse which it was heaping on the Hoover Administration, an emissary of General Butler's approached Stimson suggesting the court martial be abandoned. He found the Secretary of State in a mood reminiscent of the days when he was Secretary of War—of the days when his great-grandfathers had taken down their rifles to fight in King Philip's War, the French and Indian War.

Stimson made his first move—a proposal that instead of a court martial, Butler be reprimanded, removed from his command and placed on the list awaiting orders. Leonard laughed in the emissary's face.

Stimson made his second move—a proposal that Butler be reprimanded, removed from his command and sent to Guam instead of being put on the list awaiting orders. Leonard laughed again.

The terms were accepted.

This was the second time Mr. Stimson had gone wrong where Mussolini was concerned. At the height of his clean-up of Kellogg's moth-eaten imperialistic policies, Mr. Stimson's attention was called to the fact that Mussolini's Ambassador in the United States, together with his consuls, had been pro-

moting a reign of terror among Italo-Americans. Mussolini's envoys had been endeavoring to collect taxes from them. They had tried to prevent their naturalization as American citizens. They had spread Fascist propaganda among American schools, in one case causing the dismissal of a school teacher who refused to use the propaganda supplied her. And they had insisted that all Italians join and contribute to the Fascist League of North America.

Stimson ordered an investigation. But it was carried out under the direction of William R. Castle, Jr., then Assistant Secretary, whose best friend is Ambassador Martino and who gives to Fascism the same respectful reverence that his missionary ancestors divided between the Bible and the acquisition of land from Hawaiian natives.

The result was a white-wash of both Mussolini and his representatives in the United States. Mr. Stimson could not help knowing that Castle's investigation was violently partisan. But as a result of his birth and background, Mr. Stimson has a certain respect for established order, especially when it is in the form of a high-powered and successful dictatorship with which he is trying to negotiate a naval agreement. So he saved for Liberia and Nicaragua the invective which Mussolini justly had coming to him, and accepted the Castle report.

*

tenant and was one of the first to enlist. But to have a former Secretary of War rank no higher than a Lieutenant was most embarrassing, and Pershing very soon assigned him to the 305th Field Artillery with the rank of Colonel. Like all Stimsons, he served faithfully, though not brilliantly, saw real service in France and won the respect and devotion of his men.

After the War was over, after he had become Secretary of State, even after he had participated in ceremonies commemorating a Pact Renouncing War, Stimson showed how deeply implanted is his devotion to the military by declaring his views on compulsory military training unchanged—that now, as before the War, every young man in the United States should be compelled to spend several precious months carrying a rifle around a dusty parade-ground for the honor, glory and defense of his country.

Despite all this, Mr. Stimson considers himself a devout disciple of peace. He makes this declaration so often that he gives the impression he is chiefly trying to convince himself of his own pacifism. And while Henry Lewis Stimson would become an outright pacifist only if he, himself, could perpetually dictate the terms of peace, he does have very genuine but poorly managed impulses in that direction.

The two outstanding examples are his effort to uphold the Kellogg Treaty in Manchuria and the London Naval Conference.

Stimson's attack on naval disarmament had been painstakingly planned. He stumbled into the Manchurian row by accident. Although it is not generally appreciated, Stimson probably did a better job in Manchuria than at London.

In dealing with the crisis in Manchuria, Stimson showed more nerve than he has displayed in tackling any other problem. Although the slap which he got from Litvinoff for his pains resounded with such a whack that it drowned the real effect of his work, actually Stimson ended a near war in

Possibly if Mr. Stimson had known the Senate in those earlier days as he does now, he would have been more cautious. The principle of what he did went diametrically against the grain of what a majority of the Senate has stood for during a century of isolation. Manchuria was some 6,000 miles away. Only about \$12,000,000 worth of American property and a score of Jewish-American fur-buyers are located in the entire area and they were nowhere near the scene of the dispute.

There was no material reason why the United States should have been interested in a war in Manchuria except this:

The United States had taken the initiative in negotiating a treaty for the outlawry of war. The last nation had ratified the pact, and President Hoover had invited its author, Frank B. Kellogg, and all the diplomatic representatives of the nations which had signed it, to attend a gala ceremony at the White House, formally declaring the Pact in effect and war outlawed throughout the world.

Mr. Stimson had the alternative of acting vigorously or seeing the Kellogg Pact and the White House ceremony become the laughing stock of the world. He was not, however, goaded into action by ridicule alone. Essentially slow-moving and lazy, ridicule supplied the kick-off, but when Henry Lewis Stimson got going, he went all the way. He made it clear that his action in throwing the entire weight of the United States against war was a precedent, and that thereafter the United States intended to set itself up as the protector of the Pact of Paris and the guardian of the peace of the world.

Litvinoff's slap could have been avoided. In the first place Stimson's battle had been pretty well won before Litvinoff retaliated. In the second place, although few people knew it Stimson had been fighting on Litvinoff's side.

All during the controversy Mr. Stimson had championed the Russian cause. The chief bone of contention was whether China should return the Chinese Eastern Railroad before the dispute was arbitrated. Russia contended that the railroad had been seized illegally and that its future ownership could not be arbitrated fairly while it remained in the possession of China. Stimson backed Russia in this contention and he backed her to the limit. He summoned the meek little Chinese Minister, C. C. Wu, to his office, pounded on the desk and demanded that the railroad be turned back to Russia. His eyes snapped and his words rasped. When Stimson starts one of his pounding scenes he can be an awesome individual.

When he left, Russian troops, having waited to take advantage of frozen ground, had advanced some eighty miles into Chinese territory. Mr. Stimson was absent for five days. During those five days the Russians completely evacuated Chinese soil. Mr. Stimson, when he returned, did not bother to read the telegrams the State Department had received reporting this evacuation and sent two sharply worded notes drawn up during his vacation, to China and Russia.

Mr. Stimson probably regrets the time element in regard to his last note, but he has never regretted the stand he took

MR. STIMSON has confided to his friends that his greatest ambition before he became Secretary of State was to end the back-biting rivalry between Great Britain and the United States which reached its climax after the abortive Geneva Naval Conference, when France and Britain negotiated a secret agreement of their own and Mr. Coolidge, in retaliation, instructed Frank B. Kellogg to snub the British by sailing only within nose-thumbing distance of their shores while en route to Ireland in the summer of 1928. Mr. Stimson's hope was to negotiate, as the foundation for a new Anglo-American friendship, a new naval treaty.

Sincere as this ambition was, Mr. Stimson, as in most things, was pushed into it. Even before he became Secretary of State and was en route from the Philippines to Washington, the Japanese, worried about increased cruiser construction, got Stimson ashore at Tokyo, wined and dined him and emphasized the importance of holding a naval conference as soon as possible.

A day or two after his arrival in Washington, Stimson was called into a conference between President Hoover and Hugh Gibson, perpetual plenipotentiary for the United States at all disarmament conferences. These two had been planning some surprises for the French and British at the session of the Preparatory Commission on Disarmament opening in Genevatwo weeks hence, and Stimson's capacity at that first conference was merely to listen and nod approval.

During all of those early naval negotiations through the summer of 1929, it was Hoover who did the pushing and

Unquestionably in this case tenacity was a virtue. But with Stimson naval negotiations monopolized his time almost to the exclusion of everything else. During November and December, prior to the departure of the American delegation in January, Mr. Stimson spent practically all of his time in his study at Woodley. There, rather than at the State Department, he held conferences with the admirals, the experts and the members of the delegation who were to accompany him. There he held long sessions with the Japanese Delegation when it passed through Washington. There the details of the American program were meticulously worked out. Rarely did Mr. Stimson set foot within the State Department, and the foreign affairs of the United States, other than those pertaining to the navy, were left entirely in the hands of Mr. Joseph P. Cotton.

But despite his advance concentration on naval affairs, despite the months of detachment at Woodley, Mr. Stimson

The problem Mr. Stimson faced at London was far different from anything he had tackled before in his entire life. In Nicaragua and the Philippines he was dealing with primitive peoples and had the army and navy of the United States at his back. His word was law. He could engage in the most generous discussions with them, but if they did not agree in the end they had to yield.

In this emergency he fell down. He fell down with the press at the start. He fell down with his fellow-delegates on the straight-away. He fell down with the American public on the home stretch.

ambition had been to put an end to naval competition and to begin a new era of Anglo-American friendship. All eyes were on him.

And he muffed the ball.

His chief fault lay in the fact that he knew this was his supreme moment. He knew that all eyes were on him. He knew that responsibility for success or failure rested entirely on his shoulders. So he accepted every infinitesimal and unimportant responsibility there was to accept. He delegated little to others. He was surrounded by six American delegates, all touted by the Hoover Administration as headliners. Of these, four at least, deserved their reputations. Ambassador Dawes had been able to make a recalcitrant Europe accept a revision of reparations. Dwight W. Morrow had come out on top of a score of difficult negotiations in the Allied shipping controversy, to say nothing of the collapse of Cuba and the oil and religious controversies in Mexico. Senators Reed and Robinson were tried and trusted warriors who had been able to wheedle and jockey agreements out of difficult political alignments.

A good executive would have used these men. Stimson did not. To Reed and Morrow he delegated certain negotiations with the Japanese and the French. The other negotiations he kept chiefly in his own hands. And he worried over them. He fretted with detail. He became nervous and confused, until, sometimes at meetings of all seven delegates, six would be in unanimous agreement and an extra hour was necessary to bring the chief delegate—Mr. Stimson—into line.

Four factors contributed to Stimson's downfall at London:

The habit of relying on the whip hand he held in the

War Department, in Nicaragua and in the Philippines, and which was lacking in London;

Nervous fatigue.

Whether this or something else was responsible, Stimson was perpetually worn out in London; and despite the fact that the fall of the French Cabinet gave him three weeks' breathing spell, despite the fact that he had two weeks on the high seas coming from and going to London, he took two months' rest in the Adirondacks immediately the treaty was ratified.

Next to his fatigue, which he could not prevent and which

And as with a great many other things which have mattered much in his life, he was rushed into a situation before he knew what it was all about.

Finally, when Secretary Stimson, at a journalistic luncheon, let drop the fact that he favored a consultative pact, American public opinion had been so see-sawed back and forth, so juggled up and down, for and against a consultative pact, that ratification in the Senate appeared unlikely and President Hoover finally cabled Stimson to drop it.

horses in Rock Creek Park and met Theodore Roosevelt, then President, accompanied by Mr. Root, then Secretary of War. The creek was between them. Roosevelt, who knew Stimson, but did not recognize him at a distance, asked Root who the soldierly-looking horseman was.

"Lieutenant Stimson, of the New York National Guard," replied Root. And then, calling across the creek, he ordered:

The incident is illustrative of one of the most important points in Stimson's make-up. He is a fighter, but first of all he is a soldier. He obeys orders. He has courage, both moral and physical. He has guts and he has nerve. He will not retreat—except under one condition—if ordered.

As Secretary of State he has now got to the point where he encourages in his subordinates a great deal of discussion. He is liberal to the extent of listening to their views and usually accepting them. On occasion he gives orders. And when he gives them, he expects them to be obeyed.

Therefore when the President of the United States tells Mr. Stimson he is opposed to a consultative pact, when he tells him that he will not under any circumstances recognize Russia, when he tells him that he is opposed to too much American participation in the General Disarmament Conference at Geneva, Mr. Stimson obeys.

CHAPTER SIX

PINK PEPPERMINTS AND PROTOCOL

NCE one penetrates the massive pile of dirty gray pillars which an act of Congress has finally decreed must give way to the capital's beautification program, the Department of State is not an unattractive place. Its high ceilings, wide corridors and walls three feet thick make it cooler than any Maryland or Virginia country club during Washington's sweltering summers. Its southeastern rooms overlook prim Presidential lawns; across the street, green stretches of Potomac Park and the broad Potomac itself reaching out toward Alexandria, the Chesapeake and the sea. Its swinging lattice doors, its wide marble mantelpieces, the carefully polished copper fixtures in its wash-rooms—all create an atmosphere of antiquity, solidarity and imperialism characteristic of the hand at the helm of American foreign affairs.

138 WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND

Everything about the Department, from its deep fireplaces to its portraits of stern and ancient Secretaries of State creates the impression that not a single thing, not even a colored messenger, has been changed for a hundred years.

This is a delusion. The State Department has changed. There was a day when Thomas Jefferson, the first Secretary of State, moved into his new quarters in Philadelphia, with a staff consisting of four clerks and one French interpreter, plus three ministers and sixteen consuls stationed abroad. There was a day when letters to ministers and consuls were laboriously copied in the American Letter Book, when these notes required four to six weeks to reach their destination and sometimes were written in invisible ink with a notation on the outside: "To be sunk in case of danger from the enemy."

To-day State Department telegraph operators working day and night, send and receive cablegrams costing \$200,000 a year. The messages are coded or decoded by trusted experts sitting in a room to themselves, mimeographed, and placed on the desks of the Secretary and his assistants twenty minutes after their arrival. About 3,400 letters are mailed from the Department daily, while fifty diplomatic pouches of mail are taken off steamers in New York harbor every morning by special Department representatives and rushed to Washington several hours ahead of ordinary mail. These fifty pouches contain the reports of the 4,000 representatives which the State Department maintains at some 425 foreign posts, and these reports in turn are circulated among the 600 officers and clerks of the Department by a system which despite the age and decrepitude of its messengers cleans out the file boxes in each office every twenty minutes.

Not only has the State Department changed, but despite its pleasant atmosphere of antiquity, its machinery, at least, is now about as efficient as that of most government departments. This is rather a back-handed compliment, when the top-heavy and cumbersome organization of some Depart-

ments, especially the army and navy, is taken into consideration. However, despite the fact that the State Department is no worse than any of the others, its reputation is just the opposite. In Washington it is called the most inefficient, dilatory, procrastinating and red-tape-bound bureaucracy in the government service. Outside of Washington, businessmen compare it unfavorably with the Department of Commerce, while editors leap at opportunities to pooh-pooh the slightest tendency toward white-spats and namby-pambyism on the part of its officers.

The State Department has played all the trump cards in its hand in order to live down this reputation. The Secretary of State has made speeches, the Under-Secretary has gone on a barn-storming trip, and the Bureau of Current Information has inspired articles—all to no avail. The fact remains that most people in the United States, who have ever heard of the State Department at all, have heard of it as a social club whose members are selected from blue-stocking Bostonians, wield their forks with their left hands, and are no more representative of American life than the Redskins whom their ancestors pushed west.

Broadly speaking, this is not true. There is just enough truth in it, however, to make the picture persist. Out of the four thousand-odd diplomats, consuls, clerks, and stenographers, who represent the State Department both at home and abroad, only a few hundred honestly deserve the epithets they get. However, these few not only are completely impossible, but also happen to be placed in strategic places where they constantly and consistently act as a cinder in the public eye.

There are two other concrete reasons why the State Department's unenviable reputation continues to persist.

Second, the career men of the State Department were given their chance in 1925, failed to grasp it, and have never been able to live down that failure.

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The Rogers Act also drew a sharp caste line between the foreign service, or career men, on the one hand, and the drafting officers on the other. Drafting officers are permanently appointed to serve in the State Department and never go abroad to serve in legations and embassies. Men of more brains than means, they frequently write the orders which the Ambassador in the field must carry out. The career, or foreign service, officers, on the other hand, are supposed to spend practically all of their time abroad, being allowed to come back to Washington occasionally for short periods of service in the State Department. Their salaries are higher than those of the drafting officers, and they also receive small allowances for rent, teas, dinners, receptions, wreaths, birthday gifts and other means by which a diplomat justifies his retention in a foreign capital.

Within the foreign service itself, the Rogers Act failed to eradicate a second caste line, not so sharply drawn, however, between the consuls and the diplomats. In theory, the two branches of the service are one, and a man may transfer back and forth between them. Actually, however, the diplomats look down upon the consuls, who have to keep regular office hours and bother with such plebeian routine as bills of lading, clearance papers, reporting trade opportunities and sending home the clothes of dead seamen. The diplomatic branch requires money, a broad Bostonian A, and the knack of handling a tea-cup. There are about one hundred career diplomats and over four hundred career consuls in the service.

The Rogers Act put this diplomatic group of career men on top of the State Department. They could get anything they wanted and their appetites were insatiable. Frank B. Kellogg, nervous, inexperienced, had just come back from the Court of St. James. Qualified to become Secretary of State only because he was one of the very few Senators who had chatted occasionally with Calvin Coolidge, then a very much snubbed Vice President, Kellogg relied on the career men.

He found as his Under-Secretary, Joseph Clark Grew, wealthy descendant of the Boston Cabots, and related by marriage to the House of Morgan. Not knowing what else to do with his time or his money, Grew decided that the Diplomatic Service was as pleasant and patriotic a career as any and had prepared for it by tiger shooting in Manchuria, elephant hunting in India, and a clerkship in the American consulate in Cairo at the age of twenty-four. In the twenty years which followed, he had made an excellent record for himself and attained the rank of Minister. As Under-Secretary of State, however, Grew was in constant hot water. The administration of a legation abroad with a staff of three or four, he discovered, was far different from the problem of running a high-powered machine employing six hundred people which grinds out American foreign policy for every part of the world.

tion in Panama, did the same. Every newspaper in the country carried articles and editorials denouncing the self-promotion plan of the career men. And worst of all, big business, the god whom the State Department strives chiefly to serve, joined in the denunciation. Victor M. Cutter, President of the United Fruit Company and who ought to know diplomats, made a speech before the high moguls of big business gathered at the annual meeting of the United States Chamber of Commerce, denouncing the career men as lounge lizards and displayers of the white spat; while The Magazine of Wall Street published a scathing article, illustrated with sketches of a high hat, stick, gloves, spats and all the accounterments of the career service.

As result of all this, the career clique's bubble burst with tremendous reverberations and the following consequences:

• 1. The ring-leaders of the inner circle, Joe Grew, J. Butler Wright, Leland Harrison, Hugh Wilson, having seen the hand-writing on the wall, appointed themselves as Ambassador to Turkey, Minister to Hungary, Minister to Sweden and Minister to Switzerland, respectively, just before the smash

career service. Discovering this fact, Bliss recalled the invitation and asked Dwight to come to the second reception for the common people.

There was nothing unusual about Bliss's social snobbery. It is rather common in the State Department. The social line drawn between the foreign service officer of the select career service and the drafting officer who sometimes rises from a clerkship used to be as strict as the distinction between Brahmin and untouchable. To some it still is. Joshua Butler Wright is of the old school. He does not appear to be. He once punched cattle on a Wyoming ranch and still labors under the delusion that he can mix with "folks." His old job as Assistant Secretary of State did not give him much time for this, however. He was the State Department's glad-hander and took pride in his work. Every ticket-puncher and porter at the Union Station knew him. There was even a rumor that some of them called him "Butsy." The sight of Joshua Butler Wright, attired in Bond Street topper, cutaway, tailored in Saville Row, cream-colored gloves and malacca stick, strolling down to Gate Number 18 was the cue to every employee in the Union Station that a new Ambassador was arriving in town.

Those were the halcyon days when the State Department was a rich man's club and no one was afraid to admit it. Its members took this for granted. In fact, many of them opposed the Rogers Bill boosting salaries because they sincerely believed that high salaries would open the gates of diplomacy to hoi polloi and that the responsibility for representing the U.S.A. abroad should fall only on the shoulders of the wealthy few.

146 WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND

No one is very brazen about admitting such a thing these days, but, occasionally, in shadowy corners of the Metropolitan Club one hears whispers that the career service is not what it was in the good old days when a substantial private fortune was necessary in order to become a Third Secretary of Legation.

As a matter of fact, it still takes nothing short of a miracle for a man to get transferred from the consular to the diplomatic branch of the service unless he has a private income, at least a small one. This is one of the factors which tends to make the career service so unpopular with the general public.

The general public, traveling in Europe for the first time in the person of a school teacher from Wichita or a banker from Pueblo, drops in at the American Embassy in Paris or Madrid with the feeling that he is helping to pay for the upkeep of the place and might possibly run across some of the folks from home. However, he meets there a young man with glasses who has spent all of his life since graduation in the rarefied atmosphere of pink teas, protocol and diplomacy, who knows nothing of the United States outside of Cambridge, New York, Bar Harbor and Washington, who has soiled his hands at no manual labor more arduous than bridge, and the result is a clash which not only does not enhance the prestige of the foreign service back in Kansas and Colorado but which makes the young man feel that his country is populated with hicks who don't deserve to have their interests protected.

The result of all this is that the career service has never been known to sympathize with any point of view other than that of entrenched wealth. Its members are ideally qualified to protect the interests of those who contribute to the Coolidge and Hoover Administrations. Most of them have spent their lives hanging on to what their fathers made. The business man who has made money on his own initiative is rare in their midst, and as a result, their approach to every problem is negative rather than positive. Their motto is that which hangs in Pull-

man car vestibules after ten o'clock: "Quiet is requested for the benefit of those who have retired."

So warped is their vision, so ultra-conservative their outlook on life that Dorsey Richardson, one-time Assistant Chief of the Western European Division, cautioned a colleague against mentioning the fact that he had lunched with Senator LaFollette. Similarly Noel Field, a studious and naïve idealist just entered the Department, was considered too radical to be assigned to duty abroad because he had written a pamphlet on international conciliation published by the Carnegie Foundation.

Another man who was temporarily detained from going to the field was Eugene Macfarlane Hinkle, but for entirely different reasons. Gene was a nice boy and socially successful. But although he had squeezed through the State Department examinations, he still didn't know what it was all about. Even after he had remained in the Department for the usual training period of one year, his knowledge was still confined to such rudimentary ideas as the fact that Russia is Red and Latin-American relations are difficult. Therefore, it was decided that Hinkle's only salvation was a year's service in the Division of Current Information where he would have to answer a half-hundred newspaper queries a day on everything from the width of the Suez Canal to the make-up of the French Cabinet. The newspapermen were patient—at first, Hinkle took hours to answer queries. He wound himself up in red-tape. Finally, the press protested. After several protests they took their case to the Secretary of State—to no avail. Hinkle had a friend at court. He was a relative of Joseph Clark Grew, then Under-Secretary.

years. Some of them never get out at all. But this rule did not hold with Hinkle. After two years at Cape Town, he was transferred to Constantinople where he became a Secretary of Embassy under the watchful eye of his relative, Ambassador Grew.

The cardinal principle of the career service is that fresh blood shall never be admitted unless it starts at the bottom of the ladder. It makes no difference whether a man has made a reputation at law or in business. If he then decides that he has acquired certain experience which makes him valuable to his country and if he decides to serve his country as Diplomat or Consul, he is then given an opportunity to throw in his lot with a bevy of college boys who have boned up for the examination, and if he works brilliantly and consistently, he may, before he reaches the age of sixty, have been promoted from a salary of \$2,500 a year to \$6,000 or \$7,000.

