Homecoming

A lane of 14-foot cornstalks appeared at the West Branch, Iowa, railroad station. Down it, early one morning, last week, marched Nominee Hoover with his wife and sons. Automobiles carried them through the proudest village in the U. S. to a house of which the original part was a log cabin, where, 54 years and eleven days before, Herbert Clark Hoover had been born. A Mrs. Jennie Scellars, who now owns the house and has declined to sell it to Mrs. Hoover, served up an oldtime Iowa breakfast. On her front porch she drove a fast trade in what a wag called "Hoovernirs."

West Branch, pop. 745, was becoming crowded with brass bands and parading visitors to the number of 15,000 or more, but the Hoovers were permitted to go alone to the graves of the Nominee's parents, Jesse Hoover, the West Branch blacksmith, and his wife, Huldah. They both died before the Nominee was 10.

The next pilgrimage was to a certain spot on the streamlet for which West Branch* is named. Part of the villagers' preparations had been to restore, with a dam, what used to be the Old Swimming Hole. The Nominee eyed the work and then said to Newton C. Butler, one of the three playmates of his youth whom he had found still in West Branch: "No, this is not the place at all. I think it is up yonder by that tree."

"Up yonder" the party headed, but thick Iowa gumbo prevailed. The reminiscers turned back to their automobile, hot and muddy. Not until the afternoon, when persevering, he returned to the streamlet, did the Nominee see the place where small "Bertie" Hoover used to splash.

Postmaster I. O. Yoder, a remote cousin, entertained at lunch. All afternoon there were conferences and buzz-buzzings in a big tent pitched behind the high school. Dinner was a Hoover-family reunion at Remote Cousin Ralph Branson's (on whose farm was the swimming hole).

As night fell, the Nominee appeared before the multitude. "This," he said, with some emotion, "is a home-coming." He talked about his and their pioneer ancestors; about his first schoolteacher, Mrs. Molly Brown Carran, who was present, gazing up through thick-lensed eyeglasses at her prodigious pupil. He recalled Iowa's apples, rabbits, nuts, fishing. He returned again to the Old Swimming Hole: "As an engineer I could devise improvements for that swimming hole," he said. "But I doubt if the decrease in mothers' grief at the homecoming of muddy boys would compensate the inherent joys of getting muddy."

He soon got on to the practical purposes of his visit. He reminded people that he was farm-raised in the days when farming was a mode of living, not an industry. He redescribed farming's transformation and its post-War predicament. He repeated his pledges: 1) for a Federal Farm Board; 2) a Farm Loan Fund; 3) a stabilized, autonomous, farm marketing system.

Not unexpectedly he said: "I am not insensible to the value of the study which sincere farm leaders have given to this question of farm legislation. They have all contributed to the realization that the problem must be solved. They will be invited into conference. Outstanding farmers such as Governor Lowden will be asked to join in the search for common ground upon which we can act."

He discussed high railroad freight rates as a factor in the Farm Problem: "It is as if a row of toll gates had been placed around this whole section of our country. ... Some calculations which I made a few years ago showed that the increases in railway rates had in effect moved the Midwest 200 to 400 miles further from seaboard."

He dwelt on modernization of inland waterways as the best relief from high railroad rates: "By modernization, I mean increasing depths to a point where we can handle 10,000 tons in a line of barges pulled by a tug. This Administration has authorized the systematic undertaking of this modernization. Within a few years we will have completed the deepening of the Ohio up to Pittsburgh, the Missouri up to Kansas City, Omaha and beyond, the Mississippi to St. Paul and Minneapolis, the Illinois to Chicago."

He restated his preference for the St. Lawrence River, as opposed to the N. Y. State Barge Canal and the Hudson River, as the route for a Lakes-to-Atlantic seaway.

He carefully concluded his waterways remarks by saying: "Nor does this development mean the crippling of our railways ..."

The peroration was on the two Hoover keynotes--An Equal Chance for All, and Happy Homes.

After his "revel in sentiment" (as he called it), the Nominee motored to Cedar Rapids. Delegations of Farmers and Farmers' Friends from 14 States* were accorded personal receptions on the wide veranda of "Brucemore," an estate, equipped even to pond swans, owned by a Mrs. George W. Douglas. There were no speeches or press statements. The Nominee, with smiling Western Manager James W. ("Sir James") Good for impresario, simply shook hands with every one, let them look at him, talk to him, ask him questions. A North Dakota contingent, led by Prohibition Administrator John N. Hagen, was assured that Hooverism is extremely Dry. (North Dakota lately voted within 5,000 of repealing its longtime State enforcement law.) North Dakota's boyish Senator Gerald P. Nye was there and, though the Nominee declined to commit himself to an extra session of Congress for Farm Relief, Senator Nye announced: "I was in doubt before Hoover's acceptance speech, but he has talked frankly. I find it my duty to support him."

The most significant result of the Cedar Rapids' conferences which lasted two days, was the appointment, to command the G. O. P.'s farm bureau at Chicago headquarters, of John J. Oglesby. Thereby the mention of Farmers' Friend Lowden, in the West Branch speech, was underscored. Mr. Oglesby was Lieutenant-Governor of Illinois under Governor Lowden (1917-21). They are fast friends. Mr. Oglesby was a leading Lowdenizer before the nomination. Now he agreed heartily to Hooverize. Perhaps his first commission will be to soothe Mr. Lowden's lingering bitterness and bring him, reluctant but resigned, into the fold.

P: Back in Washington, Nominee Hoover proceeded to plan his autumn itinerary. Headquarters were moved, for a "back yard'' campaign, into the residence of the late Representative Louis Adams Frothingham of Massachusetts, whose grounds abut on the Hoover grounds.*

* Of the Cedar River.

* Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, both Dakotas, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan.

* The arch-Democratic New York World--perhaps as a matter of interest, perhaps as a sly play upon the superstitions of its readers --said: "Acceptance of the Frothingham residence as campaign headquarters was made on the same day that word was received that Mr. Frothingham had died suddenly on his yacht while cruising off the coast of Maine."