The Hoover Week

President Hoover conferred long and often last week on grave matters of state. His principal conferees were Secretary of the Treasury Mills, Governor Meyer of the Federal Reserve Board and President Dawes of Reconstruction Finance Corp. They came and went by White House side doors, kept their lips sealed on their deliberations. The anxious solemnity of their conferences with the President gave Washington a presentiment of momentous events just below the horizon.

P: A White House caller was Mrs. William Edgar Borah. She brought her niece, Mary Lueddemann of Portland, Ore. and two Boise friends. The wife of the ursine Senator from Idaho invited the President out to their State to hunt & fish next fall. Replied President Hoover: "If the economic war is over by that time, I'd be willing to go anywhere."

P: When President Hoover received the news from Hopewell, N. J. (see p. 12), he summoned a secretary, dictated the following statement for the Press: "I have directed the law enforcement agencies and the several secret services of the Federal Government to make the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby a live and never-to-be-forgotten case, never to be relaxed until these criminals are implacably brought to justice. . . ."

P: In 1832 Samuel Finley Breese Morse, famed painter, first got the idea of transmitting "intelligence by electricity." In 1837 Telegrapher Morse sent his first test message ("Attention, the Universe, by kingdoms right wheel") from one side of Manhattan's Washington Square to the other. Six years later Congress voted him $30,000 for telegraphic experiments. The next year his first long-distance message ("What hath God wrought") flashed over a government line from the Capitol's Supreme Court chamber (now its library) in Washington to Baltimore. Last week President Hoover inaugurated the centennial of the Morse idea when he ceremoniously fingered a gold-nugget-studded telegraph key in the White House. At his touch a high speed automatic transmitter began rattling out the President's message in the Capitol library: "I am glad . . . source of pride . . . honor to his country . . . inspiration to mankind."

P: Last week the chiefs of seven powerful railway unions and brotherhoods (Locomotive Firemen & Enginemen, Conductors, Trainmen, Switchmen, Telegraphers, Train Dispatchers, Maintenance-of-Way Men)-- marched into President Hoover's office to read him a long petition of their wants. They roundly favored Alfred Emanuel Smith's foreign debt formula (a long moratorium during which each country would have deducted from its debt a percentage of the value of its imports from the U. S.). Most conservative representatives of Labor, they warned: "Unless something is done to provide employment and relieve distress we cannot be responsible for the orderly operation of the railroads. We refuse to take the responsibility for the disorder which is sure to arise if conditions continue. ... It would be with great reluctance that we would ask for a Dole. . . . Everything else suggested has either failed or has been denied. If something is not immediately done we will be obliged to demand a Dole. . . The unemployed citizens we represent will not accept starvation."

-- Missing was the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers.

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