This principle of self-protection is the first rule of the service. So sacred is it that one Frederick Dagonet Kellogg LeClercq was able to continue in the service long after his value to the State Department had ceased. Freddie also was a nice boy. He had wit and the old ladies liked him. His rise was rapid. As Secretary of Embassy in London his duties were light. He persuaded his Ambassador to let him spend his time studying at Oxford. This, Freddie argued, would better prepare him to serve his country. Freddie was graduated from Oxford and went to Tokyo, where he used to create sensations by strolling around the lobbies of the Imperial Hotel in his pajamas. Arrested on a Japanese train for gambling, he was foolish enough to escape by pleading diplomatic immunity, much to the disgust of his Ambassador. Returned to Washington shortly after this incident, Freddie worked only part time in the State Department, using the balance to study law at George Washington University, again arguing that this, also, would prepare him for the service of his country. Freddie's colleagues realized his weaknesses but protected him.

Thanks to the protective code of the foreign service, Freddie led a charmed life. He had his stay in Washington extended beyond the usual term in order to get his law degree. Finally, however, with the sheepskin a month from his grasp, Freddie fell. Charges were preferred against him by a group of high school girls he had met in a bus.

Unless one is as reckless in his amours as Freddie LeClercq, or unless one as flagrantly misbehaves as the inebriated diplomatic secretary who told President King of Liberia that the United States was god damn tired of its mandate over his Republic, practically no one is ever thrown out of the career service. That is one of its greatest faults.

To throw a man out is to admit publicly the weakness of the service, so its members argue. The result is—deadwood may drift on forever.

A great many people quit, but usually they are wealthy, fed-up, or feel their service has not been properly appreciated at home. For instance, William Phillips resigned as Minister to Canada ostensibly because he wanted to educate his children in the United States, but actually because he was peeved at not being made Ambassador to Rome. Leland Harrison resigned as Minister to Uruguay partly because the flies were bad and his children sick, but chiefly because he was piqued at not getting Billy Phillips' post in Ottawa and felt that he was being shunted off to a post much below his dignity. Fortunately for Harrison, Henry P. Fletcher had resigned as Ambassador to Rome with the idea of becoming either Sec-

retary of State or Senator from Pennsylvania and, having failed at both, had to content himself with the thankless and insignificant chairmanship of the Tariff Commission. So he took Harrison on his staff. Franklin Mott Gunther, whom the foreign service frowns upon because he got Senator Swanson to push his appointment as Minister to Egypt, resigned because he was offered nothing more important than a ministership to Ecuador. Failing even the luck of a berth on the Tariff Commission and not wanting to degrade himself with his father's fur trade, Gunther has taken up archeology.

But on paper, at least, the State Department's machinery is perfect. The Department is divided up into divisions, There is the Western European Division which handles the countries of Western Europe with their colonies, watches every political move made in that area, writes instructions to American diplomats in Western Europe and advises the Secretary of State in regard to Western European problems. The same is true for Eastern Europe, the Near East, the Far East, Mexico and Latin America.

The administrators of this conglomeration of divisions are three Assistant Secretaries of State. The oldest in point of service is Wilbur John Carr, the only man in the State Department who has worked his way up from a menial clerkship to a position of major importance. For nineteen years he supported an invalid wife on an infinitesimal salary and rose from Clerk to Chief Clerk, then to Director of the Consular Bureau. His wife died, and seven years later he married again, this time to a lady of wealth. Wealth is the first requisite of success in the State Department and from that time on Carr vas made. Carr had not only wealth but experience and a reasonable amount of brains. The result is that he runs most of the administrative bureaus of the State Department and runs them fairly well. He is slow, meticulous to the last T, and has the habit of getting his desk piled so high with papers that the Under-Secretary of State once ordered him to clean them off. He is cursed from every side. It is Carr here and Carr there, and Carr's to blame for anything happening anywhere, but if he passed out of the picture the State Department would look years before it could replace him.

Next to Carr in time of service is William R. Castle, Jr., who could be, if he would, the most effective man in the Department. Castle has most of the qualifications necessary for a successful diplomat. His family supplied him with money, and thanks to the fact that his missionary ancestors knew how to secure Hawaiian pineapple fields as well as convert the heathen, he is supplied most liberally. He also has great charm, a sense of humor and a keen mind. On two points only does Castle miss out in being a really effective man. He completely lacks breadth of vision and he is what the French call a bon fou homme.

Stimson was shrewd enough to size up Castle at the very start. Castle had pulled every wire there was to be pulled to get himself appointed Under-Secretary of State. He had gone to the Kansas City convention under the pretext of marshaling votes for Herbert Hoover. He had dug up old passports in the State Department to prove that Hoover had retained his citizenship during the period he was abroad. He had made every kind and degree of obeisance before the Republican candidate's altar.

over the way Castle brought pressure upon him to secure the appointment.

So Castle rolled up all his big guns, the most important of which was David Aiken Reed, astute Senator from Pennsylvania and Castle's neighbor on S Street. Reed went to another neighbor on S Street—Herbert Hoover—and demanded Castle's appointment. Reed had battled Hoover's and Stimson's London Naval Treaty through the Senate. He had upheld the President's hand against the Democrats on Arkansas food relief and a dozen other things. Hoover was in no position to refuse. Furthermore, he liked Castle.

A few weeks later, Reed announced his support of American entrance into the Court.

Francis White, Assistant Secretary of State in charge of Latin-American Affairs, is one of those persons who couples a remarkably effective brain with a rather ineffective personality. He has that asset of looking dumb but being just the opposite. After one knows White all his virtues burst into full bloom, but he takes eons of knowing.

Like almost every other man who has risen to high rank in the State Department he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He comes from one of the old aristocratic, horse-and-hound families of the Maryland Green Spring Valley, as does also his wife; and her buoyancy and charm fully compensate for the initial lack of charm of her husband. Latin Americans wonder how he won her.

White got the blame for one serious slip-up which Secretary Stimson made when he slapped an embargo on arms shipments to Brazilian rebels just a day before those rebels overthrew the government which Stimson was endeavoring to keep in power. Stimson justified his embargo on the ground that it was required by international law—a contention which was directly contrary to the opinion of his legal experts. Had Francis White been diligent in digging up the facts, however, Mr. Stimson would have been able to justify his embargo by a treaty to which Brazil and the United States were both parties, proclaimed by President Hoover only four months before, and which bound both countries to declare arms embargoes in favor of the other in case of revolution. No one in the State Department seemed to know about the treaty until Drew Pearson published it in the Baltimore Sun several days later, which caused Secretary Stimson to wax exceeding wroth at his Assistant Secretary in charge of Latin-American relations.

White speaks perfect Spanish with a strong British accent. One of his greatest assets is his ability to wait, and this made him the Latin-American bumper for Frank B. Kellogg. Kellogg wanted immediate action and would drive full force into Francis White. White would recoil and then gradually ease Kellogg down to a full stop.

In Nelson T. Johnson, now Minister to China, Willys R. Peck, Consul-General in Nanking, George C. Hanson, Consul-General in Harbin, and a score of other "China hands," the State Department has some of the outstanding men in the service who have been responsible for the high regard which the United States holds among the 400,000,000 people who crowd China's borders.

soured on them. While still Assistant Secretary of State and just before his departure to China, Lyle Wilson of the United Press showed Johnson a toy paper airplane which looped-the-loop, dipped and circled automatically. Johnson was as pleased as a small boy. A few days later Wilson went back to the store to get another plane, but the dealer was sold out. He explained that the new Minister to China had purchased his entire stock.

Johnson appreciated the Chinese sense of humor. He was preparing for his new job.

In the Near East the State Department is almost as fortunate. Gardiner Howland Shaw, George Wadsworth, Paul Knabenshue and Paul H. Alling know their Turkey, Egypt, Syria and Arabia far better than they know the United States. Shaw, frequent target of the Ku Klux Klan, because he once studied for the Jesuit priesthood, is one of the ablest members of the foreign service. A man of great wealth, he leads the life of a recluse, poring over tomes on Turkish politics, the Arabic language and Persian art. Wallace Smith Murray, despite an ingrained and incurable streak of imperialism, stands above the rank and file in intelligence and has boosted himself to be Chief of the Near Eastern Division.

Despite the fact that he is surrounded by able and brilliant men, Ambassador Grew also is surprisingly successful in the Near East. The secret of this is the fact that Grew is an excellent diplomat when stationed abroad but a poor executive when administering the State Department. He now has set up an ambassadorial record in Constantinople of having saved two Turks who, on different occasions, were about to drown. He is the most popular foreigner in Turkey.

Soviet Russia, but at present most people in the State Department forget its existence. Robert F. Kelley, Chief of the Division, is the high priest of the fanatic little clique which believes that nothing good can come out of Russia, not even the Moscow Art Players. He, together with Bill Castle, was responsible more than any one else for the bitterly anti-Russian policy adopted by Charles Evans Hughes and Frank B. Kellogg. Kelley has never been in Russia. He knows nothing of the Russian people. Except for a few months spent in Calcutta as Vice-Consul, all his service for the State Department has been within the narrow walls of his own office. Yet from that office the Russian policy of the United States has been dictated for the past eight years.

Since the day when Dwight W. Morrow became Ambassador, American policy in regard to Mexico has been run from Mexico City and the Mexican Division has become a mere rubber stamp. With Joshua Reuben Clark succeeding Mr. Morrow, this is still true. Clark was partly responsible for Morrow's success. Trained in the State Department's legal department, Clark is an outstanding authority on international law and held the office of Under-Secretary of State prior to Cotton's appointment. Clark could have remained in that office, had it not been for two facts. First, he had no love for Herbert Hoover. Second, he was drawing a salary of only \$10,000. Ambassador Dwight Morrow offered him much more.

Both Hoover and Clark swallowed their dislike of each other later when Morrow read them an ultimatum to the effect that his work in Mexico would have to be carried on and that Clark was the only man who could do it. Even then there was some doubt as to whether or not Clark, because of his modest circumstances, would take the appointment. His wife, however, soon settled that. Asked by newspapermen at her home in Salt Lake City whether Reuben had enough money to swing an ambassadorial job, she answered:

"Of course he has. You can say that he will take it."

Mr. Clark is a Mormon but he has only one wife.

Under William R. Castle, the Western-European Division ranked next to the Latin-American Division as the weakes in the Department. To-day, under James Theodore Marriner it is one of the strongest. This is not Marriner's fault, however He is not an administrator. His health is not good and he is so fond of basking in the admiration of doting old ladies and pretty young things that he can never say no to a dinner invitation, with the result that his health does not improve. Marriner is witty, brilliant and keen. He is in Mr. Stimson's complete confidence and is his most trusted expert on disarmament. Although Castle is supposed to be Marriner's superior, the latter is given far more responsibility by the Secretary. On the whole, Marriner is an excellent advisor, though like so many career men his tendency is to anticipate what the Secretary wants and serve it up to him on a silver tray pre-digested.

Marriner has under him two assistants who, except for specialties in which their chief is interested, practically run his division for him. They are John Crawford Hickerson and Pierre de Lagarde Boal. Hickerson is the specialist on Canadian affairs and one of the soundest thinkers in the Department. Boal, born in France of American parents, married a French wife and served in the French air service. He is a conscientious and able expert on French affairs and disarmament. Outstanding among others in the Western-European Division are Robert Green, a former Princeton professor, Paul Culbertson, brother of the Ambassador to Chile, and John Carter, former editorial writer for the New York Times, who suffered agonies trying to make his journalese conform to the stodgy style of diplomatic notes when he first entered the Department. He still keeps his pen pointed by writing inaccurate but amusing articles under a pseudonym.

These six political divisions are constantly on the State Department's firing line. It is through them that instructions to American ambassadors regarding the most important events taking place abroad are constantly sent. And it is the political

There are a dozen additional divisions in the State Department but they are behind the firing line. There is the Solicitor's Office, probably the most important section in the whole machinery of foreign affairs, but like a munitions plant in the rear, it grinds out legal opinions—ammunition for the political divisions. And it grinds thoroughly and slowly. At its head is Green H. Hackworth, jovial, ponderous, able, and hemmed in by so many of Mr. Stimson's legal friends in the persons of Allen Trafford Klots and James Grafton Rogers that his style is severely cramped.

There is also the Division of Current Information, directed by Michael McDermott, an amiable Irishman, naïve and idealistic enough to believe that the hand of God guides the Secretary of State, which makes him suffer inward agonies in dealing with agnostic newspaper men.

There is also the Office of the Historical Advisor, built up to be one of the most valuable in the Department by Tyler Dennett, who finally rebelled at the obstacles put in his path by the career clique and took leave of absence until such time as Secretary Stimson could make up his mind whether he did or did not want to continue the policy inaugurated by Abraham Lincoln of publishing without censorship the past diplomatic correspondence of the United States.

Many things may happen in these havens of career refuge which the State Department at home seldom hears and certainly never lets leak if it does. It is a nice tight little diplomatic world, with a premium on pink peppermints and protocol, and into which entrance for the uninitiated is as difficult as for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE MAN WHO STAYED TOO LONG

NDREW WILLIAM MELLON will go down in history as the man who did not know when to quit.

For eight years he dominated the national capital. For eight years his word was law with every banker throughout the land. For eight years Presidents served under him. So powerful was his influence, so great his prestige that he told them what to do and his judgment was final.

In Congress his name was spoken in hushed tones. By the press he was referred to only with profound obeisance. When he rewrote the taxation system of the United States, the entire nation echoed his praise. When he relieved the wealthy of their taxes, when he took billions out of the Treasury in the form of tax refunds and returned them to already over-prosperous corporations, only a handful of Senators raised their voices against him.

Small, emaciated, shy, giving the impression of being timid but always surrounded by an army of assistants and servitors. Andrew Mellon became a figure of might and power. To his simply furnished office in the barred and guarded Treasury. Building, politicians, social leaders, diplomats and the barons of big business came to bow before him.

For eight years he was reverenced in high places. For eight years his wisdom was hailed as sublime. For eight years his views were acclaimed as enduring philosophy, his achievements labeled historic. Far and wide he was heralded as Great.

Gone are his magic surpluses. Gone are his promises of tax reduction. Gone are the hallowed days of prosperity. Gone is the time when the White House accepted his word as law.

Fame, throne, scepter, halo, all have been torn from him. They disappeared the day Herbert Hoover persuaded him to remain in office. For Herbert Hoover he had neither regard nor affection. But he had listened to the adulation of the multitude. He had heard his name on the lips of the people. He liked it. And he stayed on.

So now he speaks when it suits the White House, and he says what the White House wants him to say. If the White House wants an announcement that there will be no deficit, Mr. Mellon announces that there will be no deficit. If the White House says there is to be continued tax reduction, Mr. Mellon reverses his original statement and says there is to be continued tax reduction.

And behind Mr. Mellon's back the world titters.

Calvin Coolidge, a lesser but wiser man, refused to temp

fate. But King Andrew could not tear himself away. He stayed to maintain the prestige of another fictitious character, and they both went down together.

Had King Andrew, in the fullness of his glory, retired on March 4, 1929, he would be doubly revered to-day. In retrospect, his era of golden surpluses, contrasted with the present dismal days of Treasury deficits, would have made him appear more than ever the legendary hero he had been hailed.

In the closing session of the Seventy-first Congress as the House prepared to enact the increased soldier bonus over the protests of the White House and Treasury, Representative Treadway of Massachusetts arose on behalf of Mr. Mellon to make a last appeal against the bill.

King Andrew had stayed too long.

*

Andrew W. Mellon became the third or fourth richest man in the United States chiefly through a series of fortuitous circumstances over which he had little control. Of course, Mr. Mellon did nothing to stem the tide of fate which carried him on to wealth and power, and, in fact, materially aided it. But

clerk in the Overholt Distillery, the sum of \$20,000. Frick had the vision of building ovens at Connellsville, Pennsylvania, to turn coal into coke. The Mellon bank took a mortgage on the plant and an interest in the business. It loaned Frick an additional \$40,000 and then another \$50,000. And as Mr. Frick, later head of the Carnegie Steel Corporation, increased his profits, so also increased the profits of the Mellon family.

The work of the young Mellon brothers in passing on loans took them out into the industrial field. It was their job to spend several weeks studying the factory which applied for the loan, making a survey of its production, its markets and its balance sheets. Young Andrew showed unusual ability at this, and at the age of 25 he was practically in charge of his father's bank. Five years later, Thomas Mellon retired, leaving Andrew in control of his entire estate.

Mellon's banking career was not one of great genius. It was conservative and sound, but without initiative. The two exceptions to this were when he broke Standard Oil in Pennsylvania by building a rival pipe line from the western oil region to the Delaware River, and when he foresaw the great use to which aluminum was going to be put and cornered the bauxite deposits of the United States.

How this rather shrinking individual happened to land in the very middle of the Washington political maelstrom is something which never has been satisfactorily explained. It appears, however, that Mellon, timid as he was, modest as he pretended to be when it came to the political limelight, had begun to get a little tired of the monotonus routine of walking back and forth between his home, his club and his bank, had begun to be bored with donating money to hospitals, with buying rare portraits, and with seeing everything he touched turn to gold. He yearned for new worlds to conquer. So it was not mere accident that found him at the top of the list of heavy contributors to the \$7,000,000 Republican campaign fund raised by men who expected to realize far more than six percent on their investment by putting Warren G. Harding in the White House.

Andrew Mellon was one of the first to cash in on his investment. As Secretary of the Treasury he later paid himself a tax refund of \$400,000, the largest awarded to any single individual.

THE first time Andrew Mellon came to Washington, then a boy of 16, the Washington Monument was not yet completed. It had been built up to the point where the marble now ends, and young Andrew had the distinction of climbing up the scaffolding of the monument that far.

Mellon did not visit the White House on his first trip to Washington. In fact, he did not visit the White House at all until the day he entered it as a member in the ill-fated Cabinet of President Harding. Since then he has been going in and out of the White House, always by the rear entrance, like the swinging to and fro of a saloon door.

was built up a myth—the myth that placed in his hand the scepter of power, and that made him King Andrew, the Mighty, the monarch who stayed too long.

While still a member of the Coolidge Cabinet there was no man in public life who so captured the public's imagination. Much of the basis for this Mellon myth rested upon his personality. A thin, half-frightened individual, Mr. Mellon looks so esthetic, so almost spiritual, that the natural impulse of the press and even of congressional investigating committees was to protect him.

When he first came to Washington, he made so pathetic an appearance that his under-secretary always stood at his side at press conferences and bore the brunt of the questioning from congressional committees.

Mellon's fingers are long and tapering like those of an artist, and in them he nervously twists a cigar, the size of a cigarette. The fingers do not belie Mr. Mellon's character, for his art collection, although not large, is exceptionally rare, and reveals the soul of an artist.

The myth, however, extends far beyond the small circle of friends who have the privilege of personally knowing some of Mr. Mellon's admirable qualities. In fact the myth, as far as the general public is concerned, rests solely upon three factors:

First, Mr. Mellon has established himself as the great sorcerer

who waved his wand and brought taxes tumbling from their war-time peak to almost nothing.

Finally, Mr. Mellon is the stern realist who made the dilatory war debtors of Europe reach down in their jeans and cough up the billions they had been owing Uncle Sam.

Mr. Mellon was lucky enough to take over the Treasury when it was the easiest and most popular job any man had held in a generation. All he had to do was sit still and watch the sinking fund reduce the public debt. With this reduction he could bring about a simultaneous reduction in taxes—and get all the credit for it.

One of the first things Mr. Mellon did to endear him in the hearts of his banking colleagues was to refund the public debt. A total of \$7,000,000,000 was due to be repaid or refunded within two years, and for every percent of reduction in interest rates, American taxpayers would save \$70,000,000 annually. Interest rates had dropped after the War, and Mr. Mellon, taking advantage of this drop, was able to save them this much and more.

He was hailed as a wonder-worker.

172

the burden of the war debts from the Federal Treasury to the American buyer of European bonds.

Only the elder La Follette and the Democrats stood out against him. Still remembering the war days when the country had been taught to believe that wealth should bear a greater sacrifice than the poor, they blocked the Mellon move to reduce the tax on large incomes from forty to only twenty-five percent. But later, when La Follette, the chief obstructionist, died, the Democrats yielded to popular pressure and permitted a reduction down even to twenty percent.

By this cut, Mr. Mellon, chief sponsor of the reduction, lopped about \$1,500,000 off his own income tax.

*

MR. MELLON is a man of such great personal magnetism, such apparent sincerity that it is difficult to reconcile these with

As it turned out, Senator Reed, whose law firm protects Mr. Mellon in Pittsburgh, and who considers it his duty to extend that protection also to Washington, immediately rushed to Mr. Mellon's support on the floor of the United States Senate. He said that the sum of \$91,472 could not be returned to the Treasury since the case was now definitely closed; following which the Treasury inconsiderately acknowledged Mr. Mellon's critics to be right and David Aiken Reed to be wrong.

Mr. Mellon also may have been completely ignorant of the action of his subordinates in refunding taxes to various firms which the Mellon family owns, but the record is not one of which the other great Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, would be proud. More than one million dollars was refunded to each of forty organizations and people, among them the Gulf Oil Company, the Aluminum Company and its subsidiaries, and the Standard Steel Car Company, all three largely owned and completely controlled by Mr. Mellon.

It may also be true, but it is scarcely conceivable, that Mr.

And so he fought alone.

Frank Kent tells the story of how both Mellon and Senator Couzens were invited to dine at the White House through the mistake of a social secretary. For several hours Mrs. Coolidge suffered exquisite agonies. However, when Mr. Mellon, always the perfect gentleman, arrived, he saw Senator and Mrs. Couzens across the room, and took his daughter Ailsa over to meet them.

The most vindictive chapter of Mr. Mellon's life, however, is that dealing with his marriage.

the children for seven months a year. She returned to her old home in Hertfordshire.

Mrs. Mellon, determined not to relinquish her children, returned to the United States. All the power of the Mellon millions, all the influence of one of the most ruthless political machines which ever dominated any state, was pitted against her. Mellon even had induced the District Attorney of Allegheny County to go to Europe to help the fight against his wife. When Curphey, charged with illicit relations with Mrs.

County Court on May 25, 1912, and the decree was granted on July 3 of the same year.

Mrs. Mellon has always received the devotion and affection of her two children. They have visited her religiously every year, and, according to their friends, have made several attempts to bring about a reconciliation.

Mr. Mellon, however, seems never to have forgiven his wife. There is only one thing he likes less than being referred to as the country's third richest man, and that is any allusion to his wife or his divorce. When a Washington newspaper, reporting that Paul Mellon had purchased a large Virginian estate on which his mother would live, alluded to the possibility of a reconciliation, Mr. Mellon expressed his disapproval and disgust in no uncertain terms.

*

WHEN Andrew Mellon first arrived in Washington he was disappointed and began methodically marking off the months on his calendar. He looked forward to the forty-eighth month when he would be finished. To-day he could have marked off one hundred and twenty months had he not given up the practice after the twenty-fourth. The reason he gave it up was because he suddenly discovered he liked Washington.

Longevity of service, however, is not Mr. Mellon's reason for lingering on. The truth is that despite the criticism and abuse that have been heaped upon his head, Mr. Mellon tremendously enjoys his job. As a private citizen he had become prodigiously bored with seeing everything he touched turn to gold. Having made more money than any but two or three other men in the world, it was no sacrifice for him to quit making more of it. In Pittsburgh he was relatively unknown. In Washington he has been all-powerful. His name was on the lips of every one.

