The Hoover Week

President Hoover last week took a hand to speed the Tariff Bill to final enactment. The House and Senate conferees thereon were snarled. Major items were still in dispute. The main question was: Which wing of Congress should vote first? Each side, for political reasons, wanted the other to go first, to reserve the advantage of the last word. Chiefly at stake was the export debenture plan, approved by the Senate, disapproved by the President and the House.

As arbitrator President Hoover summoned House and Senate leaders to breakfast, listened to them wrangle over the question of procedure. His desire was twofold: 1) to beat the debenture; 2) to hasten the bill to passage. To gain these ends he sided with the Senate that the House should lead in voting on the conference report. The House leaders bowed to his will, returned to the Capitol to plan for their body to pass this week on the points at issue. President Hoover was quite aware that if the House, as he confidently expected it would, again rejected the debenture plan, it would have a strong psychological effect on the Senate to do likewise. Not the least important of President Hoover's reasons for wanting to hurry the tariff through is to make room in the Senate for the London Naval Treaty which he hopes to get ratified before June adjournment.

P: President Hoover was told that his Caribbean policies were leading "toward a holy alliance called the American League of Nations" when he received the credentials of Dr. Don Rafael Brache as the new Dominican Minister to the U. S.

P: Mrs. Hoover, confined to the White House with a sprained back, last week turned on the radio, heard these words:

"A new attack has massed against the fortifications. As the bombing squadron comes in through the Golden Gate the attack planes rapidly circle the presidio in a protective maneuver. The main bombardment group bombs the presidio, turns below us toward Mather Field as the pursuit planes follow. . . . Goodbye."

Well did Mrs. Hoover know that the voice was that of her son Herbert, radio engineer, describing over a nation-wide hook-up the Army's final air maneuvers above San Francisco from a giant Fokker 10,000 ft. up in the air.

P: "There are a few men of the West of my generation who did not know the pioneer woman in his own mother. . . . It was those women who carried the refinement, the moral character and spiritual force into the West." So over the radio spoke President Hoover for the unveiling of a large statue of the Pioneer Woman of the West at Ponca City, Okla.

P: To a Gridiron Club dinner went President Hoover last week to watch Washington newsmen make fun of his policies, to see his Secretary of State at the London Naval Conference burlesqued as Alice in Wonderland, his National Republican Chairman consigned to political limbo, to hear John Philip Sousa lead the Marine band in a rousing new Sousa March dedicated to Britain's Royal Welch Fusiliers. It was this regiment which joined the U. S. Marines in lifting the Boxer siege of Tientsin (1900) and helping to rescue Herbert Hoover, engineer.

P: With the President's permission Attorney General Mitchell and Secretaries Wilbur & Hyde laid plans to build Cabinet cabins on the Rapidan where, over holidays, they could be near their chief without crowding his household.

P: In a special message, President Hoover called on Congress to pass before adjourning his chief recommendations for aiding law enforcement, specifically: 1) to transfer Prohibition enforcement to the Department of Justice; 2) to relieve court congestion; 3) to increase Federal prison accommodations, establish a new parole system; 4) to form a strong border patrol; 5) to give the District of Columbia an adequate Prohibition Law.

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