Resignations

Last week President Hoover received within 24 hours two important resignations from men who had served him long and loyally overseas. "With the greatest reluctance" he allowed Dwight Filley Davis to step out of service as Governor General of the Philippines. The news of the retirement of Charles Gates Dawes as Ambassador to the Court of St. James's produced "great regret" at the White House. Reason in both cases: pressing personal affairs.

Mr. Davis, who has spent almost three years at Manila, wanted to join his invalid wife in Paris and "get a little rest." Sixty minutes after his resignation President Hoover, as everyone expected, nominated Governor Theodore Roosevelt of Porto Rico to be Governor General of the Philippines. In Washington, Col. Roosevelt declared he was "very deeply grateful." Most Porto Rican politicos felt the same way.

Arriving earlier in the week from London, Ambassador Dawes was bedded at the White House. As chairman of the U. S. delegation to the Geneva Arms Conference next month, he went immediately into conference with President Hoover, Secretary Stimson and other conference delegates on the problems ahead. Statesman Stimson appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to ask for $450.000 expense money for the delegates, intimated that the U. S. would not take forceful leadership at Geneva, declared the U. S. delegation was composed of "the most practical pacifists to be found."

After four days in the capital General Dawes took a 4 p. m. train for Chicago. At 7 p. m. E. Ross Hartley, his onetime secretary, announced: 1) Mr. Dawes would serve as delegation chairman only through the preliminary weeks of the Geneva conference; 2) he would then resign as Ambassador to Great Britain; 3) back in Chicago as a private citizen he would resume the board chairmanship of his Central Republic Bank & Trust Co. The bank's stock jumped from 82 to 104 on the news.

All diplomatic diplomats allow the White House to make the first announcement of their resignation. That Mr. Dawes spoke out boldly for himself set up a thunder of political speculation in Washington and Illinois. Had the individualistic Ambassador sprung a surprise on Mr. Hoover? The White House insisted it was fully informed in advance. Was Mr. Dawes escaping political exile at Geneva to contest the Republican nomination with the President next June? "Damn nonsense!" snapped the Ambassador when he reached Chicago. "I'm coming home to take care of my business like every good American should." Despite the fact that his best friends believed that he was without White House motives and ambitions the thought persisted that, somehow, somewhere, "Charley" Dawes would be brought forward as the beneficiary of anti-Hoover sentiment in the G. O. P.

This sentiment was reflected last week by Mrs. Ruth Hanna McCormick, smart Republican politician, in her Rockford (Ill.) Register-Republic which declared that "Mr. Hoover is not a popular leader." Her paper advised leaders to discard the practice of renominating a President just because he was in the White House, to stop "following the political methods in vogue when father was a boy." Five days later the Register-Republic declared: "Illinois gives you Charles Gates Dawes for President!''

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