And during this time Mr. Mellon has been a reasonably efficient Secretary of the Treasury. Considering his reputation as a rival of Alexander Hamilton, his estimates for national revenue have been amazingly wide of the mark—never within \$100,000,000 of being right and \$1,132,000,000 off in 1923. But he has had the rich man's usual facility for handling large sums without being staggered at their size. He has kept politics consistently out of his Department, refusing, when he first came in, to discharge competent Democrats merely because they were Democrats, and forcing Harding to fire Elmer Dover, whom the Ohio Gang had first put over on him as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury.

He has worked hard. He has had little time for his few diversions—walking, riding and golf. He is to be found at his office promptly at nine and he remains there until six or seven. He walks to his office in all kinds of weather and is so methodical that he has figured his total ten-year mileage between the Treasury and his apartment as equal to walking from Washington to San Francisco and halfway back again. He also has estimated that the walk takes him twenty-one minutes if he is not in a hurry or nineteen if he is. On those rare occasions when he takes a taxicab he sometimes has been known to find himself without a cent and has held the driver

So Mr. Mellon, in one way or another, has come to be looked upon as a saintly and wealthy old gentleman who has dedicated the last remaining years of his life to the public's welfare—first to building up prosperity, and now to salvaging it.

To Calvin Coolidge is given credit for beguiling the people into believing that stock market values could be pyramided indefinitely and for leading them up to the brink of the crash. But Calvin Coolidge would no more have gone counter to Mr. Mellon's advice than a faithful Mohammedan would have ignored the teachings of the Prophet. He was the mere mouthpiece for Mr. Mellon's bull-market optimism.

Two years before the crash came, experts of the Federal Reserve Board, charged with keeping sound the financial structure of the country, warned that the inflated stock market could not last and urged that the public be told to ease out while the easing was good. Time after time when the Federal Reserve Board, the American Bankers Association, and various business journals announced that speculation had gone far beyond the point of safety, Mr. Mellon either himself or through his White House spokesman, Mr. Coolidge, issued statements contradicting them. He assured the public that all was well and that it could continue buying on margin with impunity and with profit.

When, because of a Federal Reserve Board warning on June 5, 1928, the stock market broke badly, Mr. Mellon, ex officio

products which industry, spurred on by the stock market, was turning out in greater and greater volume. And they did up to a point.

Encouraged by national advertising to the tune of a billion dollars a year, they bought all that an over-taxed system of installment buying would permit—until their buying power was exhausted.

*

FACTS percolate to the public mind almost as slowly as mountains rise or oceans fall—but nevertheless they do percolate.

Gone also are the days when it was considered a "national calamity" if Andrew W. Mellon should leave the Cabinet.

CHAPTER EIGHT

SONS OF THE WILD JACKASS

HE Senate Insurgents are the strongest and weakest

Individually they are the strongest.

Collectively they are the weakest.

Mr. Hoover once used the resounding expression "rugged individualism." He had no intention of applying it to the Senate Insurgents. They were furthest from his thought.

But the characterization is a perfect fit. They are the finest type of this ideal. They personify all the noble qualities of character he implied when he used the pat phrase.

And just as completely they demonstrate the pathetic and utter inadequacy of individuals, no matter how admirable, to cope with the colossal economic and political problems of the present day as long as they are nothing more than individuals persisting in an individualistic philosophy.

It is one of the major tragedies of American public affairs to-day that these men, individually so commendable and noteworthy, should collectively be so futile.

Without program, unity or leadership they have floundered about helplessly, making defensive sorties against some particularly vicious transaction but all the time being more and more mired and overwhelmed by the organized and aggressive forces of wealth and reaction.

Peace and disarmament, economic and political justice and equality, they earnestly and sincerely defend and strive for at all times. They alone can be depended upon to vote right on issues.

And this is true of all the other questions. Always they have wasted themselves on halfway measures which, when they do succeed in putting them through, are used by those in power to perpetrate greater abuses.

With great resourcefulness they defeated Mr. Hoover's at-

of their lack of roots in the underlying economic struggle of the day—the fight for the ownership of the raw material, the machine, and the wealth produced by the worker. The insurgents spring from classes and environments to which this basic struggle is unreal and which, in some instances, are even hostile to it.

In an industrial civilization, an age of the machine, when the greatest issue is that of possessing class against toiling mass, not one of these men is of proletarian origin. They come from small independent farm homes that are so rapidly vanishing from America, the professional class, and a few from the wealthy. But not one of them from the mill or factory.

During the tragic winter of 1930-31 when millions were walking the streets vainly looking for work, when thousands of factories stood idle and warehouses bulged with surplus grain and cotton although hundreds of thousands were hungry and ill-clad, when the whole horrible failure of the Capitalistic Industrial system was starkly revealed, they not only had nothing fundamental to offer as a solution but did not even get together to formulate a plan for temporary relief.

There never was a time when the country was more in need

of an honest, forthright, and intelligent leadership with a definite program and purpose. They, who should have been in the forefront, were passive and empty-handed.

True, the brilliant oratory and industry of young Bob La-Follette exposed the vicious and brutal policy of inaction and starvation of the President and the Red Cross. But beyond that neither he nor the others did anything positive.

The Insurgents could see the need and urgency of a special session of Congress in 1931 to press for important economic and political legislation at a time when the public was aroused and bitter—but get together to force such a session and to formulate a program of vital measures on which to justify it? That they could not do.

Even on that phase of the economic issue they might be expected to know most about, the agricultural problem, they have been without plan or program. Individually they have a variety of nostrums—the equalization fee, the tariff, the debenture, a government subsidy—but nothing of fundamental nature.

The reporters and camera men swarmed about their offices. They were interviewed and photographed at length. One picture showed them in a group with Borah between Young Bob and Norris, their arms lovingly entwined.

was at the bottom of the whole trouble and that the farmer must have two billion dollars from the Treasury to put him on his feet.

Each was sincere. Each was earnestly and honestly seeking a solution. But the problem and task were too much for them. They lacked the economic grasp to see through to the essentials. And they were too ruggedly individualistic to be able to get together even on a makeshift.

The discipline of a common cause, the unifying force of a specific and comprehensive economic philosophy and program, the only hope for significant reform in an industrial civilization, is unknown to them. Guerilla fighting they understand and know how to conduct, dramatically and effectively. But beyond raids and hopeless defensive stands they have been unable to coöperate.

Borah can bring an apathetic Senate to its feet in unprecedented applause with a passionate demand for food for the hungry and clothes for the cold. But to initiate or coöperate with a movement directed toward a sweeping economic reorganization that would strike at the causes of unemployment and lift agriculture from bankruptcy he has shown no capacity.

The elder LaFollette fought nobly for over a quarter of a century, endured stoically and heroically the most ferocious attacks, and yet left nothing lasting or important. Even the patch-work reforms he was able to achieve have fallen into the hands of those who fought them and been used by them to their own ends.

weak-kneed "log-rolling" Democrats that prevented them from gaining a final smashing victory.

But the effort strikingly disclosed their power when they worked together along a definite line of action. Above all it revealed that there was one among them who had the qualities of leadership. This was not the first exceptional bit of work that Young Bob had achieved in his few years of leadership in the Senate, but it was the most significant in indicating what may be expected from him in the future.

Had the old Senator survived a few more years, Phil would have stepped into his place. He had already been started on his political career, being elected District Attorney of Dane County his first year out of law school.

But when the old Senator, broken by the strain of the 1924 Independent Presidential Campaign, succumbed six months later, Phil was too young to take his place. It was absolutely essential to the Progressive Party in Wisconsin, and to the economic welfare of the LaFollette family, that a LaFollette succeed to the vacant seat.

In this explosive situation, the first thought was to nominate Mrs. LaFollette for her husband's unexpired term. The proposal met with hearty approval throughout the State where

But living up to her reputation as a far-sighted and skilful politician she rejected the tempting offer and put Young Bob forward instead. He was just within the constitutional age limit and, because he had been so close to his father, was quite well known throughout the State.

He had made but one public address before he began his campaign and that was as his father's messenger to the Progressive Convention in Cleveland in 1924. On that occasion Young Bob read a message from his father and acquitted himself splendidly.

He worked for months on his cariff speeches and they were the outstanding discussions in either branch of Congress on the Smoot-Hawley Act. His smashing attacks upon the President on the food-relief issue, which forced him and the Red Cross, after months of suppressing facts and minimizing conditions, to admit there was widespread distress, were based on weeks of careful study.

To-day he is one of not more than a half-dozen men in the United States Senate who are first rank public speakers. When it is known that he will take the floor, public interest

in the capital is second only to that called forth by a speech from Borah.

The most dramatic incident of his senatorial career, so far, was the extemporaneous counter-attack he made against an attempt by an Old Guard wrecking crew, consisting of Senators Moses, Bingham and Reed, to bar the United Press Association from the Senate because its enterprising correspondent had the initiative to unearth secret and embarrassing roll calls. Speaking wholly extemporaneously Young Bob literally chased the three would-be press censors from the Senate floor and completely smashed a neatly laid plot they had cooked up to punish the independent press organization and its correspondent.

Young Bob is one of the most conscientious members of the Senate. He works hard on the floor and in committee. He attends all sessions. On most important legislation he is the Insurgent sentinel in the chamber and their most skilful and resourceful whip in the lobbies and cloak-rooms.

He is particularly effective in this capacity because of his universal popularity and the high respect in which he is held by every one in the Senate. He is not only the favorite of the Insurgents but is respectfully regarded by Republican Old Guarders, Young Turks, and the Democrats.

This is due not to any mincing of words when discussing issues, but to the fact that he never indulges in personalities. He confines himself, always, strictly to issues and principles. Because of his manifest ability the Insurgents have backed him for important committee assignments and, with the secret aid of several friendly Old Guarders, have placed him on three of the major committees of the Senate—Finance, Foreign Relations, and Manufactures. On the latter he is chairman by right of seniority.

His ailment dates back to his boyhood. When he was first stricken it was not believed that he would recover. After a long convalescence he slowly returned to active life, but his health was always uncertain.

As a result of the strenuous ordeal of two hard campaigns in succeeding years and unremitting attention to his work in the Senate he suffered a recurrence of his ailment and was compelled to convalesce for a time in 1929. By the fall, however, when the tariff bill was taken under consideration he was active again and except for a faint limp and a pallor showed no signs of illness.

He worked unceasingly for ten months in one of the most arduous congressional sessions in many years and then immediately engaged, during a particularly hot summer, in a state-wide campaign in behalf of his brother's gubernatorial candidacy. In addition he made several speaking trips to neighboring states to campaign for Insurgent colleagues. To-day he is in excellent health and apparently fully recovered.

Young Bob is no teetotaler. Among friends he accepts and enjoys an occasional highball or cocktail. He is jolly and boyish in intimate companionship. Like his father he is a meticulous dresser, but less formal. When he first came to the Senate, he affected rather sheiky sideburns but after some raillery from friends he shaved them off.

There is a strong resemblance between him and his father. Like the latter he is below the average height, has the same stocky, powerful build, leonine head, and fighting jaw. He

does not wear his father's pompadour and he is devoid of the latter's bristling manner and piercing eye. His brother Phil affects these traits—not altogether successfully at times.

Young Bob is one of the few men in public life in the capital who is really popular among the correspondents. It is not alone because he is unfailingly fair and courteous but because they know he is absolutely sincere, straightforward, and trustworthy. They constantly manifest their esteem by giving him inside tips and confidential information.

He is not the crusader that his father was but he has the qualities of a great leader. Given the health, he is unquestionably destined for a historic rôle in the Nation's affairs.

Senator John J. Blaine is distinctly of the rabble-raiser type. He is a sincere Progressive, but with him issues are expressed chiefly in personalities. During his three terms as Progressive Governor of Wisconsin he broke with many of the close LaFollette leaders, almost always because of personal differences.

His administrations never swerved from LaFollette policies but somehow he and many of the old Progressives could not get along together. Some of them finally got so angry at him that they opposed him for reëlection. Blaine went out and developed his own Progressive leaders, chiefly among the younger men, and they have served him devotedly.

He ran against Senator Irvine L. Lenroot, who was up for reëlection. Lenroot had once been a LaFollette man but had broken with him and had become an Old Guard leader. Lenroot, backed by all the resources of the Conservatives in the State, ran as a dry, trying to minimize the Prohibition question in the campaign. Blaine stressed it vigorously.

nomination would be decided by the strength of the wet vote on which Blaine was putting his reliance. There had been no test on the issue in the State and the outcome was unpredictable.

The appeal was irresistible to the parched voters in the large German sections and the next day when the ballots were counted, Blaine had nosed out Lenroot by a few thousand.

In the Senate, Blaine has proved a tenacious, hardy fighter. He will tackle any one and anything. When the Insurgents or the Democrats want a particularly rough-and-tumble job done, either on the floor or in an investigating committee, they call on Blaine. And he never fails them no matter who the subject of attack.

He is an uninspiring speaker, handicapped by a physical disability, due to a boyhood injury on the farm. But what he lacks in oratorical skill he makes up in vigor and outspokenness.

He enjoys muck-raking. Although serving his first term, he has been on three investigating committees, twice as chairman. On all he has taken a leading part. If he were a more skilful prosecutor he would be more effective. But here again, what he wants in skill he makes up in persistence and courage.

Bolting is another of Blaine's oldest and favorite pastimes.

But in the Senate he has full scope for "raising hell" without running afoul of his own political associates. And he is thriving on the happy situation and enjoying himself hugely.

Nye's difficuties arise out of his friendly nature. He hates to antagonize folks.

While his amiability may occasionally lead Nye into temporary confusion on issues, it has stood him in good stead in gaining committee recognition in the Senate. Republican leaders, cannily taking cognizance of this quality, chose him from among the Insurgents as the latter's representative on the important Committee on Committees, and made him Chairman of the Public Lands Committee.

Like Young Bob, Nye owes his senatorial career to a "lucky break." He was appointed to fill a vacancy by a Governor who expected to run for the seat himself, later, but who died before he could get around to it.

Until he came to Washington, Nye had never held public office and his most important work had been as editor of a small, weekly, country newspaper. He had taken an active but not a leading part in the North Dakota Nonpartisan League movement which, a decade ago, gave the super-patriots such scary, "Bolshy" chills.

In the 1930 campaign, A. C. Townley, once the Nonpartisan League dictator of the State, trying to stage a comeback in a campaign for Congress, was opposed by Nye and other former Nonpartisan Leaguers.

Nye has developed appreciably in many respects in the five years of his service in the Senate. When he first came to the capital, he looked exactly what he was, a small, farm-town, weekly editor. Since then he has laid aside his snappy, longish sideburns and yellow shoes, and has taken on a quiet, cosmopolitan air.

Agriculture is real and alive to him, although that does not make him any more positive about fundamental measures necessary to solve the farmer's difficulties. He believes the tariff would be a boon to the farmer "if it could be made to work."

In both his rôles as investigator, he was chairman of the investigating committees. In the first inquiry, uncovering the trail of the Continental Trading Company phase of the Teapot Dome scandal, he was aided by several important factors—the presence and assistance of Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana, and the fact that a group of the keenest correspondents in the press corps covered the proceedings and were constantly back-stopping him with advice, information, and favorable publicity.

Senator "Jim" Reed knew how to handle Illinois and Pennsylvania political operators when he went after them and drove them from the Senate floor. But to Nye, a Mrs. Ruth Hanna McCormick and a "Puddler Jim" Davis, with their endless bag of shyster tricks, were a bit confounding.

At times the skill of these two glib and ingenious politicians in protesting innocence reached such heights of effectiveness that it was doubtful just who was being investigated—they or the Senate Committee.

Then too, both Democratic and Republican leaders surreptitiously threw obstacles in Nye's path in an underhanded effort to raise suspicions against him, tactics they would never have dared attempt with Reed.

Nye hasn't the promise of leadership that Young Bob has, but he is far the abler of North Dakota's two Senators, and certainly the best likely to come out of that State for a long time.

A two-fisted fighter, with a sincere indignation against injustice and oppression, hard working, and a simple man, he has all the elements that go to make a leader, except that he always wanders off on a tangent in crucial moments.

At the height of the agricultural relief clamor, when the farmers of the Northwest needed only a spark to set them into revolt, Brookhart, among the foremost in fomenting the disaffection, and who of all people should have known better, was easily beguiled into the Hoover camp and without rhyme or reason acclaimed him as the Great Reliever.

ability to draw obvious conclusions. For years he has studied the agricultural problem in all its ramifications, both in America and abroad. He is unquestionably the best-informed man in the Senate on agricultural statistics.

Yet he has never propounded a farm-relief plan that was not a nostrum, and the only difference between his proposals and those of the professional farm-relievers is that he characteristically does not hesitate to demand billions from the Treasury where the others talk in millions.

This obtuseness once cost him his Senate seat,

To every one's surprise the race proved to be very close. Brookhart, however, was elected by a narrow margin and was so certified to the Senate by Iowa State officers.

The case was a straight-out put-up job. It succeeded because the Insurgents were badly demoralized by the smashing defeat of the LaFollette-Wheeler Presidential effort and the Democrats, little better in morale, were further unnerved by the temptation of gaining a member.

The fight was long drawn out. The Insurgents did the best they could but they were badly handicapped by Brookhart's constant restraining them, because this Old Guard leader or

Why, in the face of indisputable evidence that he was being jobbed, he should have succumbed to such patent trickery is inexplicable. But he did, and he was tricked out of his seat.

Brookhart promptly returned to Iowa, ran on a vindication issue against the regular Republican candidate who fortunately came up for reëlection then, beat him by a wide margin and came back to the Senate.

In many respects, Brookhart is one of the most interesting of the Insurgent group. He was born in a log cabin on a farm in Missouri, and worked his way laboriously to an education. His official biography characterizes him as a farmer, teacher, lawyer, and soldier, and he put in long years at each.

He is built like a burly wrestler, rather short and powerfully muscled. He walks with his head jutted forward and

with an aggressive gait. He rarely wears an overcoat and seldom a hat.

His great want is a sense of direction. He means well, is honest and sincere, has a big, warm heart and a head crammed full of facts and figures. But he lacks a good steering gear.

Senator Lynn J. Frazier of North Dakota is living proof that in politics there is money in dirt farming.

As Chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee he has done excellent work in defending the tragically misgoverned Redman and bringing to light the terrible abuses of the Indian Bureau. But always the push and direction have some from others

Frazier is a real dirt farmer. He is a graduate of Normal School and the University of North Dakota. Upon finishing school he returned to the family homestead and actively engaged in farming. He left the plow to accept his first gubernatorial nomination.

They became devoted supporters and admirers and, bit by bit, Cutting, as the leading publisher of the State, began to take an important rôle in State politics. Over a long period of years, and at a time when it was financially unprofitable to do so, he attacked Albert B. Fall's machine and manner of doing things.

All this time Cutting's influence with the fifty-odd percent of the Spanish-speaking population of the State increased. When the United States entered the World War he patriotically turned from State affairs to serve as Captain of Infantry on the military staff of the American Embassy in London, for which he was awarded the British Military Cross.

Upon his return to the State, he set to work seriously to

In 1922, Cutting, as independent in State politics as he has proved to be in the Senate, tested out his theories and carefully nurtured organization and supported a Democratic candidate for Governor against the Fall machine. His ideas proved their worth and his candidate won handsomely.

From then on, he greatly expanded his organizational activities, but always with that rare tact and skill and generosity which are so necessary with and so appreciated by the Spanish race. In 1927, when a vacancy occurred in the Senate, another gubernatorial friend, this time a Republican, appointed him to fill it. When he ran for the full six-year term in 1928, he was elected by a large majority.

To-day he is the State's most esteemed patron. What Don Cutting does in far-away Washington, his constituents do not bother themselves about. So good and generous and understanding a man could do only what was right.

With the marriage of Young Bob, Cutting is now the only bachelor among the Insurgents. He is 42 years of age, wealthy, educated, traveled, and with an assured political future. He is one of the most eligible young men in the capital—and also one of the chariest.

In physique and political affiliations the most favored for

His occasional speeches, consisting for the most part of lengthy quotations from learned authorities, are among the most tiresome in the Senate. His greatest achievements in eight years of service in the Senate are a few pieces of local pork.

Three or four years ago, either out of irritation at the bombardment of resolutions or in order to call his bluff, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took him up on his demand for an inquiry into American banking machinations in Nicaragua and made him chairman of a small sub-committee with authority to investigate the matter. After much preparation, and with great pomposity, Shipstead finally got the hearings under way.

The inquiry was a total flop. After a few sessions, at which Nicaraguan émigrés testified, nothing more was heard of the matter. And Shipstead has never assumed any investigational responsibilities since.

He affects great interest and knowledge of the law and foreign affairs. At smart social-political salons, where he appears more frequently than any of the other Insurgents, he likes to air at length, and with heavy solemnity, his erudition on these two subjects.

He is a dentist by profession, but is said to have studied

Shipstead's evolution as a safe radical is a remarkable and fascinating performance.

At the height of the Northwestern rural disaffection in the early '20's, he jumped into the arena in Minnesota, where he was born and educated, and announced himself as a Farmer-Labor candidate against Frank B. (Nervous Nellie) Kellogg, then Republican Senator from the State.

Either because of this alluring promise or just plain disgust with the quaking Kellogg, Minnesota turned him out and sent Shipstead to Washington. There he did what his predecessor had not the genius to conceive or accomplish—he ate his Insurgent cake and had it at the same time.

porting him with the result that, although Hoover carried the State by a large vote, Shipstead led him by 100,000.

To-day, Shipstead is the lion of the salons and living proof of the fact that it pays to have ideas in politics.

If Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana were more indusrious and energetic, he could be one of the really great figures in American public life.

As it is, he is one of the ablest and most forceful men in the Senate. But he doesn't begin to do the work that he is capable of and which his exceptional talents should inspire him to do.

But he is lazy.

He rarely prepares himself for a fight, depending upon his sharpness of wit and upon his many friends, particularly the correspondents, to supply him with information. They do so eagerly because he is often the only one who will raise an issue, but he could do infinitely more effective work if he would only apply himself personally to preparation.

Wheeler has been a dissident all his political life. Because he comes from Montana, although he was born in Massachusetts and got his law education in Michigan, he is a Democrat. If he had come from a Republican State, he might have been a Republican, but he would have been an Insurgent wherever he had come from.

Wheeler had been in Washington only a few years when the scandals of the Harding Administration gave him his opportunity to gain national attention. While his upright and austere colleague, Senator Thomas J. Walsh, was ferreting out the oil deals, Wheeler went after Attorney General Harry Daugherty.

In alarm Daugherty and the Ohio Gang instituted a framed prosecution of Wheeler in an effort to discredit his damning investigation. The case was later thrown out of court and Wheeler was thoroughly exonerated of the false charges.

