"Quietly, Please!"

Last week Owen D. Young, returning to the U. S. from the successful Reparations conference in Paris, followed Hero's Highway from sea to land. He left the S. S. Aquitania at Quarantine, sped up the harbor on a special tug, landed at Manhattan's Battery, motored up Broadway past City Hall. But not one whistle blew for Hero Young. Not one ecstatic cheer rose for him. Not one inch of ticker tape fell upon him. Insistently refusing a public reception, Hero Young made his homecoming a strictly private affair.

While he was at sea, a movement was launched by the New York Telegram to accord Hero Young a hero's welcome. It was accurately pointed out that his achievements at Paris were far more significant than arrivals of visiting royalty, trans-Atlantic flyers, Channel swimmers. Behind the proposal the City Government, long habituated to receiving great personages amid blazing publicity, squarely placed itself. A welcoming commission, including Alfred Emanuel Smith, John Jacob Raskob, Bernard Mannes Baruch, Banker Charles Edwin Mitchell, Railroader Patrick Crowley et al. was duly named. Students of public psychology waited to see what pitch of enthusiasm could be aroused in the populace by a public reception to a man whose triumph was mental, not physical.

Hero Young's wireless from the Aquitania prevented this question from being answered. "Please," he begged, "let me come home quietly. . . . We [Thomas Nelson Perkins and Thomas W. Lament, his Reparations colleagues] cannot find in our hearts justification for the acceptance of such an honor for a service rendered as private citizens which any number of other Americans could or would have done as well. . . ." When fog trapped the Aquitania 200 miles out of New York, slowing her progress, Hero Young became impatient. The next day his eldest son, Charles Jacob Young, was being married in Cleveland to Miss Esther Marie Christensen. From Paris Hero Young had promised his prospective daughter-in-law to attend her wedding, even if the Reparations compact had to be rushed to signature. It was early evening before the liner paused at Quarantine where Hero Young boarded a special tug sent by the New York Central R. R. to carry him to the Battery. There he hailed a taxi, drove up Hero's Highway alone. The same night he entrained quietly for Cleveland.

But Mr. Young could not so easily dissociate himself from the Hero's role. Men-in-the-street might ignore him but in Washington he was being closely eyed by many a potent fellow Democrat as a possible presidential nominee three years hence. Last fortnight the Democracy dined at the capital in the name of harmony. The orators mentioned no names as 1932 candidates but among the diners one name was persistently whispered back and forth--Owen D. Young. He had, all admitted, done a great thing at Paris--a thing which could surely be dramatized for use in party politics.

Similarly, talk about himself for the presidency was no novelty to Hero Young, who heard quite a bit of it early last year. If he heard last week's Washington talk he did not show it but prepared, after the wedding, to present his "private citizen" self in Washington; to report with his colleague John Pierpont Morgan to President Hoover; to explain, as one economist to another, just what the Young Plan of readjusted reparations means to the U. S., as to world peace. First to bestow formal Kudos upon Hero Young was the Roosevelt Memorial Association, which last week voted him one of its three annual three-inch golden Distinguished Service Medals.*

*The other two medals went to Novelist-Historian Owen Wister, because "America, right or wrong; colorful, adventurous, romantic, blind, heroic, banal, lives and breathes" in his pages: and to Herbert Putnam, Librarian of Congress, for 30 years of able service.