Old Horses & New

President Hoover last week accepted one great national issue and helped build up another. He accepted the Insurgents' challenge on the Power issue by vetoing the Muscle Shoals Bill. His pocket veto of the Wagner Bill to reform the Federal employment service loomed like a big square target for Democrats to shoot at.

The Wagner Bill would have scrapped the present Department of Labor employment agency (now placing 1,300,000 workers per year) and set up new and larger machinery for co-ordinate job-finding between the Federal and state governments. President Hoover's major reaction to the bill was, he said, a fear that it would create a hiatus between the old and new systems which would hurt, not help, joblessness. Fortified with arguments from his Attorney General and his Secretary of Labor, the President said:

"If I would prevent a serious blow to labor during this crisis, I should not approve the bill. . . . It cannot be made effective for many months or even years. It is not only changing horses while crossing a stream but the other horse would not arrive for many months. . . ."

New York's Democratic Senator Robert Wagner, author of the dead bill, retorted: "The President has failed every man out pounding the pavement in search of work. . . . Before we ever got into water, the Administration was offered a sound horse with which to ride through the storm. It refused it. It insisted on riding the decrepit and balky creature which is the existing Federal employment service."

On Muscle Shoals the President reiterated his belief in controlling the "Power Trust" by regulation rather than by direct public competition. His veto message, to which he brought his full professional prestige as an engineer, made these objections to the bill: 1) Government operation of the plant would produce a loss of $2,000,000 per year; 2) Muscle Shoals is no longer needed for national defense because private companies now make ample synthetic nitrogen; 3) no private company would take a restricted lease on the nitrate plant; 4) unknown millions would be required to modernize the "more or less obsolete" nitrate plant; 5) a capable board of managers believing in government operation could not be found; 6) the Government would be competing with its citizens. To take the sting out of his veto President Hoover suggested that Alabama and Tennessee as the two states primarily concerned name a joint commission with "full authority to lease the plants at Muscle Shoals in the interest of the local community and agriculture generally." The Senate sustained (34-to-49) the veto after the President had been roundly abused on the ground that he made Muscle Shoals into a "gold brick" and then tried to pass it off on the states.

P: Last month the enterprising Des Moines Register and Tribune discovered at Le Grand, Iowa, what was believed to be the earliest known photograph of Herbert Clark Hoover. The Hoover family was holding a reunion at West Branch, Iowa, in 1876 or 1877. As its members grouped themselves before the old-time camera Jessie Hoover (No. 2) took up a rear position holding his son Herbert (No. 1), aged 2 or 3, in his arms. His other son Theodore (No. 4) stood high in a tree crotch. Huldah Minthorn Hoover, the President's mother (No. 3) held daughter Mae (No. 6), now Mrs. Leavitt. Beside her stood Jesse Hoover's sister Mattie (No. 5), now Mrs. Pemberton of Le Grand, owner of the original photograph.

P: For 36 hours last week President Hoover became as private a citizen as his great office will allow him. With Mrs. Hoover and the minimum escort he boarded an ordinary train at Union Station, traveled south in a regular Pullman drawing room. Next morning he got off at Asheville, N. C. It was snowing hard. He motored 2,300 ft. up Sunset Mountain to Blue Briar cottage. There Herbert Hoover Jr. got out of bed, in his pajamas greeted his father for the first time since November. They hugged. For eight hours father and mother visited their ill son. The White House physician examined the patient, told the President that he was making "very definite improvement," with every indication that he was "on the road to a permanent cure." X-rays showed that the tubercular spot on the left lung has disappeared, that scar tissue covers the right lung lesion. The patient had gained 15 lb. (now weighing 147 lb.) and was in good spirits. At dusk the President, with Mrs. Hoover, returned to Asheville, journeyed back to Washington a very happy, very relieved father.

P: With "intense regret" President Hoover accepted the resignation of Alexander Legge as chairman of the Federal Farm Board, promoted James Clifton Stone, the Board's tobacco member, to the chairmanship. Resuming the presidency of International Harvester Co., Mr. Legge expressed confidence in the Board's "ultimate success," flayed the Board's critics for "making a lot of noise," complained of the farmer's "slowness" to get together and act collectively. That there would be no change in the Board's policy of market stabilization of cotton and wheat was Chairman Stone's first official announcement.

P:. To turn over to the states the remaining 178,979,466* acres of unreserved, unappropriated public land was last week's recommendation of President Hoover's committee on the Conservation & Administration of the Public Domain (TIME, Sept. 9, 1929). After a year's study the committee's 19 members agreed that the states could also have the mineral rights on this land provided they adopt conservation programs in harmony with Federal policy. Lands which states did not want would be turned into national ranges.

* The original public domain was 1,441,136,160 acres.

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