With the campaign over, he returned to Washington and took his former place among the Democrats. They attempted no such "disciplining" as the victorious Coolidge machine inflicted upon bolting Republicans. In 1928 Wheeler earnestly supported Smith and campaigned for him throughout the West.

Wheeler is still a few years under fifty and should play an important rôle in national affairs—if he will bestir himself.

In a fight he is without equal in the country to-day in erousing popular enthusiasm and delivering telling blows.

Hoover was the candidate in 1928, but the voice of the Republican Party that year was the voice of Borah.

In a Senate debate he alone can bring the chamber to its feet in spontaneous applause, contrary to all its staid habits and rules. He is capable of the most brilliant parliamentary and tactical strokes.

The longest period during which he ever worked in harness with his fellow-Insurgents was the 1929-30 tariff fight, and it required all the tact, patience, and persistence of Young Bob and Norris to bring that about. They worked almost as hard maneuvering Borah into the leadership of that fight and keeping him there, as they did combating the egregious measure itself.

What Borah could do in the way of real leadership if, instead of his empty legalism, he had a wide and comprehensive economic grasp, and, instead of the temperament of an incorrigible individualist, he had a capacity for discipline and coöperation, can only be imagined. He could easily give the impetus to a great political movement.

But he won't, because he is Borah. And he will never be any more.

He will raise more hopes and thrill more audiences, but that is all. The persistent labor necessary to create a Liberal Party will have to be done by others, if it is done at all. It is beyond him.

Borah at one time appeared ready to bestir himself. In 1922 he told close friends that the time had come for raising the banners of political revolt.

For a brief period, he was fascinated by the thought. But nothing ever came of it.

If all that had been necessary for realization of this project had been an epic declamation, a resounding pronunciamento, it would have been brilliantly consummated. But to leave his books, his studies, his cool, quiet, shaded office, his horse, his unhampered and comfortable aloofness for the strain and toil and turmoil that an independent campaign would entail was too much for him.

Not that Borah doesn't like the cheers of the mob. There is no one more sensitive to the stimulation of the crowd than he is. When he steps out onto the Senate floor his unconscious glance is always to the galleries.

He is a genius at gauging the opportuneness of these occasions. He knows just when to step to the footlights. Outwardly all may seem quiet, but Borah senses the undercurrent and he strikes.

words he has raised hopes that at last he was preparing to act, only to let the issue subside.

Borah doesn't mean to disappoint. He never feels that he does. And he is always sincerely distressed when he is told so.

When, in 1924, the elder LaFollette attempted to raise a Progressive movement with his independent Presidential campaign, Borah criticized both old parties. But join with the bolters? That was out of his character. He was fulfilling his rôle by denouncing the inadequacies of the reactionary old parties.

People expect too much of Borah. He is the advocate, the mouthpiece. Not the organizer, the commander.

As the pleader of just causes he is supreme. As such he has done noble service. He is the master mass psychologist as an orator. But he is not of the mass.

It is this scholar in him that so powerfully modifies his great political talents. The deep satisfaction and peace of quiet and undisturbed study draw him back from the confusion and clamor of public fray.

It has a profound attraction for him, but as a forum, not as a battle-field.

He has a rare talent for friendship. When Congress is not in session and he is in the capital, the Senate reporters assemble in his office every day at a fixed hour for the most unusual press conference in the city.

Here affairs and individuals are discussed and chatted over with the utmost candor. No one and no subject is taboo including the host. He is argued with and challenged freely and frankly.

Once in a great while a news story will result from these daily meetings, but that is not their chief purpose. The news-

gulfed by an industrial civilization, and the fight he has so gallantly made has been largely futile.

He is still maintaining his ideals; he is still pressing forward. But he knows that he is fighting a hopeless battle and that the competitive individualism he has sought to preserve is no longer possible.

He entered the public arena unaware of the real issues at stake. For long years, single-handedly he fought epic battles for political reform, when the economic was the real ruler.

He overthrew Cannonism and has driven corrupt and vicious men from high office. He strove mightily and successfully to extend the government's political sway over economic forces. But it has been all in vain.

But he has gone on, always the resolute and forthright warrior, trying to plug up the holes, stopping a steal here, a scandal and outrage there. For a time, after the 1928 Presidential campaign, he spoke of retiring from the Senate at the end of his term in 1931 and going back to Nebraska, in the hope of achieving something lasting there.

In a smaller arena the accomplishment of a fundamental and vital recasting of the political and economic system he thought might be within the measure of his remaining years and strength. But vicious corporation and political forces conspiring to defeat him left him no alternative but to take up their challenge.

He again ran for the Senate and despite the use of the most

CHAPTER NINE

THE MONKEY HOUSE

HE House of Representatives is the greatest organized inferiority complex in the world.

Contrary to general belief, its major occupation is not legislation but trying to make itself appear important and significant.

The fact that this is patently impossible, the House being constituted as it is, has not deterred that body from its vain pursuit. It is this blind groping for some means of making itself a respected and significant body that is one of the basic causes for the ready subserviency of the House to boss rule.

Conscious of its inability to impress or to function as an independent institution, it has abdicated its power into the hands of bosses, in the hope that they will give it the standing it could not achieve by exercise of its own free will and intelligence.

The Founding Fathers created the House as a vehicle for the more immediate expression of public sentiment than was considered likely in the aloof and exclusive Senate. Their model was the British House of Commons.

The country got more than the Fathers bargained for. The House is expressive, but only of the most stultifying and reactionary forces in the land.

Instead of being the counterpart of the great English legis-

depths of subservience and inanity until, in 1925, it bowed before one of the stupidest and most mediocre rules it has yet experienced, the domination of the Longworth-Snell-Tilson triumvirate.

Thomas L. Blanton, Democrat, of Texas, after trying for the Senate and being defeated, ran for his former House seat on the issue of less expensive congressional funerals. Up and down the fifty-three wide Texas counties that make up his district, he crusaded on the question of curbing lavish expenditure in burying deceased House members. He promised that, if elected, he would put an end to this waste of taxpayers' money. He won by an overwhelming vote.

government to pay \$1,500,000 for a bunch of foreign books.

So serious did the situation become that Mr. Collins was compelled to explain to his constituents that the large sum was needed in order to get a bible that "Moses wrote" out of the hands of the heathen.

A hill region representative, who used to make his campaign by hiking over his district, repeatedly ran on one issue: "If you don't elect me this time I'll run again." And he did until his hill-billy constituents finally elected him.

The House chamber is a huge, oblong hall filled with rows of long padded benches. On these the members sprawl without place, order, or decorum, the Republicans on one side and the Democrats on the other.

Usually only a small proportion of the members are in attendance. Days will go by with only a handful of members present, droning away in the ugly, unkempt chamber.

House rules permit applause, and in a debate the place takes on the atmosphere of a boxing arena. There are cheers and clapping, boos and catcalls, constant moving about and clatter. If ever anything worth while is said, few can hear it and still fewer pay any attention.

A soldier bonus proposal entailing a hundred million dollars in expenditures and a complete change in government policy, they will restrict to forty minutes' debate, twenty minutes to a side, while a bus regulating bill will be allowed to hold the floor five days. A "lame duck" reform measure, five times passed by the Senate, the bosses prevented from coming up at all for years, and when finally forced by public opinion to permit a vote on it, they emasculated it by a stultifying amendment.

Every important bill that comes before the House must obtain a "rule" for its consideration. The Rules Committee is controlled by the bosses of the House. It determines the flow of the legislative stream.

But if a bill they are against, for some reason or other, does succeed in fighting its way out of committee, they shelve it in the Rules Committee. Some years ago a Republican chairman of this committee was commonly reported to carry such measures about in his pocket. He was eventually defeated for reëlection. He promptly set himself up as a lobbyist in Washington.

*

A few minutes, often only a few seconds, are allotted to speakers. They rush to the front, roar out a few remarks, and then ask for permission to "extend and revise my remarks."

These later appear in the Appendix of the Record as elaborate addresses. They are then printed at cost in the government's printing plant and mailed free of charge, under the member's postal frank, to his thousands of constituents.

The following is a skeletonized summary of the debate that ensued on this important issue.

The SPEAKER. The gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Bacharach) is entitled to twenty minutes and the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Hawley) is entitled to twenty minutes.

Mr. BACHARACH. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all members have five legislative days in which to extend their remarks on this bill

The Speaker. Is there objection to the request of the gentle-

There was no objection.

Mr. HAWLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield three minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Chindblom).

gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Frear).

Mr. Bacharach. Mr. Speaker, I yield one quarter of a minute

to Mr. Rankin of Mississippi.

Mr. Bacharach. Mr. Speaker, I yield a quarter of a minute

to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Blanton).

man from Iowa (Mr. Ramseyer). (Applause.)

Mr. Bacharach. Mr. Speaker, I yield one minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Fish).

gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Simmons).

Mr. Bacharach. Mr. Speaker, I yield one-half minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. LaGuardia).

Mr. LaGuardia. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time. I am going to vote for the bill. (Laughter and applause.)

Mr. Bacharach. Mr. Speaker, I yield one minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Crowther).

Mr. Bacharach. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from

Indiana (Mr. Canfield).

Mr. Bacharach. Mr. Speaker, I yield one-quarter of a minute to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Almon).

Mr. HAWLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield one-half minute to the gen-

Mr. Bacharach. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time (two minutes) to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Garner).

Mr. Schafer of Wisconsin. If He were here in the Nation's capital to-day, attending a wedding feast, and again performed a miracle, would He turn the water into a non-intoxicating beverage?

Mr. Sproul of Kansas. I do not know what He would do in that regard, but I will say this to the gentleman, that Jesus made it a point to observe the laws of his worldly country.

Mr. LaGuardia. He also made it a point to change some of

Mr. Sproul of Kansas. No; He did not.

Mr. LaGuardia. That is my understanding.

Mr. Sproul of Kansas. Well, the gentleman is not informed about New Testament Scripture, because He did not do anything of the kind. He broke none of those laws.

Mr. Strong of Kansas. Might He not do as He did in the

Occasionally when the bosses are purposely dragging deliberations in order to consume time, a member will be

principles, and arrived in the Capital of the greatest Nation on earth just in time to get dinner and walk out on the street in front of my hotel, just in time to hear the fire alarm. To my consternation, I heard the added remark, "The Capitol is on fire." Living down across the Capitol grounds northwest, I looked up and beheld the flames just bursting forth. Imagine the emotion and the consternation that raged in my soul, for it was nearly three years ago when I first came to this city to assume the responsibilities that my people at home had intrusted to me, and from this same abode I trudged up the "Hill" and thought of the greatness and grandeur of this edifice, representative of a great Nation and this thought came to me in all of my excitement on the night of January 3, 1930: That this grand exemplification of the American Nation was on fire

having observed such a threat as I had to the Capitol, I joined in with the gallant firemen and others who felt as I did, to aid in pulling the hose through a smashed main entrance Capitol door that it could be used at the seat of conflagration on the top floor; and I tell you it was no easy job. Pretty soon I ran into a policeman and a Mr. Lieutenant of Police—that, after everything was over, except the moving pictures. I did not see the picture-taking, as I had gone to my place of abode; but there was a fire, but not nearly so much fire as there was smoke afterward. But during the height of the flame I got a thrill I will never forget. I thank you. (Applause.)

The following short dissertation on oleomargarine was delivered by Representative John Davenport Clarke of Delaware County, New York. Mr. Clarke is a lawyer, conservationist, farmer, and former assistant to the Secretary of Mines of the United States Steel Corporation.

Mr. CLARKE. Strange sounds were heard emanating from the old cow barn, mysterious shadows flitted hither and thither, and Rover, the faithful old shepherd dog, had been barking and howling, so I got up and hurried up to the barn to see what the trouble was.

There was the mother cow and the father cow and the roosters and chickens all gathered around a strange little yellow package to look, in mysterious wonderment, at the little stranger in their midst. In a few minutes a long-haired, wild-eyed professor came rushing into the barn to acknowledge the parentage of the little child he called "Oleo."

The guilty professor hurried to Uncle Sam, acknowledged the child was illegitimate, destined to unfairly compete with healthy, wholesome butter, admitted to Uncle Sam his guilt, and went further and said he was willing to be taxed ten cents a pound on this yellow daughter, "Oleo," for her support.

A bill was instantly prepared to make certain that Uncle Sam got this tax to support Oleo, and all went well until from the mysterious Island of the Pacific the professor found old mother

palm oil and a new yellow kid was born.

A lot of step-children gathered in this unholy alliance, there was Miss Cocoanut Oleo and Master "Nutty" Margarine, and other dirty children. They were all hollering that they could not get old mother fat Guernsey from the Packers and insisting on a ten cent tax, and lo, and behold, Miss Palm Oil opened the door for all this strange crowd of bunko artists.

All the Dairy farmer wants is protection for his legitimate dairy product, and all Mr. and Mrs. Dairy Farmer want is that the parents of Miss Oleo do what they agreed to do originally, pay the tax of ten cents a pound, where Miss Oleo, colored in the semblance of butter, enters into our family life in unfair competition with Butter.

Fair play, a square deal and meeting the obligation Oleo's parents freely entered into with Uncle Sam, is all we ask and all this bill is expected to do when it becomes a law.

The House Office Building, where most of the members have their official offices, is like an ant heap. Congressmen are limited to one room apiece, packed in with files, furniture, office help, and what not. Committee chairmen get an extra room or two.

In the Seventy-first Congress, Representative Stone of Oklahoma created a sensation by charging his colleagues with nepotism. He declared that members had their wives, children, fathers, fathers-in-law, nieces, and other relatives on the House payroll as secretaries and clerks. Members of the House are allowed \$5000 a year for clerical hire.

member had three relatives drawing pay. Another had a fifteen-year-old daughter attending a Washington school who had collected nearly \$1000 as a clerk.

Stone demanded legislation to stop such pilfering of the public till, but the House turned a cold shoulder. When he became insistent and took his crusade to the newspapers, many members ostracized him.

Few House members, if defeated after any length of service, return to the small towns from which most of them come. They go to any lengths to remain in the capital. Those who have been servile enough to partisan or business interests get "lame-duck" jobs. Others become lobbyists, open law offices, or go into business in the capital.

Even if they want to return home, their families, particularly their wives, object. The capital is an experience they never get over.

For them, Washington is the promised land. They zealously and punctiliously execute all the inane and laborious social formalities. No one is so exacting in social niceties as a House member and his wife from Podunk.

The House is the standing butt of Washington's jokes. The most common is the story of a visitor to the capital who found, upon arriving at his destination, that he did not have sufficient change to pay his taxi bill.

"That's all right," the driver said, after looking him over carefully. "You can pay me next time. I'll trust you, I can see you are not a Congressman."

Few really able men remain long in the House. If they do, at is in hope of winning a higher place. The best of them either quit in disgust or despair or run for the Senate, the

Even White House secretaryships seem significant in comparison with membership in the House. Coolidge and Hoover had no trouble in taking their pick of House leaders for White House assistants.

The combination was totally devoid of parliamentary skill and finesse. In the instances where the scramble for local pork made the House unmanageable, the triumvirate was utterly helpless.

There never was a time in their rule when they could not have been discomfited and even routed if there had been a half dozen men in the House with the courage and force of character to defy them. Repeatedly, at the slightest show of resistance, they were thrown into a panic.

When the Smoot-Hawley Tariff came back from the Senate and some of the northwestern farm group began to murmur, the trio immediately began to talk concessions. It is fair to say that with the tremendous popular resentment against the bill, the farm bloc, if it had possessed the backbone and principles to make a real fight, could have staged a successful revolt.

Instead, being spineless and without convictions, the farm bloc surrendered before the triumvirate could do so, and the latter had nothing to do but enforce another "gag" rule and jam the measure through.

Progressives that enabled the triumvirate to maintain its authority.

Had the Democrats really been a militant minority and Representative Garner, their floor leader, an aggressive opposition fighter, they could have repeatedly put them on the defensive. But outside of meaningless partisan protests, the Democrats carefully skirted all responsibility and allowed the Republicans undisputed control.

The weakness and incompetence of the triumvirate's leadership greatly increased after the first year of the Hoover Administration. Longworth and Snell distrusted and disliked the President from the very start. For their own and the party's reputation, they supported him, but without zest. The gross blunders and indecisions of the President made it increasingly difficult and distasteful for them to do so.

Tilson is the only one of the three who slavishly followed the White House. On more than one occasion it let him down, but he never swerved in his lugubrious fealty.

"Nick" Longworth was a man of charm and many graces. He was a gifted musician and considerably above the House level in intelligence.

In the more than twenty-five years of his congressional service, Longworth never sponsored anything of the slightest importance, and until he was made Speaker in 1925 was known chiefly as the husband of Alice Roosevelt.

He was too intelligent and self-respecting to be blatant or

But he was always regular, and a strait-laced conservative, even if he would occasionally, on an issue of local implications such as the bonus bill, stand on his own views. He was particularly apt to do this when the President attempted to get the House to assume responsibility for killing such legislation, as Hoover tried to do.

Longworth was genuinely liked in Congress. In the Chair he was unfailingly good-natured and courteous, and even when he was bludgeoning the House he was never disagreeable about it. He disliked disturbances and the docility of the House during his leadership made it easy for him to avoid them.

Socially he associated with a small group of wealthy men. In his gay moods he was an amusing entertainer.

He was devoted to his seven-year-old daughter Paulina, and during legislative sessions was her host once a week at the capital.

When he died unexpectedly, some weeks after the close of the Seventy-first Congress, the full significance of his universal popularity in the House was for the first time fully grasped by the Administration and Republican leaders. It was suddenly clear that he alone had been the best hope of the Republicans to retain the Speakership and that, without him, they were desperately handicapped.

His death also disclosed conclusively that his quiet, affable personality had been the dominant force behind the rule of the triumvirate, and that without him Snell and Tilson might have ruled, but the cry "Czarism," that was heard far and wide during the days of Cannon, would have again resounded.

Longworth was as much a "Czar" as Cannon ever was, but far more successful. He ruled, but the House never rebelled. Which explains perhaps why Mr. Hoover paid him

leads his side in cheering, waving his big hands wildly above his head.

One such violent pronouncement during the food relief controversy precipitated a furor in the Senate and almost broke up a compromise which the President was secretly negotiating.

Tilson has two ambitions. He wants to go to the Senate and he would like to be Vice President. In both of these aspirations he has been thwarted by J. Henry Roraback, the Republican boss of Connecticut, who does not like him.

The secondary Republican leaders, the committee chairmen and subchairmen, with a few exceptions are mediocre nonentities and drab party hacks. They hold their places solely through dead weight of seniority.

Representative Isaac Bacharach of Atlantic City, wealthy bachelor, is one of the exceptions. He is a ranking subchairman of the fiscally all-powerful Ways and Means Committee and is the ablest among the Republicans on the committee. He is well informed on the government's finances and on occasion does not hesitate to challenge the Administration on such matters.

He is a standpat Republican, but a gentleman notwithstanding. He never slobbers about the virginal chastity of the Grand Old Party, nor does he grow eulogistic about its leaders. Politics with him is chiefly a pleasant diversion. He is popular and likes nothing better than a gay party.

When the White House approves, they approve. Should the White House say "no" they reverse themselves in the same breath. On the compromise Soldier Bonus Loan Bill, Hawley in the morning voted in committee to report the measure. By night of the same day, following a sharp call from the White House, he announced that he had acted hastily on "undigested information," and was against the measure.

Not a Republican leader in the Senate had a word to say in defense of Lucas, but Wood issued statements, through the publicity bureau of the Republican National Committee, upholding him.

Affairs Committee, is a big-navy jingoist and one of the most persistent publicity seekers in the capital. The press gallery knows him as "Pop-Gun" Britten. He was once a prizefighter, but now confines his battling to scaling the social ladder. His committee is notorious, even among House committees, for its unrelieved inanity.

Representative George Holden Tinkham, of Boston, is proof that a good man can live down even a Harvard education.

The Democratic, Roman Catholic Irish that heavily dominate his constituency, he never fails to satisfy with a clamorous wetness and badgering campaign against the Protestant clerical-prohibition hierarchy.

Tinkham is as remarkable in appearance as he is in rabbleraising qualities. He is squat and bald and adorned with a stiff, bristling beard that protrudes almost horizontally from his chin. He took to the appendage during an African biggame hunt, when he discovered that by letting his beard grow he saved both effort and money. Since then he has given it no further attention except an occasional trimming to keep it within bounds.

Although he is very wealthy, he is notorious for his tightfistedness. He lives in a small Washington hotel because he was able to get good terms on a long-time lease and buys his suits in numbers because of a discount from his tailor.

Representative Hamilton Fish, of New York, is an earnest and honest man who somehow just can't help appearing somewhat ridiculous, no matter what he does. If he goes hunting the wily Red then even such a patriotic and standpat Republican organ as the New York Herald Tribune berates him for asininity. Does he attack Capitalism and bolt to the Insurgents, then the radicals laugh.

Although one of the most serious men in Washington, no one in the capital takes him seriously, least of all the correspondents. This is a great trial to "Ham," as he is known about the city. He is a persistent and zealous publicity seeker.

Whenever he has anything to say, the press is never scooped.

Such excesses, the friend insisted, were enough to impair permanently even as good a man as Fish.

After his death in 1925, they quickly fell into complete desuetude. For a time they made a half-hearted attempt to continue their activity, but, with the will of their master gone, they broke into petty jealousies and disintegrated. Within a few years the leaders had made their peace with the Republican bosses and were given back the petty committee places they had once honorably forfeited.

Representative John M. Nelson, LaFollette's campaign manager in his Independent Presidential campaign, and once widely known as the militant leader of the House Insurgents, is now the meek chairman of the meaningless Committee on Invalid Pensions. The only purpose this committee serves is to provide a few additional clerical places.

When approached with the suggestion, following the Republican defeat in the 1930 election, that a movement be organized in the House either to overthrow the Republican leadership or to revise the rules, Nelson turned a cold shoulder. He refused to do anything that would jeopardize his mediocre committee chairmanship.

Representative John Schafer of Milwaukee is known among his colleagues as the "Roaring Fireman." When he takes the floor the House drops everything and settles back for a never-failing entertainment. He is a rare spectacle even in the House.

Over six feet in height, of vast bulk, and with a huge quid of tobacco in his jaw, he bellows at the top of his voice. In his youth he was a railroad fireman, and he has never gotten over trying to outshout a moving train. When he gets on his feet, he unconsciously reverts to his earlier days when he had to yell to make himself heard.

For a time he had the idea of running for the Senate against Young Bob. He broke with the LaFollette organization, following the old Senator's death and, while still vigorously asserting his Progressivism, he leaned more and more to the regulars.

A close race in 1930 and the election of Philip LaFollette as Governor the same year has done much to dampen his senatorial plans, at least for the time being. But he is a young man, only a few years older than Young Bob, and he still aspires.

Kvale is 34 years old, one of the youngest men in Congress. If he were associated with an active Progressive group, he would be more effective. Alone, he is still too unsure of himself to take the lead or pursue a militant policy.

*

Having performed this noteworthy service they rest gracefully on their well-deserved laurels. They confine themselves wholly to local affairs, leaving the serious matters of legislation and politics to coarser and more robust hands.

They always give unquestioning obedience to their leaders. They never bolt or assert themselves or ask disturbing ques-

She is always pressing some local project. Every year she brings a few talented young people from her district to the capital.

Mrs. Owen has had a colorful career. She has been married twice and is the widow of a British army officer. She accompanied him on arduous colonial service and was a nurse in the British Egypt-Palestine campaign.

Last session, in the interest of her political future in that part of her silk-stocking district which is rapidly becoming a workingman's section, Mrs. Pratt essayed the rôle during the tariff debates of a severe critic of the outrageous sugar schedule. She roundly denounced the extortionate duty and ringingly declared it meant hardship to the lowly.

legislation, the Democratic leaders of the House have played sly and devious rôles. They attacked the tariff measure as a whole, but very carefully saw to it that the products their States were interested in got good, healthy boosts in rates.

On the power issue, the "lame-duck" and unemployment bills, they left the leadership to others. The independent La-Guardia of New York was the real fighting leader for these measures in the House.

Representative John N. Garner of Texas is a vivid and interesting personality, but as an opposition leader he is guilty of what military men call "fraternizing with the enemy." Between him and Longworth there was a strong friendship.

Garner often went through the motion of bitterly assailing the Longworth leadership and even satirizing him on the floor as "that bald-headed coot." But behind the scenes they understood each other perfectly and were on the best of terms. "Nick" never took exception to what "Jack" said about him.

After a tumultuous battle on the floor in which Garner violently led his hosts in a bitter attack upon the Longworth machine, the two men might have been seen leaving the chamber, chatting and laughing, arm in arm. It was all a sham battle, and often not even a good show.

In debate Garner is without a peer as a rough-and-tumble fighter. There is no one in the House who can cope with him. He is fast as lightning in repartee, and does not mince words or language.

"It's a hell of a poet, Who doesn't know a sheep from a goat."

Garner's best work has been his disclosures concerning the astounding record of income tax refunds that has characterized the Mellon administration of the Treasury. He revealed that

in the ten years of Mellon's incumbency, more than three billion dollars have been returned or rebated to great corporations, huge estates, and wealthy taxpayers.

Garner affects a careless, slightly disheveled attire and frequently appears unshaven. His snow-white hair and heavy, gray eyebrows are always on end. He has mischievous eyes and a fine face. He lives modestly and quietly in a small residential hotel. He rules his side of the House firmly and the Democrats follow him loyally.

They keep almost wholly in the background. Mr. Crisp is the outstanding parliamentarian of the House, but beyond a reserved discourse now and then he disturbs himself little. Mr. Byrns is Chairman of the Democratic National Congressional Committee and by virtue of political statements to the press gets into print a little more frequently.

It is among the rank and file that is found the full flavor of the Democrats. George Huddleston of Alabama is a fighting crusader for peace and against large military expenditures. Lamar Jeffers, from the same State, is the son of a Captain of the Confederate Army, and himself a wounded veteran of the World War. Mr. Jeffers is a strong "believer in fraternalism" and is a member of several leading fraternities.

John E. Rankin of Mississippi is a slash-bang denouncer and when he gets heated up about Republican iniquity, he is worth going a long way to hear. Percy E. Quin, also from Mississippi, is another fervent orator of unconventional vehemence. When Percy takes the floor the lobbies and cloak rooms empty to hear him.

clothes, and pouring out a stream of uproarious observations. The House and galleries enjoy it immensely.

Tom Blanton considers himself the "watch-dog of the Treasury." He never misses a session of the House and is never happier than on unanimous consent calendar days, when an objection by a single member is sufficient to prevent consideration of a bill.

He has had a stormy career. Once he came within a few votes of being thrown out of the House for abusive language he inserted in the Congressional Record. Several years ago he directed a crusade against several District of Columbia Commissioners and the capital's police force. He forced the Commissioners to quit but the police are still functioning as badly as ever.

Loring Black of Brooklyn, New York, supplies the iconoclastic-intelligentzia element among the Democrats. He mocks all that his Southern fellow-Democrats hold sacred, particularly prohibition. Edgar Howard of Nebraska, on the other hand, while also a cynic, is a believer in prohibition.

Howard is an ardent friend of the Indian and claims that he can speak several of their dialects. He has a broad, homely wit, and talks with an exaggerated slow-motion drawl.

Henry T. Rainey of Illinois, white-haired and patriarchal, is a sincere and intelligent liberal. On a greater and more dignified stage, his fine qualities of character and ability would have made him a significant figure.

But in the House, he is lost in the mob and its clownish antics. He does what he can, but it is largely wasted effort, particularly as his own leaders are indifferent. He is a lawyer by profession but years ago gave it up for the simpler life of a

ner's federal-aid labor-exchange bill. The President had repeatedly endorsed the ideas contained in the measure but because a Democrat had initiated it he underhandedly tried to defeat it and later did kill it by a pocket veto.

LaGuardia, by threatening to organize a bolt against the then hard-pressed Republican leaders of the House, forced them to permit the bill to be brought out on the floor. There he soundly trounced the Administration, defeating a meaningless substitute it proposed by a two-to-one vote, and then passing the Wagner bill.

He returned to the House, demanded that the chamber be cleared of women, and then in plain, unadorned language told the goggle-eyed members about the horrible conditions he had seen.

When police in New York City were arresting and beating up striking New York clothing workers, LaGuardia joined the ranks of the picketers. The police recognized him, however, and would not arrest him.

LaGuardia went on the floor of the House and after displaying Jardine's leaflet, drew from his pocket a tiny lamb chop which he declared cost thirty cents, a small roast that he said cost several dollars, and a piece of steak that was even more expensive.

Recently a youthful admirer wrote LaGuardia and asked his advice as to whether he should be a prize-fighter or a member of the House. LaGuardia wrote back: "Dear Johnny, combine the two and you will be sure to succeed."

CHAPTER TEN

THE COURT JESTER

CHARLES GATES DAWES has spent a lifetime aiming at big things but never quite getting there.

He could have been a great Ambassador to Great Britain. A coarse mid-western sense of humor told him that it was funny to slip ice down a lady's back.

He could have been President of the United States. He preferred to be true to a boyhood friendship instead.

Boyhood friends have played an intimate and peculiar part in the life of Charles G. Dawes. There are not many who have had such friends. One of them became a great industrialist and Governor of his State; another became the Generalissimo of the armies of his country; and a third was thrice candidate for the Presidency of the United States.

Dawes was then a small, wiry person through whose character ran the traits of intense loyalty, tempestuousness and nerve, opportunism, contradictoriness and love of the limelight. At that early age, the first and last qualities—which are the keys to Dawes' later life—had not yet become predominant. It was Frank O. Lowden who evoked from Dawes the highest expression of loyalty. It was Bryan who planted the first ideas about the value of limelight.

Dawes and Bryan spent a great deal of time together during their early legal days in Nebraska. They even fought out their first case against each other, Bryan representing the Missouri Pacific Railroad, despite his subsequent advocacy of government ownership, and Dawes, later champion of big business, representing the shipper of some horse collars who claimed that he had been overcharged. The amount was \$1.27. It is not recorded who won the case.

He was not the son of a poor man. His father, a Brigadier General in the Civil War, was a prosperous lumber dealer in Marietta, Ohio. His brother Rufus was in the gas business. His brother Beman was in the gas and oil business. His brother Henry was President of the Southwestern Gas and Electric Company. It was not unnatural, therefore, that young Charles should follow them. He borrowed money, acquired a gas plant, and while Bryan remained an obscure lawyer back in Lincoln, Dawes, within a few short years, had made what was, for that day and age, a comfortable fortune.

When Dawes returned to Illinois he developed, besides the

gas business, a friendship which he was to cherish more than any other and which finally was to keep him from the Presidency. Frank O. Lowden was then struggling to establish a law practice. He and Dawes became partners in storming Chicago society and in running the Illinois National Guard, occasionally inducing young Lieutenant Pershing to come up on the pretext of giving military advice.

It was through Mark Hanna that Dawes got his first taste of politics. Hanna introduced him to McKinley and persuaded the latter to let the young man—then just turned thirty—manage his campaign in Illinois. This Dawes did with such efficiency and success that McKinley offered him the job of Comptroller of the Currency. Dawes, who had already won some reputation among his friends as an opportunist, jumped at the chance. His friend, Lowden, who was also offered a place in the McKinley Administration, turned it down.

By the time Dawes was forty-five years old he had accumulated as much money as he would ever need and was a respected citizen of Chicago. This was as far as he had gone. Aside from five years in what was not a very important office in Washington, he had satisfied none of his thirst for public

He got a chance to practise at both when the United States entered the World War. It would be unfair to impute these as the only motives for his patriotism. Dawes was a superpatriot and came by it honestly. Not only had his father been a General in the Civil War but one of his great-grandfathers, William Dawes, had accompanied Paul Revere. His manner of riding to war, however, was not that of his famous ancestor. Dawes rode to his first army post at Atlanta, Georgia, in a luxurious private car and continued to live in it at his own expense while carrying out the important duties of a major of engineers. Throughout his army career, he never quite lived down that initial blunder.

This Senate scolding was another piece of studied Dawes' stage-play. The Vice-Presidential inauguration is supposed to be a very whispered and surreptitious performance inside the Senate chamber and must not detract from the main show

scandal, the most inexcusable chapter in Dawes' life. William Lorimer needed money to convince examiners that his La Salle Street Bank had sufficient assets to comply with state banking laws. Dawes gave him a check for \$1,250,000. After the bank examiners were satisfied, Lorimer returned the check. Dawes did not consult his Board of Directors. He did not care a snap of the fingers whether or not he was violating the law. Lorimer had asked him for help and Lorimer was his friend.

Later when Lorimer's bank failed, its 4,000 depositors sued Dawes, and an Illinois court fixed his liability at \$1,487,854. Friendly judges later pared this down to \$100,000.

Dawes is not without sympathy for his fellow-men. Underneath his affectation of hard-boiledness there is a genuine lush of sentimentality. As a memorial to his son, Rufus F. Dawes, he established a chain of hotels operated at cost, where a man can get a bath for five cents and a meal for a trifling amount more. Dawes himself doled out sandwiches and coffee to long lines of shivering men during one of Chicago's depression winters twenty-five years ago. His philosophy is, first, that the rich should help the poor, and second, that the rich should always be rich and the poor always poor. The idea that there is anything wrong with a system which creates such an abyse

him—in fact, that he was going to invite him to visit the United States. Imagine his surprise, even his chagrin, therefore, when he found the new envoy brought no invitation, but merely had come to discuss naval affairs in general. Naturally, he was not then acquainted with Mr. Dawes' clown acts, and in talking to newspapermen immediately afterward, the Prime Minister was obviously and openly peeved.

London, however, soon got acquainted with them. Dawes found that, as far as naval negotiations were concerned, his Ambassadorial job was a washout. His rôle was that of a glorified messenger boy. He received cables from Secretary of State Stimson, put on his top hat and morning clothes and trotted over to No. 10 Downing Street where he handed the message to MacDonald or Arthur Henderson. Sometimes he got telephone calls to come to the Foreign Office and receive notes, which he in turn cabled back.

The routine got a little boring.

So even before the Conference opened, Dawes, being bored, having had the naval limelight turned off, looked around for other avenues of escape from the monotony of being an ambassador. He discovered Ye Cheshire Cheese Tavern. More than one hundred and fifty years before, Dr. Johnson and Boswell had made it famous. Dawes decided to refresh its fame. He came there almost every noon to lunch. Within two days, word of this had spread to all London and a line of American tourists waited outside for an opportunity to lunch in the same room with their Ambassador. The barman made a small fortune by charging a shilling for a guaranteed

opportunity to shake hands with him and waiters charged even more for reserving tables near him.

All London laughed. But it laughed louder after the American Ambassador's dinner to the Spanish Infanta.

Dawes has always had a yen for moving picture actors. He once staged a dinner in Washington in honor of Buster Keaton. To the dinner in honor of the Spanish Infanta in London, he invited Leon Errol. However, only one among that large number of pompous and austere-looking personages knew that the American screen comedian was present.

Errol was disguised as a waiter—as a drunken waiter—and he played his part well. He lurched, he stumbled—dishes caromed everywhere. He insulted the guests. He spilled ice down one lady's back and sent a lobster spinning into the lap of the Duke of Norfolk. Finally, he was fired, with mock indignation, by the American Ambassador, who thought the incident highly amusing.

The Spanish Infanta, who was in on the secret, agreed with him. The others did not. The most indignant of all was the Spanish Ambassador, dean of the Diplomatic Corps.

Apparently not satisfied with being the talk of London, or perhaps it was because the gossip showed signs of diminishing, Dawes managed to stir it up at one of the court levees. London society takes these functions with more solemnity and seriousness than Washington takes a Presidential inaugural. Days are spent practising curtsies. Fortunes are spent on gowns.

Protocol is followed as carefully as if an empire were at stake—two steps before His Majesty—a bow—a step in front of Her Majesty—another bow—and then on to one's appointed place.

Imagine, then, the consternation of the Court when His

Excellency, the American Ambassador, bowed once before King George, and walked on, forgetting Queen Mary completely.

Afterwards he was reminded of his omission.

"Oh," said Charley Dawes, "I'm from the Middle West. We don't pay much attention to women over there."

But the Middle West is not London and London has not got used to Charley Dawes.

But how could it?

• —A man who denounced LaFollette as a Red and a menace, who organized the Minute Men of the Constitution to war on union labor, yet who established a chain of charitable hotels for unemployed men—
• —A man whose hard-headedness is proverbial, but who has written a play for his two adopted children, who plays the flute and the piano, and who has composed music that is performed by Kreisler—

How could any one, more especially the British, understand some one whose chief charm is the contradiction that constantly runs through his life?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

HERE happens to be in this humdrum capital a little man who occasionally lets his thoughts wander back through a land of pagodas and beggars and bronze-bellied images through stagnant opium dens, a market of prostitutes, and across the pale pearl of the tropic sea where a "palm-tree bends over the sand and offers its heart to the moon."

Then came Claudel, a man whose name is more widely known throughout the world than all the diplomatic corps together. He has been a failure in Washington. He has been a success in the United States.

Why

Return home troubled and heavy.'

Behind Claudel's back, his dinner partners rage at him. He is known as the most silent, the most depressing dinner companion in Washington.

His mind is on the contagious ecstasy of a field of grain in the sunshine or the inspiration of a Chinese temple at dusk.

*

The graduates of l'Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques in those days became either consuls or diplomats. Claudel chose the former because it required no personal fortune.

His first post was New York City.

"New York at that time was crushing," he said, when once persuaded to talk. "I do not find it so now. But then, thirty years ago, it was—how can I describe it—half and half. The sky-scrapers were just beginning to be built and the city was a mixture of giant buildings towering over squat roofs. It was better in those days for the visitor to see some other part of America before he came to New York."

Claudel, then at the age of twenty-five, had already begun to write, and his works show the imprint of almost every city

After a year in Boston, during which he was in charge of the consulate, this rather sensitive and impressionable youngster was transferred to China, and, en route, was given permission to visit his home. The journey to New York had been his first trip away from France and he had been absent nearly two years.

This disappointment, described with all the sensitive dignity of his twenty-six years, was one of the first sketches Claudel wrote.

"The voyager reënters his home as a guest. He is a stranger to all, and all is strange to him. (Servant, hang up the traveling cloak and do not carry it away. Soon it will be necessary to depart once more.) Seated at the family table he is a suspected guest, ill at ease. No parents; it is never the same! This is a passer-by whom you have received, his ears filled with the fracas of trains and the clamor of the sea, like a man who imagines that he still feels beneath his feet the profound movement that lures him away. He is not the same man whom you conducted to the fateful wharf. The separation has taken place and he has entered upon the exile that follows it!"

up with silt. Consular duties were not heavy, and Claudel spent much of his five years at Foochow in his house-boat drowsing through the canals of China or reading through languid summers in his bungalow in the interior. At Foochow he learned to know the East—its mystery, its philosophy, its religion.

Nearly twenty years in the Orient gave Claudel something which he himself cannot describe. Nor can it be done here. There he learned that Oriental penetration of character and that understanding of human nature which the Chinese express in word pictures. It is this philosophy, also expressed in word pictures, running through Claudel's works that has made him one of the most criticized poets of France, as he is one of the most criticized diplomats in Washington. A furor was raised when it was suggested that the Academy accord him due recognition. His plays can neither be read nor played, his critics contended. His Oriental mannerisms they branded as lyrical frenzy and bold improvisations, which in France, where the classic dominates art, is nothing short of heresy.

The other great influence in Claudel's writing had begun before he came to Foochow. As a student in Paris, he had become a confirmed disciple of his professor of philosophy, an agnostic. But while in search of atmosphere for some poetry one Christmas Eve, Claudel walked into Notre Dame. That was the beginning of what has since been called his "long pilgrimage towards God." Describing that moment years later, Claudel cries:

I remember the darkness where we two were face to face, those gloomy winter afternoons in Notre Dame.

I, all alone below there, lit up the face of the great bronze Christ with a twopenny-halfpenny taper.

Only the faith was in me, and I looked at You in silence like a man who prefers his friend.

I went down in Your sepulcher with You

"the palm tree bent over the sand and offered its heart to the moon."

Once during the course of an intimate conversation, Claudel was asked if he did not sometimes become bored with the prosaic commercial world of the United States and long to be back in the Orient, but either he was too good an Ambassador to admit it or else is even more adaptable than any one suspects. He said:

"Oh, the Orient is more picturesque, of course, but not more fascinating. What is more fascinating than standing on the twenty-ninth floor of a skyscraper and watching a snow storm blanket New York? What is more fascinating than looking down upon the traffic lights of New York, watching the automobiles, the trucks and the buses all stop as if moved by a giant machine? New York is superb and mighty and I enjoy it.

"America is like the boom-boom of the battle charge. It is the sustained note. It is necessary in music. They say it came from the Negro. I do not know—but America has it. The boom-boom-boom, never varying, never letting down. I see it in your streets—the throb of life—the charge onward.

"I am glad to begin my work in America and to end it here. I am sixty years old. I have been every place. I have seen the world. I have five children. It will some day be time for me to return to my native France. After America, I shall do so. I have bought a place in the Alps, where I shall sit and write and..." he fumbled for the word... "what is the verb for the word 'rotten'?"

"To vegetate," it was suggested.

CHAPTER TWELVE

LITTLE NEMO, THE WONDER-WORKER

WIGHT WHITNEY MORROW spent a lifetime getting a reputation as a great liberal only to spend three months in the Senate blasting it.

The revelation caused Justice Brandeis to observe that the world would be much better off if men were less ambitious.

There is no question that Dwight Whitney Morrow did do a superb job as Ambassador to Mexico. He went there at a time when relations with that country were at their lowest ebb in recent history—at a time when Frank B. Kellogg had informed the Mexican Government that it was on trial before the world, when both governments resorted to the stealing of diplomatic dispatches in order to get something on the other, when the State Department had announced the termination of the smuggling treaty in order to aid revolutionaries to get arms shipments with which to overthrow the Mexican Government, and when the Mexican Government, in retaliation, was sending paid propagandists all through Latin America to

There is no question also that Dwight Whitney Morrow has performed superbly and liberally almost every job he has ever tackled.

When Cuba was virtually bankrupt and New York bankers were demanding intervention, Mr. Morrow, representative of J. P. Morgan, Cuba's largest creditor, opposed intervention and extended additional credits to get the island on its feet.

When a honeycomb of corruption was exposed in New Jersey prisons, Mr. Morrow headed a committee which reformed the State penal system, making it one of the most humanitarian in the east.

When he has been called upon to serve on philanthropic boards, to raise money for hospitals or endow libraries, Mr. Morrow has given unstintingly of his time and his effort.

never had cause to worry regarding the side of the roll-call on which he would find the name of the little wonderworker. His record was written in cold and unchangeable black across the pages of the Senate's roll-call, and on the economic issues this is how it reads:

Water Power:

Voted against the Norris Bill providing for Government

Voted against amendment requiring Secretary of War to supply electric energy from Muscle Shoals to nearby communities at rate not to exceed 4 mills per kilowatt hour. Amendment failed of two-thirds vote necessary to set aside rules.

Voted against motion to reconsider the confirmation of the three Federal Power Commissioners who had voted to oust the two chief enemies of the power trust—King and Russell. Motion carried.

Voted against motion to reconsider the confirmation of George Otis Smith, Chairman of the Federal Power Commission. Motion carried.

Voted against motion to request the President to return the confirmation papers on these three Commissioners to the Senate. Motion carried.

Voted against motion to recommit the nominations of the three men to committee. Motion carried.

Paired with Brock of Tennessee against motion to place the nominations back on Senate calendar. Motion carried.

Commission until one and two in the morning. Confirmation voted.

Food Relief:

Voted for Reed motion to await results of Red Cross \$10,000,000 drive before voting on Robinson's \$25,000,000 food relief appropriation. Motion defeated.

for human relief. Motion carried

Bonus:

Voted against Soldier Bonus Loan Bill. Bill passed. National Defense:

Voted for modernization of battleships. Bill passed.

Voted against Frazier amendment providing that no funds in the War Department appropriation bill could be used for military training in schools or colleges. Amendment defeated.

*

Many people consider it a rare phenomenon that Dwight Morrow, a man of great wealth, should have shown any liberal qualities at all.

They would be right in the case of Henry L. Stimson, scion of a family of great wealth, which for two centuries has been one of the ruling dynasties of New York State. But with Dwight W. Morrow, not at all. Morrow had every reason in the world to be liberal. He was the son, not of a wealthy conservative, but a hard-working college professor. James Elmore Morrow, President of Marshall College, West Virginia, was a man of broad vision, wide sympathies and a contagious buoyancy of spirit. Without the latter he might have become soured by the difficult task of educating five children on an income of \$2,400 a year. But he did not. He gave them all college educations and, with the possible exception of Jay J. Morrow, he passed on to all of them an appreciation of the problem of

those who struggle, which, after all, is the fundamental basis of liberalism.

To the two sons, Jay and Dwight, came the greatest temptation to stray from the liberal foundation implanted by their father. After his graduation from high school at the age of fourteen, young Dwight Morrow clerked for four years in the County Treasurer's Office in Pittsburgh, and then, because the tuition was free and the Morrow resources slender, he took the competitive examination for West Point. Although he stood highest in the examination, the appointment was refused because his brother, Jay, already had entered West Point and the Congressman declined to send two members from the same family.

This turned out to be one of the most fortunate twists of fate in Dwight Morrow's career. His brother's army education made him a typical military officer of the most reactionary school. His high-handed tactics in conducting the Tacna-Arica plebiscite preliminaries caused the State Department to abandon the plebiscite altogether and to postpone any settlement of the boundary controversy between Chile and Peru for two years. No two men could have more dissimilar points of view, and had Dwight gone to West Point, he would probably now be the replica of his elder brother.

Having escaped West Point, young Dwight Morrow entered Amherst. And because he was poor and had to make his own way, he achieved a brilliant record and got one hundred percent return out of his four-year investment. He did the same later when he entered Columbia Law School, graduating so high in his class that he was promptly offered a fifty dollar a month apprenticeship with Reed, Simpson and Thacher, the same firm which now handles the legal work of Soviet Russia

in the United States, and from which the present Solicitor of the Justice Department, Thomas D. Thacher, came to Washington.

It was at this time in his life that Dwight Morrow developed the thesis that honesty and unselfishness always pay.

This was typical of Morrow in Cuba, in Mexico, at London, and in all his personal and professional relations. In Mexico he did not begin his negotiations over the petroleum law by pretending that the position of American oil companies was right. Other Ambassadors, quite aware of the failings of the oil companies, had taken such a stand. They asked much, prepared to take less. Morrow reversed the process. He nearly took President Calles' breath away by announcing at the start of negotiations that the American oil companies were partly in the wrong. So, he also said, was the Mexican Government. If both sides yielded, an agreement could be reached. It was

The result, however, was severely criticized by the oil companies. They claimed that Morrow had opposed, rather than championed, their rights. To a certain extent he had. He looked at the problem also from the Mexican point of view. He believed that Mexico, as well as the oil companies, should

get a square deal and that it was his duty as American Ambassador to help protect Mexico.

Later, much embarrassed, Mr. Stimson explained that he had put this forward merely as a bargaining move; that he was asking for a great deal in order to be able to reduce his demands; that by throwing out the specter of a giant battleship, he could wangle cruiser concessions from the Japanese.

Mr. Morrow had not worked these things out very clearly in his mind when he first became a young lawyer in New York and when he first went to live in Englewood, New Jersey. But the essential fundamentals, planted by his father, were already there and it was the working out of these ideals that eventually brought Morrow into the firm of J. P. Morgan as one of its partners.

He took time, for instance, to amalgamate the five local charity organizations into one Civic Association over which he presided for ten years. He took time also to head a committee which built an armory. As President of the Englewood Free Library he raised the money for a handsome new building. He took time to push three bills through the State Legislature in order to abolish the Tri-Township Poorhouse and he headed two hospital drives which made the Englewood Hospital one of the best equipped in the country. All of this threw him in constant contact with his neighbors, among whom were Lamont and Davison. He served with them on committees and gouged them for large contributions. They were not only impressed with his energy and mental capacity but they reasoned that if he could get large sums of money from them he could perform equal miracles in the business world.

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Friends have played a large part in the life of Dwight Morrow.

He is a man who makes friends and keeps them, and he has been fortunate in having a few in high places, some in low, upon whose loyalty he could depend, no matter what the circumstances. He has leaned on them heavily and they in turn have leaned upon him.

It was Dean Acheson, a clever young Washington lawyer,

who wrote the reverberating prohibition speech denouncing the Eighteenth Amendment with which Morrow opened his senatorial campaign in New Jersey. It was the late Joseph P. Cotton, who, as Under-Secretary of State, backed to the limit everything Morrow did in Mexico. And it was J. Reuben Clark, a former Under-Secretary of State, who accompanied Morrow to Mexico and helped him negotiate some of his most delicate deals.

Some twenty years later, Dwight Morrow contributed materially to the fulfillment of his prediction that Calvin Coolidge was the man of his class most likely to succeed.

Morrow is a man of great enthusiasms. Sometimes his enthusiasm is sound. Sometimes it is merely successful. His enthusiasm for Calvin Coolidge as President was of the latter variety. Morrow got on the Coolidge band-wagon when it was only a push-cart affair shoved around by one or two enthusiasts, of which Morrow was the chief pusher. He organized the "Amherst Coolidge-for-President Committee," before any one outside of his own State had anything but a vague recollection that Coolidge was Governor of Massa-

chusetts. Through money raised almost exclusively by Morrow the club distributed several thousand copies of a volume of Coolidge's speeches called "Have Faith in Massachusetts." More particularly the club concentrated upon distribution of the book to delegates to the Republican National Convention held in Chicago in 1920, where Morrow with usual haphazard and irrepressible enthusiasm gnashed his teeth because the elder statesmen of the G. O. P. refused to consider Coolidge as Presidential timber.

Of these, the Cuban problem, on a much smaller and less complicated scale, was somewhat analagous to that which existed in Mexico. In a few brief and panic-stricken months after the War, the price of sugar had tumbled from the wartime peak of twenty-five cents a pound to the fantastic figure of one and one-half cents. American banking houses had

In 1916 the corruption of the New Jersey State prisons was exposed. Walter E. Edge, then Governor, had been Chairman of the State Senate Committee on Labor Legislation when Morrow had drafted the New Jersey Workmen's Compensation Act during Woodrow Wilson's governorship, and Edge called upon him to reform the State prison system. Morrow hired research experts and went to work systematically. He spent a year digging into the penal institutions of the State going back as far as colonial times. He sided with organized labor against the sale of prison-made goods in competition with free labor. And after a year he brought in a report which caused the revision of the State's penal legislation and set up a penal system as modern and humanitarian as any in the eastern United States.

Neither this nor his reorganization of Cuban finance put Morrow in the public eye. Outside the State of New Jersey in fact outside of Wall Street, he remained practically unknown until he became Chairman of the Aircraft Board. Thanks to the scathing and unquenchable criticism which General William Mitchell, head of the Army Air Corps, had leveled at the army's air policy, the attention of the entire country was upon the Aircraft Board.

Personal publicity was about all the aircraft hearings did for Dwight Morrow, and he did not do much more for them. He worked hard and at a period when he could ill afford the time, but it was work which any other reasonably able executive could have performed just as efficiently.

The most interesting part of Morrow's service as Chairman of the Aircraft Board was the manner in which Coolidge appointed him. Notification of the appointment came merely through reading a Sunday newspaper. Coolidge asked no questions as to whether Morrow had time to do the work or the inclination to do it. Dwight Morrow he considered one whom he could draft at his convenience. So three days

For the last dozen years, these two men, the antithesis of each other in appearance, have been almost inseparable companions. Rublee is nearly seven feet tall and as thin as the proverbial bean pole. He stoops a little, perhaps from the habit of making his own height appear a little less in contrast with the five-feet-five of his boon companion.

Rublee is the son of a Wisconsin newspaper publisher who championed the old Socialist movement in that State and passed on many of his liberal leanings to his son. A man of no wealth, Rublee had practically retired from a lucrative law practice in Washington in order to devote all his time to Dwight Morrow. They became acquainted when Rublee, then a partner of the late Joseph P. Cotton, served with Cotton on the Allied Maritime Transport Council, of which Morrow was also a member. Since that time Rublee has been one of Morrow's most constant advisors and is responsible for many of the moves which have increased the latter's reputation as a great liberal.

For two months before going to Mexico City, therefore, both Morrow and Rublee concentrated upon a long-distance study of the country to which the former was appointed as Ambassador. This study did not consist of delving into books, but of long conferences with people of all walks of life—from labor leaders to bankers, so that before Morrow arrived at his new post he knew more about the Mexican Government than did the career diplomats of the State Department who had been there for years.

Morrow had been carefully warned of two pitfalls. One was the American Colony which is always rabidly anti-Mexican Government and which mingles only with the aristocracy of

The latter, Morrow had been informed, had no sympathy at all with the Calles régime, never met any of its members socially and were constantly associated with factions plotting to stir up revolution against the government.

Morrow handled the career men very tactfully. He let them go about their ordinary routine of writing reports and attending teas. And he let them keep their desks on the first floor. But on the second floor he established the real brains of the American Embassy. Here he and George Rublee and Reuben Clark established their offices, and here Morrow and his two advisors began to work out the solutions of the petroleum, church and agrarian problems which had so long troubled American-Mexican relations.

When Ambassador Morrow paid his first call upon President Calles, however, Mr. Lane did not accompany him as interpreter. Mr. Lane was hurt. President Calles nearly dropped dead. He recovered with sufficient promptitude to bring forward his own interpreter and the two settled down to the most unique visit that an Ambassador Extraordinary has ever paid to a President of Mexico. It consisted of a breakfast of ham and eggs, followed by an inspection trip of President Calles' farm, during the course of which the two men got no nearer discussing affairs of state than the practicability of the milking machines newly installed in the Calles' barn.

In this and in a hundred other ways, Morrow established a foundation of personal friendship before he even brought up the delicate matter of the petroleum and the religious disputes.

The most notable instance in which Morrow championed the Mexican cause was when he opposed the efforts of his old friend and former partner, Thomas W. Lamont, to arrange a settlement of the Mexican railway debt. Mexico owed somewhere around one billion dollars to those who had bought bonds to build the national railway. Lamont, representing the bondholders, offered to settle for about half that. Morrow, friend of the Mexican Government, and actually representing no one except himself, advised against the compromise. He pointed out that Mexico had a great mass of debts which should be settled in a lump arrangement. To settle the railway debt before the others was to give his old firm the House of Morgan preference over the other creditors.

Although President Ortiz Rubio accepted the Lamont compromise, Morrow's influence was so strong with the Mexican Congress that the debt agreement finally was rejected.

Dwight Morrow's friends have sometimes called him the most spectacular match-maker of the present generation. Certainly he cannot deny the fact that he is the most famous father-in-law in the United States nor the fact that he was solely responsible for introducing Charles A. Lindbergh to his daughter. In fact, even before he invited Colonel Lind-

bergh to Mexico, Morrow had given him ample opportunity to meet all three daughters, and it was only an extraordinary lack of feminine curiosity which prevented a meeting.

Coolidge had invited Morrow to dine at the White House on the state occasion when Lindbergh came back from his famous trans-Atlantic flight and partook of the Coolidge frugal hospitality. As Chairman of the Aircraft Board, Morrow saw a great deal of the young aviator both then and afterward. Morrow was a member of the Guggenheim Foundation for the Promotion of Aeronautics, and it was through him that Lindbergh joined the staff of the Foundation.

The young flier spent several week-ends at the Morrow home in Englewood, but always at times when the family was away. Only once did the trails of Lindbergh and his future wife cross before their courtship in Mexico City. Mrs. Morrow, returning from Cleveland with Elizabeth and Anne, discovered her future son-in-law at the telephone. She recognized him and introduced herself. Unlike the hundreds of government stenographers who drop their work every time the Lone Eagle steps into the corridors of the State Department, the two Morrow girls were too busy unpacking their bags to notice him.

It worked admirably. It also succeeded in bringing together Colonel Lindbergh and the Morrow girls. At first it appeared that the flying Colonel was in some doubt as to whom he really cared for. Elizabeth was tall and slim. Anne was built along the short and stocky lines of both her mother and father.

Anne was timid, sensitive, poetic, with a soul which reacts to personalities around her like a barometer. Sitting with her at the dinner table it is possible to read in the flashes of pleasure and pain that pass across her face the story of one who suffers agonies even over the idiosyncrasies of her family. Her first essay in college was a description of a man breaking eggs every morning, with exactly the same precision, day after day, breaking them with a certain pride and egotism. It was her father.

Before she was engaged, Anne once told a friend that she would like to have the refusal of Lindbergh. After she was engaged and before the announcement was made, her friends at college said she "cried for a month" trying to decide whether she was doing the right thing. Finally her mother told her she would have to make up her mind definitely; she could not change it after the announcement. Mrs. Morrow, as usual, had her way.

Although devoted friends, it is no secret that Mr. Morrow sometimes has a difficult time with his headstrong young son-in-law. Morrow, older and more experienced in the clash of human relations, believes in smoothing the path of life as far as possible wherever he goes. Lindbergh, hot-tempered and impetuous, sometimes thinks his father-in-law is a temporizer.

resented this despite the fact that these reporters had no alternative, and despite the fact that among them were one or two who had packed his sandwiches and helped him get away on the famous flight that qualified him for marriage with the Morrow girl. The upshot of this resentment was the fact that when the baby arrived, the reporters, who had waited for days outside the gate, heard nothing of it until telephoned by their own editors.

It took the new father some time to get over this. Even twenty-four hours later, when Mr. Morrow poked his head through the door of the breakfast room, he decided it was best to let his son-in-law cool off a little more.

Beautiful and vivacious, she is inclined to resent being called Lindbergh's sister-in-law.

Morrow's youngest daughter, Constance, is still in school, while Dwight Jr., his only son, is following his father at Amherst.

Mrs. Morrow is a graduate of Smith College and has served on its Board of Trustees for many years. She is an excellent speaker and has worked with her husband in almost everything he has done. She also accompanies him on most of his trips, if for no other reason than to make sure that he shaves.

He worked long hours and with tremendous concentration. This power of concentration is one of the secrets of Morrow's success. He has the knack of putting everything out of his mind except the one particular problem which he is trying to solve. So intense was this concentration at the London Conference that the Marine orderlies on duty on the floors occupied by the American Delegation at the Ritz frequently had to prevent Morrow from wandering absent-mindedly into any but his own room. Once in his haste to get out of his room, he opened a closet door, walked in and had closed it on himself before he realized where he was.

Whereas other members of the American Delegation took the usual English week-ends in the country from Friday until Monday, Morrow was at his desk in the Ritz all day Saturday and Sunday. He never quit work until midnight, and it was not unusual for him to call newspapermen into conference after eleven o'clock. When he was placed in charge of drafting the text of the Naval Treaty, he drove his committee day and night, even having cold lunches sent in to them in the conference room—something absolutely unheard of in the annals of European diplomacy.

Constantly at his right hand during the London Conference was his old friend George Rublee. Rublee it was who drafted the treaty outlawing submarine warfare and who drafted the preliminary text of the Naval Treaty, long before any of the other delegates had thought about its necessity. Rublee it was also who sold Morrow the idea, which the latter sold to Stimson, that a consultative pact was absolutely essential if a five-power pact, instead of a three-power agreement, was to be signed at London.

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"Dwight, if you'll get off that Amherst Board of Trustees, I'll give you a present of \$100,000."

Try as hard as his critics will, it is almost impossible to find

There is no question that Dwight Morrow has old-fashioned and conservative ideas about the necessity of a man living within his own income. There is no question also that long association with great wealth has given him a respect for regularity.

Once he made the wistful complaint that the clerk of the Senate had announced the third reading of a bill, but that he, Morrow, had sat on the floor of the Senate painstakingly and patiently, listening to everything, and he knew that that bill had not been read three times. Again when he did not know how to vote on the question of home liquor raiding, he decided always on the question of prohibition to watch Blaine of Wisconsin, and vote as he did. Blaine, he reasoned, was the wettest member of the Senate, and since he, Morrow, aspired to a wringing wet leadership in New Jersey, he could not go wrong by following Blaine.

He was a pathetic figure—so pathetic that he became the

great enigma of the Senate. Why, every one asked, has Dwight Morrow, "the little Wonder-Worker," the great liberal, the man who was to have been the outstanding leader of the Senate—why has he fallen so flat?

The answer is not yet forthcoming. His friends have given several answers—none of them convincing. One is that Morrow's whole life had been spent in personal negotiations and the cloistered seclusion of the banker's office. The din, the confusion, the fast-moving debate of the Senate was new to him. Morrow, they pointed out, was not a trial lawyer. He never appeared in court, never even wrote briefs. His wizardry lay in organizing new enterprises, settling disputes between big firms, preparing financial plans and advising executives. To think fast and on his feet, so necessary in the Senate, was something completely out of his line.

Other friends pointed out that Morrow was playing a waiting game, that he was biding his time, making himself an expert in parliamentary law, and that at the next session of Congress he would take the Senate by storm.

Again it was explained that Mr. Morrow had to be loyal to his chief in the White House.

Unquestionably he was loyal, but the idea that he owed any obligation to Mr. Hoover was dispelled on the day that the President sent his friend Franklin Fort to run against Morrow as the dry Republican candidate in the New Jersey primaries. Mr. Morrow knew this, admitted it during the campaign, and there was no illusion in his mind about any debt or obligation to the White House.

During his diplomatic negotiations, Morrow has been known to lie like an unfaithful wife defending her home. He got such a reputation for this at London that newspapermen compared him to a bird fluttering off in an attempt to divert attention from her young. The result was that the more optimistically Mr. Morrow beat his breast and declared that all was going well, the more pessimistic the press cables read that night.

All of Mr. Morrow's lies in those days were diplomatic ones and told for the purpose of aiding a righteous cause. Perhaps the lie which Morrow, the Senator, has given to the one-time liberal character of Morrow, the Ambassador, is also aimed to aid a righteous cause. But if so, no one has yet discovered it.

Finally, the blinding and dizzy glare of the Senate chamber cannot be compared with the rarefied atmosphere of a banker's office or an ambassador's chancery. In either of the latter it is possible to consult experts and to spend weeks making a decision. It is possible to compromise, to yield a little here and take a little there, and nobody ever knows anything about it. But on the floor of the Senate, one must make up one's mind a dozen times a day, without experts and sometimes without warning. One must vote aye or nay, and by that vote, written in unchangeable black, a Senator shall be judged forever.

Under these circumstances it is sometimes expedient to be irregular in private and regular in public.

That appears to be one of the things Senator Morrow is trying to practise. In the cloak rooms he has congratulated various irregular Senators. To Senator Wheeler of Montana he said that he fully concurred with him regarding the Senate's right to recall the names of the Federal Power Commissioners. He rushed up to Senator Borah to congratulate him on his drought relief speech.

292 WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND

But when the bell rings for a vote, Senator Hastings, Republican reactionary, looks at Senator Morrow. Senator Morrow knows what that look means. And when the roll-call is checked up, the name of the "Little Wonder-Worker" is found on the side of reaction every time.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

LENIN AND MACHIAVELLI

ARLY in the Hoover Administration, when Henry L. Stimson was a very green and very perspiring Secretary of State, he asked one of his advisors to point out the ablest members of the Diplomatic Corps. The names of two ex-news-papermen were handed him.

Ferarra, also unable to divorce himself from the routine of getting his paper on the street by mid-afternoon, gets up at five. He works at the particular book he is writing—he has published half a dozen—until nine, when he puts on riding breeches and white vest to take his morning exercise in the park. At eleven, still in white vest, but minus the breeches, he is back at his desk.

In appearance, Davila is not a prepossessing person. He has dark hair, a penetrating mischievous eye, a total height of five feet five inches and is decidedly not the ideal dinner partner

Ferrara happened to come to Washington because he also was partly responsible for a revolution.

He happened to participate in that revolution because he was a born individualist, a rebel and an anarchist.

*

the world's nitrate markets between Germany, France and Chile.

Davila spent another long Washington summer studying Russia. The Soviet Republic is a long way off from Chile and does not particularly concern it. The two governments lack diplomatic relations. However, Davila became absorbed in the five-year plan and the Russian system of government sales as compared with the hit-or-miss system of capitalism which he was watching bring unemployment and starvation in the United States. The result was a detailed report to his government on Russia, which, according to some of his colleagues who have read it, is one of the most complete studies of the Soviet system that has been made.

Having learned to know the United States, he wanted the Chilean public to get a more accurate picture of it than the one they receive from the stories of sex, jazz and gang warfare which the press associations daily carry south. So Davila sold the heads of the two great press associations the idea that the U. S. A. was not a cultural desert and that the cultural news of the "Colossus of the North" should be emphasized in the daily dispatches along with the reports on American jazz civilization.

Davila, having been put through all the journalistic paces from police court to politics, became managing editor of La

Nacion, and immediately instigated rebellion. Instead of hiring regulars in the newspaper profession, he picked his reporters from every walk of life. He got an engineer to handle economic and financial news. He picked a painter to write dramatics. And, after working with his fresh and pliable staff until three in the morning regularly for a month, he sent his newsboys out on the streets one day selling a paper, which except for the Spanish language, was an exact replica of a modern American daily. Advertisements were banished from the front page. Cable news was featured instead of political essays. A dramatic page, a financial section, and sporting pages had been added.

Santiago gasped a little and then read La Nacion with avidity. Eventually every other newspaper in Chile followed suit, and Davila eventually did himself one better by establishing the first American tabloid on the South-American continent.

Having revolutionized Chilean journalism, Davila turned his attention to revolutionizing governments. The Ambassador is rather philosophical about revolution now, but at that time he was young, intolerant and quick on the trigger.

Davila spread the groundwork of public opinion that led up to the revolution. The four newspapers of Santiago pretty well dominate Chile, and, of the four, Davila controlled two. His friend Carlos Silva Vildosola controlled the others, and together they drove home the idea that parliamentary government was ineffective and extravagant.

So once again, through his own paper and his colleague, Vildosola, Davila launched a program to mold public opinion in favor of Chilean-Peruvian friendship. The two countries had been gloating over severed diplomatic relations for eighteen years. Under Davila's leadership, however, they agreed to exchange envoys. This meant an increase in trade, which was exactly what Davila had been hoping for. Peru had never before sold so much sugar to Chile, and Chile had never before sold so much nitrate to her northern neighbor.

Davila and Frank B. Kellogg, sitting silent in Washington, merely watched the two publics realize that their mutual good will was essential to prosperity. After that the settlement of Tacna-Arica was easy.

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Ambassador Orestes Ferrara can do all three is a tribute to his sense of humor and his frankness. Ferrara is his own harshest critic. He has no illusions about himself nor his President. Referring to the criticism he got for promoting the Pan-American Conference at Havana in 1928, he once remarked:

"Whenever I do anything particularly worth while and righteous, I get criticized for it. Whenever I do anything for which I should be ashamed—and that is more times than I can remember—every one applauds."

Ambassador Ferrara holds no particular brief for President Machado. He admits that his faults are legion. Neither does he hold any brief for himself. But he makes his faults amusing and so he is forgiven.

Ferrara was once the antithesis of Machado—also almost the antithesis of what he himself now is. Born in Sicily, he probably would have been a member of the Black Hand had he not been too intellectual. Expelled from two or three universities, he joined an anarchist cult instead. Anarchism and adventure—probably the latter—took him to Crete to aid the Greeks in their rebellion against the Turks. Then, his appetite for revolution whetted, Ferrara came to New York and joined a filibustering expedition supporting the rebels who had been keeping Spain in continual hot water on the Island of Cuba. Two attempts to land arms failed, but the third succeeded, and Ferrara got to Cuba just in time to ride the crest of the revolutionary wave to fame, wealth and conservatism. When he arrived he was twenty years old. His sole assets were a thirst for excitement, a love of rebellion, a body that could withstand any hardship and a temper that later forced him into fourteen duels. At the end of the Spanish-American War, Ferrara was twenty-two years old, held the rank of Colonel, was Governor of a province, and had started on the path of conservatism and respectability.

To-day he is a millionaire, fat, charming, the best judge of wine in Washington, and the only man in the Diplomatic

As to how he made his money, Ferrara always has a twinkle in his eye when he explains that he took advantage of sugar when sugar was profitable. It was in those lucky and affluent days that Ferrara founded Heraldo de Cuba, now the only newspaper in Havana which has not been periodically and consistently banned by Machado. Ferrara is always proud of his old newspaper days, although silent about the present contempt with which his paper is generally held in Cuba. He is also proud of the fact that he still holds the post of Professor of Law and Government at the University of Havana, despite the fact that the University of Havana has been closed by Machado for three years, more or less, and despite the fact that Ferrara has scarcely lectured there in a decade.

To those who really know him, the old spark of revolution still flares occasionally in Ferrara's breast, but being an Ambassador he works it out of his system more discreetly than in the days when he was twenty, with Crete and Cuba to conquer. Sometimes he will talk a little more disapprovingly than an envoy should of the high-handed methods his President uses to destroy labor unions or assassinate his opponents. Sometimes he will reminisce a little regretfully about the hectic days of his youth, as if he wished that rebellious period were

But for the most part the Ambassador works out the last lingering traces of his rebellious youth in writing. Some of his books are anything but rebellious, such as the Causes and Pretexts of the World War, Lessons of the War and Peace Conference, or Pan-American Commercial Relations. But when he gets into the Private Letters of Machiavelli or the Life of Machiavelli, Ferrara is once more, at least on paper, his old rebellious, domineering, devil-may-care self.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

With the press corps, the Secretariat, with one exception, is a by-word for unreliability. Among political leaders mention of it brings snorts of derision and disdain.

But with all their blunders and incompetence the wide-

The reputation of the political secretary, unenviable enough to begin with, is not enhanced when he is called upon to bring about the defeat of such a measure as the Wagner Unemployment Exchange Bill or find lucrative Federal jobs for unsavory lame-ducks.

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But gradually it became apparent that if any one really wanted to get to the President, or wanted to get things done promptly and with reasonable competence, the man to see was Richey. He was dependable, when he gave his word, and he had sure and effective access to the President.

To-day, those in the know when on business at the White House seek out Richey. He is the least apparent of the staff, but he is by far the most potent.

The second to serve in this capacity, F. Lamont Belin, former First Secretary to the London Embassy, got so disgusted with the impossible task of trying to please the Hoover whims that he quit both the State Department and the White House.

There has always been considerable mystery as to just what Burke's duties were and the extent of his connection. When the President took office Burke came in with the new Secretariat. He had a desk in one of the then-existent outer offices and busied himself with the President's affairs.

He had many political callers, wrote letters on official White

But when Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt, after retiring from the Department of Justice, began publishing her prohibition enforcement memoirs and disclosed that her famous harangue against Al Smith before the Methodist prelates during the 1928 campaign had been inspired by "Jimmie" Burke, although he himself is a Catholic, he rapidly began to fade from the White House scene.

His daily appearances became infrequent and soon he was not about at all. When some months later, Mr. Hoover had the ill-fated Claudius Huston installed as Republican National Chairman, the occasion was also used to kick "Jimmie" upstairs by making him General Counsel of the Republican National Committee, a place he still holds.

The most reliable conjecture about Burke's tenure at the White House is that he tried to crash the gate for a secretarial job. The President was seeking a secretary to handle political matters. Whether the Willebrandt disclosures wilted "Jimmie's" chances or the President turned him down for other reasons, he was not chosen, and he departed. Soon, thereafter, Newton was selected for this place, giving up his seat in the House to accept it.

The dispatch with which the work was begun indicated

that it had been planned long before the newcomers took up their residence. The basement, which, since the erection of the structure, had been used only as a storeroom was converted into offices to take care of the largely increased clerical personnel.

The rug on which Alice Roosevelt stood when she was married in the White House to Nicholas Longworth graces the floor of the press room. But it has long since lost its sheen and nap. However, the place is quite an improvement over what the reporters used to have for many years when they were crowded into a little cubby-hole.

inside and to wangle tickets for a view of the lower corridor and East Room of the White House.

But no sooner was the establishment remodeled and in working order than a fire broke out in a defective flue in one of the secretarial offices and the whole structure was gutted. The work had to be done all over again. After three months of discomfort in temporary offices, the place was completely rebuilt in every detail, with one addition, an air-cooling system such as every good movie house has for hot weather.

In keeping with all these refurbished surroundings, the White House police were elevated to newer dignities and the secret service staff somewhat increased. First Sergeant George Dalrymple, who has served for 32 years in the executive offices, was raised to the rank of Captain, and Sergeant Ernest Seamen, who has been about the place 28 years, was made First Lieutenant. They and the rest of the uniformed police were also given smarter attires. The White House has its own police force, with its own uniform.

Jervis and Starling are treasure-troves of Presidential lore They are both well-educated and able men and if they should

Uniformed police and secret service men are on duty about the executive residence all the time. The former guard the property from intruders and the latter the person of the President. A detail of secret service men accompanies the President wherever he goes and is always by his side. Coolidge, in his walks and vacation trips, made quite a comrade of Starling. He not infrequently invited him to his early morning breakfast. Hoover maintains complete aloofness from his guards. He deals with them wholly through Richey.

Richey joined the President's service shortly after the latter became Food Administrator. Hoover wanted a confidential assistant and investigator and Mark L. Requa, a California politician, recommended Richey. The two men met, had a brief talk, and have never separated.

Until he went into the White House, Richey was little known and quite a mysterious figure. He was always in the background and only a few of the correspondents even knew him by sight. He still keeps out of the forefront in the White House, and little is known of his actual activities, but time has clearly disclosed his influence and importance. He is the man closest to the President, and that takes in everybody in or out of Washington.

He began his secret service career as a youngster of thirteen. The government was running down some counterfeiters near

In this work of many years' standing he has given his chief unfailing devotion. No one has ever heard from his lips a word of question or criticism of the man he works for. As a matter of fact, no one has ever gained any information from Richey that he should not have imparted. Which is a great deal more than can be said for some of the other members of the Secretariat.

They have friends to whom they are not adverse to relating their troubles. But if Richey has any such confidants, no one in Washington has yet discovered them. Yet, despite his reticence, the newspapermen consider him the most reliable man on the White House staff. When he does reply to their inquiries, they know that he has answered them truthfully.

William Hard, who worked with Richey when he was a reporter on a Chicago newspaper and the latter was doing the sleuthing for the same publication, graphically portrayed the man in an article he wrote soon after Richey entered the White House and public curiosity about him was aroused.

Throughout Hoover's work as Food Administrator, Richey was his third hand. When he retired from this office and went into private life Richey went with him. When Hoover became Secretary of Commerce, Richey again entered the government service with the title of Assistant to the Secretary. Mr. Hoover had his secretaries, but "Larry" was his confidential assistant.

His chief job was keeping an eye on the personnel of the rapidly expanding Department. When a situation needed "correcting," it was Richey who did the job neatly, quietly and with dispatch. No hint of scandal or trouble leaked out of the Department. What changes occurred were always silently

With this wealth of background in dealing with crooks, businessmen, politicians, editors, newspapermen and government officials, Richey was naturally of enormous help to Hoover in his Presidential campaign. Always in the background, he was nevertheless very active. Mr. Hoover designated him as his personal representative at the Republican National Campaign Headquarters and there was little that transpired there that Richey did not know about. And what Richey knows Mr. Hoover knows.

A high point in this under-cover wrangling was the remark made to newspapermen by Senator George Moses, as he quitted one heated conference he had with Dr. Work. "Well, boys," Moses breezily observed, "at last I have found the man who can beat Hoover."

Because of the mystery surrounding him and his background of sleuthing, Richey was not popular when he first went into the White House. The politicians and correspondents were suspicious of him. Akerson with his swagger, glad-handing and bulkier presence was widely known and generally liked.

But as time wore on, it became increasingly apparent that it was Richey, in the background, who was the abler man and the more dependable. Richey also became more known and better esteemed. No one has ever ascertained just what he does, but he now mingles more, and people have found him a pleasant companion.

Richey is in his early forties. He is part Italian. His father's name was Ricci. He is very fond of the outdoors and greatly enjoys fishing. He has a camp in Western Maryland, near Hagerstown, and likes to have small groups of the President's intimates as his guests.

The explanation as to why Walter Newton, a Republican

Representative of ten years' service from a safely Republican Minnesota district and a ranking House leader, should have given up his political career to become one of a staff of White House secretaries is to be found in the deep hidden contemporation that all but a few members of the House hold for it.

There was no more money in making the change. And, politically, the opportunities were highly problematical. It was only the desire to get into a more dignified atmosphere that could have prompted Newton to give up his seat and take a desk in the Executive Offices.

His work there has had to do with the political. He has been anything but a shining success.

In the House, his lobbying activities on behalf of the President for and against legislation evoke bitter resentment among his former colleagues, and, in the Senate, the mere mention of his name in connection with a measure is always certain to send up the temperature of three-fourths of the chamber

Whether rightfully or wrongfully, he is given the odium for some prize political blunders. One of these is the deal by which Senator Frederick Sackett of Kentucky, dull, reactionary and certain of overwhelming defeat, obtained the post of Ambassador to Germany. Apparently in return for not running and being defeated, Sackett was given the important diplomatic office and Representative John M. Robsion, a lank, blatant hill-billy, was put up as the senatorial candidate instead. Robsion got a sound trouncing and the President lost the State to the Democrats, to say nothing about a choice diplomatic job to an undeserving lame-duck.

The President's apologetic supporters disapprove of Newton because he is so patently a hard-boiled political operator. They don't object to the hard-boiled politics, but he is so distastefully that type. Newton's whole viewpoint is expressed

Doubtless, the enormous demand under which he has labored since the 1930 election to find places for lame-ducks has made him supersensitive to vacant government posts. He just hates to see one go by him without being plugged up with a pleading lame-duck.

Throughout his long service in the House, Newton was a steady, party hack of unquestioning regularity. Coming from an agricultural section he declaimed much about the ills of agriculture and voted ever-higher industrial tariffs as sound measures for relieving those distresses. Such farm-relief devices as the debenture and equalization fee, he solemnly inveighed against as evil and injurious, not because he knew much about them but because the White House was against them and he never went counter to a Republican President.

Newton is large and lumbering in size. He dresses in backwoods taste. He has a large, ungainly mouth, and plowman's hands. He is a slow and unimaginative thinker. On his feet he is loud and trite. As one of the floor leaders of the House he always responded to the party lash which was easy for him, as this course furnished him with ready-made convictions.

He early clambered on the Hoover band wagon and beat the tom-toms for him. During the campaign, he had charge of the speakers in the western headquarters, and filled the corn belt with clamor about the virtues of the Republican champion. He did the same four years previous for Coolidge.

Akerson and Strother went their own ways in the middle of Mr. Hoover's term. Akerson frankly told his press friends that he was leaving while the leaving was good.

As Press Secretary, Akerson had his marked shortcomings. Of course, he had a difficult place to fill, called upon as he was to defend Mr. Hoover's administration. But George added his share to the difficulties by an incorrigible procrastination.

This rose out of his inability to say "no" to any one and his reluctance to admit that he was not the most important man near Mr. Hoover. On more than one occasion this bit of egotism on Akerson's part proved extremely embarrassing to some of his press intimates.

Akerson airily denied this. He assured his press friends that there was nothing to the rumor. The next day, following the

In the White House, Akerson started off with great plans. Press relations were to be reorganized on a more liberal and dignified basis and there would be news every day. But, like all the other glowing promises of the Hoover Administration, nothing came of them.

After things started on their downward course, Akerson, with all his loyalty to "the Chief," had no illusion of the true state of affairs. Coming from newspaper ranks himself he clearly saw the trend of conditions. And what he missed himself, his press friends candidly told him about. So when the opportunity offered, he got out. And his friends, for his sake, were glad to see him go.

In manner he was quiet and pleasant and little was seen of him. He kept himself aloof from the political phases of the White House. When the President announced that Strother was retiring, in accordance with his wishes that he be allowed to leave after two years' service, it was a surprise to correspondents. Strother's explanation of his resignation was that he desired to retire to his Long Island home and engage in a life-long ambition to write fiction.

When Strother's retirement was announced, Hoover intimated that the place might remain vacant. But only a few weeks elapsed before a successor was named. It was explained that, unlike Strother, he would not ran's as a Secretary. He would be merely an "executive clerk." The pay, however, would be the same.

First inquiries about him in New York produced photographs showing a plump, moon-like face adorned with an extensive Buffalo Bill goatee and mustache. The publication of this picture brought word from the White House that Mr. Hastings had dispensed with the hirsute display since the photograph had been taken.

From these important journalistic connections he graduated into social welfare work. He was associated with the State Charities Aid Society of New York and was secretary of the New York State Committee on Mental Hygiene. He was also an instructor in the extension division of Columbia University and in 1930, when the White House staged its Child Welfare Conference, he was publicity agent for the Committee on Dependency and Neglect.

Presumably, on the basis of his work at the Conference, Mr. Hastings won White House recognition. Since joining the Secretariat he has kept sedulously in the background, as becomes every well-trained Presidential "ghost" writer.

When, early in 1931, Akerson announced his resignation to go with the movie industry, the President's friends immediately began to belabor him with advice about a successor. He was told that he desperately needed a man of sound political judgment and wide contacts, pleasant and reliable personality and who knew the press and how to deal intelligently with it.

Frank R. Kent, of the Baltimore Sun, one of the President's newspaper admirers, devoted one of his columns to enumerating the qualifications that the new secretary should possess. Summed up they called for a composite about as follows: the political guile and skill of a J. Bascom Slemp, the publicity adroitness of a Charles Michelson, the charm and vivacity of a Jimmy Walker, and the integrity of Caesar's wife.

Every suggestion that had been urged upon him for an oustandingly able man the President disregarded. Theodore G. Joslin, for many years the Washington Correspondent of the Boston Transcript, whom he named, made even Newton stand out as a strong figure in contrast.

Without political experience, intellectually mediocre, pompous and ponderous in manner, this was the man Mr. Hepver chose as his personal assistant.

Joslin, as Press Secretary, has concentrated on "humanizing" the President. Under his ministrations, the President has grimly and laboriously strained to arouse popular appeal. Boy heroes, girl heroes, visiting delegates, tourists and what not are invited to the White House. Its private lawns have been thrown open and the populace, which previously had been coldly held back, are now wheedled to come in. Messages of condolences, congratulations and good wishes pour forth far and wide.

No opportunity is overlooked to squeeze out "human interest" copy. Joslin counts the day lost that he has not peddled a sob story to those correspondents willing to listen. He has told them about the number of telephone calls made by the White House, and about Chili Fish, a Seminole brave, who was made Chief for a day. That the press and public have been cynically derisive has not daunted "Ted." Being totally devoid of humor, he is unaware of the silliness of the spectacle. He has continued working as stodgily and seriously at this effort as once he labored grinding out administration propaganda in his dispatches.

While the sarcasm of the correspondents has not abated Joslin's zeal it has created a growing rift between them. His officiousness has been bitterly resented and more than one of them have told him in no uncertain terms to mend his manners.

The situation between them has reached the point where Joslin complains: "I can't talk to newspapermen, any more." When, shortly after this wail, he undertook to admonish a well-known correspondent for "lack of respect due my position" a violent scene ensued right in the White House offices. Joslin came off a decided second best in the altercation. The entire press corps was aroused. The next day Joslin made his peace with the reporter, while the whole capital laughed.

spondents. He never lost contact with his newspaper antecedents. But Joslin seems to have completely discarded all press background upon joining the White House staff.

Joslin's incumbency has brought one improvement to the White House. He is punctual in his hours and appointments,

"Political currents," Joslin wrote, "are bearing the Republican Party down the River of Doubt.... There is plenty of evidence that the Republican Party is not as strong as it was two years ago.... President Hoover has lost prestige."

Which prompted the comment from one of Joslin's Gridiron Club colleagues—"This is the first time I have ever known any one to climb on board a sinking ship."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE PRESS

S long as the preponderant majority of American newspapers are trivial, reactionary and subservient, the work of the Washington press corps will reflect these debasing influences.

Even if a large proportion of the correspondents were of a high caliber they could do little. Only a fractional minority are their own masters.

The reporter working for a paper dominated by water power, financial, or political interests writes what these interests want to appear and not what he knows is the truth. If by any chance he should be so foolhardy or careless as to disregard their views he is very soon looking for another job.

The Baltimore Sun and a few other independent papers had carried stories, related by the reporters on the trip, of a strict censorship that the Hoover party had enforced on them while on the high seas. The Times, apropos of no news development, suddenly printed this editorial denial, carried as a news story under a Washington dateline, pooh-poohing the charge.

20 December, 1928.

Four typewritten, double-spaced copies of each dispatch will be required.

2. The O.K. system will continue as heretofore.

3. One copy will be returned to its author when the message has been dispatched. Receipt of this copy, marked with the time of receipt in radio room and time actually sent, will constitute the correspondent's check on his dispatch.

GRORGE BARR BAKER

No reference of any kind was made in the Times story, denying the existence of a censorship, to this order issued to

the reporters when they embarked on the U.S.S. Utah. The Hoover staff tried to explain away the censorship by asserting that it was required by naval regulations. Yet, the man who read the reporters' copy and forced them repeatedly to make changes in it, and even to withhold sending stories entirely, was Baker, a civilian, who was one of the Hoover staff and not connected with the navy. None of this pertinent information was contained in the Times story.

The correspondents of such slavishly administration papers as the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Portland Evening Express, the Providence Evening Bulletin, the Cincinnati Times-Star, Indianapolis Star, the Chicago Daily News, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Washington Post, don't dare write enything critical of the President.

No matter how damning the facts, the correspondents of these papers must suppress or distort them where the President or the administration is concerned. On jeopardy of their jobs, they dare not be truthful and outspoken.

That, despite these handicaps and hazards, there are honest and conscientious correspondents who, disregarding economic risks, dare uncover and tackle dangerous stories, is to the everlasting glory of the profession they so gallantly and thanklessly serve.

But such reporters are a minority. With the staffs of the handful of independent papers and news agencies still remaining in the country, these correspondents constitute the most steadfastly wholesome, enlightened, and constructive force in the nation's capital.

legislation that this small band does not render invaluable service.

The instances where their initiative, quick-wittedness, daring and persistence have supplied members of Congress with vital facts and material with which to win major contests are innumerable.

It was this group that uncovered the facts that led to the authorizing of the Reed Campaign Fund Investigating Committee which cost William S. Vare of Pennsylvania and Frank L. Smith of Illinois their Senate seats.

It was this group that energized the successful fight in the Senate against the confirmation of Judge John J. Parker of North Carolina to the United States Supreme Court, one of the shabbiest appointments in the history of that tribunal and one which Mr. Hoover by every device tried to foist upon it.

It was this group that was responsible for repeal of the century-old secrecy rule of the Senate and forcing into the open heretofore secret deliberations and ballots on executive appointments. It was this reform that made such fights as the successful Parker challenge possible.

It was this group that exposed the peculiar tariff activities of Senator Bingham of Connecticut, with the result that he was censured by a formal vote of the Senate.

Theirs is the most honorable record of public service in the capital. The few correspondents who are free to do so proudly

admit their participation. The others cherish their satisfaction and pride in secret and are protected by their comrades.

But honorable and brilliant as is this record, it is the work of a minority. It is wholly out of keeping with the temper of American journalism. It is unwanted, resented, and penalized, except on the few newspapers that still own their own souls.

These improvident upholders of their profession's noblest traditions are the younger men, for the most part. Their names are not found among the high-salaried "trained seals." These dignitaries disapprove of such disturbing proclivities.

Mark Sullivan of the New York Herald Tribune, the President's most facile elucidator and defender; Richard V. Oulahan of the New York Times, the debonair and socially prominent "dean" of the corps; Theodore G. Joslin, who, before his appointment as Secretary to President Hoover, was Washington correspondent of the Boston Transcript, and renowned among his associates for his breath-taking ingenuity in salving any one of Republican nomenclature; Frederic William Wile, of the Washington Star and the Columbia Broadcasting System, eulogizer par excellence; Leroy Vernon of the Chicago Daily News, dull, stodgy and complaisant in heroic proportions; David Lawrence, head of the United States Daily and the Consolidated Press, super-panegyrist and organizer, who has done so well in these two arts that he operates his own private yacht; all these view with grave disapprobation irreverent raids upon the fabricated reputations and tin haloes of the lofty-placed.

It pains them grievously and some of them speak sadly of the low estate to which the corps has fallen.

These are the officially accredited correspondents. To be officially accredited in the Congressional Directory, the correspondent must represent a daily telegraphic newspaper or press association and derive the major portion of his earnings from this source.

Official recognition carries with it admission to the two congressional press galleries, the White House press conferences, and the various other department press conferences.

In addition to this large group of accredited newspaper correspondents there is a numerous group of writers for trade and business publications, and press agents of various types. They are not listed in the Congressional Directory and despite repeated efforts by the trade-paper men have been refused admission to the congressional galleries by the newspaper correspondents.

Since the incumbency of President Hoover, the business and trade press has been accorded press privileges at the White House. His conferences have been thrown open to them and no distinction is made between them and the newspaper men.

Which is considerably more than can be said for Congress itself, the departments and the White House.

The congressional galleries are under the immediate direction of committees chosen annually by the correspondents from among their own number. These committees operate under the rules of the two chambers of Congress. The corps is very strict in its rules of admittance.

So much so in fact that no Negro reporter has yet succeeded in gaining membership there.

The several attempts by Negroes representing Negro newspapers to gain admittance have been side-stepped on the technical ground that the applicants did not represent daily telegraphic publications.

Several years ago a Negro reporter for a large Negro publication came to the capital and applied for press gallery membership. For several weeks, in support of his claims for admittance, he filed a large quantity of telegraphic copy to his paper every day.

But it was of no avail. His claim was legitimate but his color was wrong.

In 1924, when Coolidge had inveigled the crafty J. Bascom Slemp, Republican chieftain from Virginia, into the White

This church writer has, however, accompanied the President on out-of-town trips. The White House takes the position that on such occasions those accompanying the President go as "guests," albeit heavily paying ones, and that the Executive can "invite" whomsoever he pleases.

One of the most amusing incidents of the Hoover Detroit-Cincinnati-Louisville, inland-waterway-and-electric-light-bally-hoo junket in 1929 was the pairing together by a White House Secretary in the same compartment on the Presidential train of this mild and reserved churchman and one of the most boisterous and accomplished topers of the press corps.

So ran the tale, straight from the President himself.

intervals and these meetings could just as well have been omitted so far as producing any news was concerned. To outspoken criticism about his press relations in such papers as the Baltimore Sun and the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the President upon entering the White House let it be known that all was to be changed.

At his personal suggestion a committee of correspondents was carefully hand-picked by his Press Secretary. It met with him and made suggestions. He, in turn, set up three categories of Presidential press releases: direct quotes, attributable information, and non-attributable background information.

His press conferences became progressively worse, until today they are more innocuous and futile than even those of the Coolidge régime. Coolidge never called off a conference at the last moment and he always made a pretense of answering questions sent in to him. Hoover frequently refuses to see the press and totally disregards queries.

Mr. Hoover has used this convenience to inform himself as to what the press is interested in, so that he can talk about something else, or, as is most often the case, say nothing at all.

In the first weeks of his incumbency Mr. Hoover attempted to cover up his evasion by saying that he had nothing to talk about because no queries had reached him. This patent falsehood stirred such indignation among the correspondents,

His press conferences are mere press handout periods. When he has something, the reporters are admitted, listen to him read his prepared statement, and then file out and wait around the outer lobby of the executive offices gossiping among themselves until the inefficient and slow mimeographing service of the White House sends up copies to them.

Here again the reporters soon discovered that the system was being used chiefly to beguile and lull them.

They found that either deliberately or because he did not know and was trying to cover up the facts, the secretary repeatedly misled them on important details. As a result of this slick policy these daily conferences soon fell into disrepute.

The only feature of the Hoover press policy that has proved of any satisfaction to the reporters was the installation of an enlarged press room.

During the fanfare about improved press dealings, The White House Correspondents' Association, for many years a haphazard and informal organization of reporters who regularly covered the White House, was put on a ceremonial basis. The ceremony consisted of collecting a \$1 membership fee and issuing an ornate, gold-embossed press card, duly autographed by a White House secretary.

tion is open to any accredited reporter upon his own application and without any other requirement than paying his dollar. It is all breezy and casual, in the true press manner.

Even the elections of officers of the Association are free and easy. The permanent White House group, which actually runs the organization and arranges its annual frolic, picks a slate, obtains a few nominating signatures, and then announces that, owing to lack of opposition, balloting was dispensed with.

Of course now and then an election fight is precipitated. But only for the purpose of having some excitement.

The famed Gridiron Club is neither promiscuous in its membership nor ebullient in its internal affairs.

The Gridiron Club has two unwritten rules. No Jews are admitted to its sacred ranks and no reporters are ever present at its revels. Both restrictions have been broken.

Charles Michelson, for many years the brilliant chief of the Washington bureau of the New York World, and now the

\$25,000-a-year Publicity Director of the Democratic National Committee, who has performed miracles in rejuvenating that long moribund institution, was elected to membership through the influence of one of his staff.

The famous instance of the club's booting its "no-reporterspresent" rule was during the Roosevelt Administration. The President took the opportunity afforded by the supposed secrecy injunction to relieve himself of some forthright views about a hostile Republican leader. He spoke animatedly and frankly.

Since then, however, the rule has been rigidly adhered to. No President has ever said anything worth printing.

When the President goes traveling things pick up. News

Next to the President's conference, that of the Secretary of State is most important and most largely attended. These conferences are held with the Secretary himself or, when he is not in the city, with an assisant. They take place every day except Tuesday, when the Cabinet meets.

Next in interest to the White House and State Department conferences are those of the Treasury. For the first seven years of his incumbency Mr. Mellon was always flanked by his Under-Secretary when meeting the press. But in recent years the Sainted Gift to the Big Tax Refunders meets the reporters unattended.

He still shows signs of extreme agitation when closely interrogated, but now he does his own evading and enjoys it—when it doesn't get too rough. When that happens, Mr. Mellon becomes flustered and incoherent. Most of the Treasury reporters have grown quite fond of the "Old Man," as they call him, and he in turn has become somewhat more accessible to them.

The press conferences with the Attorney General have improved somewhat since the days of John Garibaldi Sargent, Coolidge's know-nothing-see-nothing-say-nothing choice for that exalted post. Sargent's invariable answer to all press queries was "I'll have to look into that."

If he ever did he never showed any signs that the information had improved his knowledge of what was going on in his Department.

Mr. Mitchell is more conversant with what his Department is doing, but the pall of secrecy about that department's activities is just as dense as it ever was.

During sessions of Congress, press activity focuses on Capitol Hill, with the White House and the Departments

The White House conferences, the State Department conferences, and all the other departmental conferences take on new life. Correspondents who rarely go near them during congressional sessions begin coming around regularly. Departmental handouts are carefully scrutinized, where before they were indifferently tossed aside.

These "brain trusts" are informal gatherings of reporters who get together and pool news resources. They are pleasant, friendly coöperatives, rich in comradeship. Rare and tall tales are swapped, most of them far more exciting and truthful than those sent to their papers.

There are three such more or less regular groups. One meets for lunch early in the afternoon in the Press Club. A second consists of a block of press offices on the ninth floor of the Colorado Building, and the third, a group of bureaus on the twelfth floor of the National Press Club Building. The papers of these correspondents do not compete with one another and the men are thus free to coöperate fully.

Another means of news coöperation among the correspondents is the "blacksheet" or carbon copy. It is a convenient means of exchanging news and is done on a coöperative basis. The correspondent who doesn't produce his share is sharply and bluntly called to task.

The correspondents always protect a colleague if he gets

into difficulty while on an assignment. They will file for him over his signature and answer queries from his editor. Sometimes their solicitude has amusing results.

The three stories came to over 3000 words. Each carried the signature of the sleeping correspondent.

Both the Western Union and the Postal Telegraph companies have wire connections in the galleries. The press associations have their own telegraph circuits and operators in each gallery. In the Senate gallery they are also allowed railedoff space for their own desks and typewriters.

About a score of women are accredited to the press galleries. Of this number only about half are really active there. These

do straight reporting and several of them are among the very ablest, most intelligent and conscientious correspondents in the entire corps.

Ruby Black, head of her own news bureau, is a highly accomplished and indefatigable reporter. She has developed her news service until she now has important papers in a number of states. Before coming to Washington, she taught journalism at the University of Wisconsin and worked on papers in Wisconsin and St. Louis. She is President of Theta Sigma Phi, national women's journalism sorority.

Ruth Finney of the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance is not only a talented writer but an authority on water power, labor and social problems. She has had wide news experience on national affairs, and her work in covering, over a number of years, the bitterly fought Boulder Dam contest, won her the high respect of her fellow-reporters and congressional leaders.

Three other women have stood the test of journalistic work in the capital in the service of the Associated Press and have won the respect of their colleagues for competent and quick reporting of straight news. Sue McNamara and Bess Furman, covering government departments, and Marguerite Young, in the House and Senate press galleries, for several sessions have handled difficult and complicated subjects with skill and intelligence.

There are four classes of news bureaus in the capital: those with a single correspondent representing one newspaper only, those with two or more correspondents representing one newspaper only, those with one or more correspondents representing a string of newspapers, and finally the press associations with large staffs.

porters as it adds both to their professional prestige and their incomes.

All the anonymous magazine columns giving the lowdown on the capital are done by Washington correspondents whose identity is known to most of the others.

Of the press associations the Associated Press, with thirtyseven men and three women, has the largest staff in Washington. Whatever else the Associated Press may be, it is always lavish in personnel.

In the Senate it has as many reporters as all the other press associations combined. This practice of maintaining numerical superiority is a fundamental tenet of Associated Press news covering policy.

The Washington press corps credits Noyes with the inspira-

tion, if not the authorship, of the amazing letter that the Associated Press sent the Senate, over Price's signature, when the Old Guard attempted to discipline the United Press for its exposé of several secret roll-calls on contested nominations. The entire corps, with the exception of the Associated Press, was aroused at this attempted censorship and rallied behind the United Press.

It was during the debate on the Senate floor over the issue that the Associated Press sent its bleat of hypocritical protest against being penalized for something its competitor had done. The Associated Press, the Price letter said, could have had the story if it had wanted to, but it didn't want to.

Coming as the communication did in the midst of a press censorship fight in which every newspaperman and every newspaper organization had a vital and personal stake, the Associated Press' letter was considered by the press gallery as a stab in the back.

The communication aroused much indignation among Senators and was unquestionably an appreciable factor in the complete and overwhelming defeat of the censorship attempt.

To the honor of the Associated Press staff in the Senate, it was as deeply ashamed of the action of its superiors and as resentful of it as the other correspondents.

The story accused Mexico of harboring Communist designs. It gave no authority for this information, other than vague references to reliable sources of information. Coming at a time when, due to the stupidity and bungling of Coolidge and Kellogg, the relations between the United States and Mexico were at the breaking point, the story created a tremendous sensation.

It might conceivably have precipitated a crisis had it not

been disclosed just where the absolutely false story had come from, and the vicious purpose which had prompted it.

The Associated Press carried the story, suppressing the facts as to the source but giving it the atmosphere and substance of weighty authority.

The Senate letter and the Mexican Bolshevik threat story are not accidents or isolated incidents of unfortunate "breaks." They are characteristic examples of the news policy of the Associated Press. It always plays the administration game.

Nothing could be more significant than the fact that the Associated Press is the only press association from whose Washington staff leading members have voluntarily resigned and taken publicity jobs with great business and political organizations. Several of them, including a former bureau manager, are doing press work for a great railroad. Another quit to go with Harry F. Sinclair in the midst of the Teapor Dome leasing scandals. Another, after more than a year of toadying to the Hoover Administration, while a member of the Associated Press staff covering the White House, became publicity agent of the Republican National Committee.

The United Press staff is about half as large as that of the

Associated Press but what it lacks in numbers it many times excels its competitor in capacity and character.

The United Press is predominant in Latin America in the press association field. It serves practically all the important papers there. It has achieved and maintained its supremacy in Latin America by close adherence to unbiased and impartial news reporting.

The United Press has made great gains in recent years and is serving many wealthy and conservative papers. This unquestionably has had some influence on its news policy.

In style the United Press is sprightly and trenchant. There is more good news writing done daily in the United Press report than is to be found in a week of Associated Press copy. The Associated Press, under Kent Cooper, general manager and a former United Press man, has endeavored to brighten up its news writing, occasionally with ludicrous results.

Until the last few years the United Press was decidedly niggardly in its pay scale. It gave its reporters plenty of opportunity for ambitious enterprise and never stinted work, but was tight-fisted when it came to salaries.

At the close of the Seventy-first Congress five of the younger men were let out. Several of them had wives and babies. One of them was brought from the Middle West, where he had done good work for a number of years. He was brought to the capital in recognition of this competence, and yet, three months later, at the close of Congress, he was dropped from the rolls at a time when press activity in Washington was slack and it was impossible to get another job. The United Press could have easily absorbed these men in its nationwide organization, but it dropped them with a couple of weeks' pay and indifferently set them adrift.

candor about such personages can hope to attain this lofty—for the press—financial status.

All the members of this select band of correspondents are noted for their capacity to see the right side of questions where high place and influential authority are concerned.

A choice example of the "policy" story is one from the hand of Oulahan a year or so ago.

One day a long feature story appeared under Oulahan's signature telling all about the "new patriots." These latest model heroes, it developed, were Mr. Hoover's appointees.

Washington had heard these Hoover men described as "Boy Scouts" and "Soft Boils," but "new patriots" was something new. What, the politicians asked, had become of such one-time Hoover "patriots" as Mrs. Willebrandt who had carried his campaign to the Protestant churches? Of Colonel William Donovan, his intimate advisor during the Presidential race; Horace Mann, who had done such valiant if mysterious election work in the South; Dr. Hubert Work, his first National Committee Chairman; and Claudius Houston, his second National Committee Chairman? They too had served, it was observed. When and why had they ceased being "patriots"?

Twenty years ago when he first came to the capital, as the correspondent for an Iowa paper, he was the friend and admirer of Albert B. Cummins, Progressive Senator from that

Mark Sullivan did not come to the capital as an experienced correspondent. Now, however, he is very much of the \$25,000-a-year class, and all which that implies.

Sullivan is not a news correspondent in the sense in which that term is generally used. For years his syndicated column has been a Republican propaganda medium. Since the Hoover incumbency it has narrowed even more in scope and become the Presidential press mouthpiece.

When the President wants to put out an alibi, a defense, or an explanation, Sullivan is the chief channel. His craftily worded dispatches are an exact reproduction of the President's devious mental and political processes And as a result he is in the \$25,000-a-year class. Unlike Snure he does not have to work from early morning until well into the night in an intense competitive field. He turns out his three syndicated articles a week, leisurely and comfortably, and leaves his cozy office close by the White House only to attend the semi-weekly Presidential press conference or when summoned by Mr. Hoover to talk over an idea or two.

In Charles G. Ross, chief of the bureau, Paul Y. Anderson, and Raymond P. Brandt, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the most enlightened, courageous and forceful metropolitan newspaper in the United States, has a Washington staff that in every respect is worthy of its high standards.

and conscientiousness are constantly giving the Sun exclusive and significant stories.

Frank R. Kent, the political columnist and commentator of the Baltimore Sun, is not a member of the Washington staff, although he usually writes his column under that date-line. He presents the sad spectacle of a man possessed of a rare opportunity for performing a desperately needed public service in exposing official incompetence, duplicity, and dishonesty, stultifying himself by unworthy personalities, social contacts, and stupid obstinacy.

It may disagree with Kent's views, in fact it practically always does, both in its news and editorial columns, but it never in any way interferes or limits Kent's freedom of expression.

colossal failure while at the same time impugning the sincerity and principles of the Insurgents and Democrats who have had the courage to challenge the President.

Do the Insurgents and Democrats refuse to confirm a fifth rate politician appointed by Mr. Hoover to the United States Supreme Court, then they are depriving the poor, patient South of representation on the high tribunal.

At great length and with full details, they informed him, and he began to see light. A week or so later he admitted in his column there really was such a thing as a power trust, and

The high repute and standing Kent once had in all quarters in the capital he has considerably forfeited. Senator Tom Heflin, who once fiercely denounced him because of Kent's biting characterization of him as a clown and buffoon, has acclaimed him as a friend and comrade, and where Washington once read Kent with respect, it now laughs at him.

Kent's obstinancy in persisting in the Hoover myth arises out of his inherent lack of a broad and comprehensive grasp of vital economic and political issues. Nothing could be more significant than his article denying the existence of a power trust, followed by his rushing to newspaper friends to learn from them, for the first time, that it actually exists.

Kent for a number of years was one of the Sun editors. He does no news writing, confining his work wholly to his column of comment and opinion. He spends a few days a week in Washington, gathering "dope" for this purpose and the rest of the time in Baltimore.

Kent is credited with cherishing Maryland senatorial ambitions. Several years ago it was reported he was offered the Democratic nomination, but declined for financial reasons. Now he is said to be in a position to accept such an invitation but it is doubtful if it will again come to him.

On labor, enlightened and advanced social legislation, on economic issues and international affairs, the Scripps-Howard papers are leaders in sound and progressive thought. This is due chiefly to the excellence and fine character of the members of its Washington staff.

On national politics, particularly on Presidential candidates, the Scripps-Howard record is not so commendable. This is due to some of the organization's business executives.

That election campaign, and a period afterward, was a

To the latters' credit, they eventually saw the error of their ways and had the courage and honesty to admit their mistake. To-day there is no more plain-spoken press critic of the Hoover Administration than the Scripps-Howard Alliance.

Although one of the five greatest capitals of the world, Washington's newspapers, with the exception of the Scripps-Howard publication, are dull, flabby, provincial and stupid. There isn't a first-class paper in the city. This need is supplied by the Baltimore Sun and the New York papers.

John M. Gleissner, managing editor; Ludwell Denny, chief editorial writer; and William Philip Simms, foreign affairs editor, contribute largely to the high order of the editorial and special feature material of the Alliance.

Denny has had extensive press experience both in the United

Despite this talented prompting, Adams failed the Tribuno. The other members of the American delegation slyly showed him up by asking him to conduct a press conference one morning. The result was so dismal that Henning, responding to the good-natured jeers of his colleagues, remarked: "My White Hope has club feet."

Robert B. Smith, Warren Wheaton and Harold Brayman, members of the staff, are upright, able, hard-working reporters compelled by economic necessity to write the sort of stuff that is to be found under their names in the Curtis papers.

ment several months previous, the navy had received no orders to hold up building operations on three cruisers, and had been proceeding all along with this work. Brayman received no thanks from his paper for his enterprise. His story was a clean beat and was picked up by the entire press of the country the next day. But instead of receiving congratulations, he was sharply admonished for his unfriendly administration attitude.

The Christian Science Monitor has one of the larger Washington news bureaus. It is manned by competent and conscientious reporters who are held down by the conservative views and many prohibitions of their organization. Robert S. Allen, head of the staff, is the youngest large bureau chief in the capital. Despite his youth, he has had important newspaper experience both in the United States and abroad.

Another talented correspondent who is hedged in by editorial policy is Henry Suydam of the Brooklyn Eagle, one of the Frank E. Gannett group of newspapers. Suydam gave up reporting for a while to become head of the press section of the State Department when Charles Evans Hughes was Secretary of State. He left the diplomatic field, however, soon after Hughes resigned. He is an excellent musician, and the Gridiron Club's most versatile composer and playwright.

Ulric Bell, correspondent for the Louisville Courier-Journal, is also unusually gifted. In addition to being a sterling and forthright reporter, he is a fine painter. Some of his work has attracted considerable attention. His paper is Democratic and conservative, but Bell is allowed wide latitude. He avails himself fully of this to write forceful and frank dispatches which are often at variance with the timid views of the paper's editorial writers.

relievers and the present and last few Secretaries of Agriculture put together.

Actually he is one of the mildest-mannered and most courteous of men. He is also one of the few correspondents who is financially independent. He has been in Washington many years, is widely known, and universally held in high regard and respect.

Like many of the most prominent newspapermen in the capital, Frederic William Wile got his start in Chicago. Although a Jew, he is a graduate of Notre Dame University and one of its best known non-athletic alumni.

Wile went abroad early in his press career and there made his reputation as the Berlin correspondent of Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail. During his foreign service, Wile traveled extensively and in high official circles.

After the War, he came back to the United States as a Chautauqua lecturer and then became chief of the Public Ledger bureau. He lost this job. He promptly set up his own press syndicate and concentrated on radio news broadcasting. In both these fields, his acute eulogistic faculties have had unlimited scope and he has prospered handsomely.

dollar. In addition to his news broadcasting, he writes a thrice weekly column that goes to a string of papers, and does special articles and editorials on foreign affairs for the Washington Star. These adhere loyally to the Star's unbroken policy of never saying anything of any importance or vigor on any subject.

For his weekly fifteen-minute news broadcasts over the Columbia system, Wile gets \$250 a week. He left the National Broadcasting Company, with which he got his start as a radio news discourser, to go to Columbia when they offered him an increase in pay which National refused to meet. Wile is also a zealous public speaker and makes numerous talks about the country on Washington, for the best fee he can get.

This column is the sweetest and most sugary writing in the capital. It exists only to bloom dear little buttercups of compliments and good wishes. If by rare inadvertence, an inferential note of criticism should creep into it, Wile more than makes up for it in his following dispatch.

Once he had a paragraph about Senator "Jim" Reed that a friend of the Senator's jokingly told Wile might make him angry. In his next column, Wile extended himself in acclaiming Reed and enumerating all his sterling qualities.

Naturally all this industry and these exceptional talents have paid Wile well. He has his own limousine and chauffeur and is one of the foremost of the select group of \$25,000-a-year correspondents.

David Lawrence is an even more shining example of what

unremitting application, business acumen, and respectful regard for high authority and position will do for an ambitious man.

He is very much of the \$25,000-a-year group, but with an income that is nearer \$125,000.

After the War, Lawrence had the business genius to see that a boom was rapidly crystallizing and that there would be enormous popular interest in stock market quotations and special business articles. At that time only a small number of afternoon papers carried a full stock market report or any kind of a business service.

Lawrence organized such a service. He gathered a staff of experts, set up a fast stock report, and hammered away at editors until he sold his idea. With the rising tide of "prosperity" and stock speculation, his service became a success and he cashed in.

He then turned to establishing the United States Daily, the idea for which he got from a colleague. Despite large doubts among newspapermen, Lawrence has kept the unusual paper going for more than five years. At times it has been reported to be in hard straits, but so far he has kept its head above

water. Early this year it was reported that he obtained \$1,000,000 from the Laura Spelman Fund. This did not, however, prevent him from cutting the salaries of his staff in March.

Lawrence is absolutely ruthless in keeping himself to the fore in his organization. No one else, not even William Hard, who works for him, is allowed to use the daily leased wire for transmission of articles. No one is permitted to dim the standing of the chief.

Yet, despite this sensitiveness, Lawrence is devoted to his friends. He may have curtly discharged, with a two weeks notice, the man who gave him the idea for the United States Daily, when the latter absented himself without notice for a week from his work, but two of Lawrence's boyhood school chums who defended him when bullies baited him as a Jew hold lucrative life jobs in his organization.

With all his material success and extraordinary business achievement Lawrence is not a particularly happy man. For one thing he is not popular among the correspondents. He is too commercial for the taste of the true reporter.

Then he is trying to do too much. Besides publishing the United States Daily, speaking over the radio once a week, and running a news syndicate, he attempts to keep up his daily Washington dispatches, which are now little more than editorialized re-writes of the morning papers.

The result is that he who once was renowned for his exclusive Washington dispatches is now shoved onto a back page or not used at all, even by the Washington Star. And the Hoover Administration, despite his tenacious fealty, has publicly rebuked him for inaccuracy.

"Bill" Hard has been too popular for his own good

His rare charm and personality, the brilliance and power of his intellect, his loyalty and sincerity, have won him too many political friends. And these friendships, because of his kindliness, have taken their toll at times in pulling his punches.

When the latter died, following his defeat for reëlection, it was Hard who discovered his body; and to-day McCormick's long fur overcoat, cut down to fit Hard's diminutive size, is a familiar and amusing sight in the capital.

After McCormick's death, Ruth Hanna McCormick, his widow, who tried in 1930 to win a Senate seat with one of the sorriest exhibitions of demagoguery of that year, induced

She paid Hard the equivalent of his newspaper income. Two years passed and no book appeared. What became of it is not known. The suspicion is that no publisher would print it.

Hard was left high and dry. He had lost his syndicate and naturally could not go on accepting money from Mrs. Mc-Cormick even if she would have paid him. He went through a difficult time.

It was during this period that Hard fell for the Hoover propaganda, and step by step drifted into the Hoover camp. The President made full use of Hard's exceptional ability. In his campaign and for a long time afterward, 'Hard was consulted on every important matter, and his writings were among the President's chief solaces.

Hard's suspicions about Mr. Hoover were first aroused when, returning from Mrs. McCormick's nomination campaign in the spring of 1930, he frankly told the President that he ought to stop pussy-footing on prohibition and the World Court, and take a definite stand against both.

It would doubtless have been much easier for Hard to have kept silent about this discovery and to have made his peace with the White House. But he refused to do that and to-day in his articles and radio broadcasts he is doing some of the keenest and most plain-spoken reporting in the capital.

He is again standing on his old independent ground. He is

again the comrade of his old fighting friends and newspapermen. And he is having the time of his life and showing it.

Such a press could be the leader of public opinion instead of the misleader. It could tonic the whole body politic of the nation.

Its columns would not be filled with White House propaganda and idiotic blurbs about Strong Silent Men and Great Engineers. The House of Representatives, the most ludicrous, boss-ridden and inefficient legislative body in the entire land would not be acclaimed as "businesslike and alert," and Senate investigators exposing corruption, infamy, and chicanery would not be denounced and assailed as "invaders of private affairs" and irresponsible disturbers of the peace and of business stability.

But until the majority of American newspapers are rid of their business and money-drawer domination, it is futile to expect any betterment in the Washington press corps. There is no reason why there should be any improvement.

366 WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND

The problem is far more fundamental than improving the Washington press corps. More independent, honest, enlightened, and courageous newspapers are what is desperately needed.

THE END