Catch

North Florida disgraced itself in Republican eyes last week when its fish turned Democratic and refused to take President Hoover's bait. As in Ossabaw Sound off Georgia the week before, the President trolled his line for hours in the waters about Fernandina but caught nothing worth keeping. Disgusted, he ordered the U. S. S. S. Sequoia, his holiday craft, to wind its way down the coast through the twisty inland waterway to better fun and fishing. Progress was slow through shoal waters. Twice the Sequoia grounded. The President baked in the sun, played Hoover-ball, worked at a desk set up under an awning on the after deck.

Out in the Atlantic off Palm Beach aboard Captain Herman Gray's sloop Orca, President Hoover's luck changed. His first day's catch: three sails (one 7 ft., 8 in.) and a dolphin. The second day he got two more "sails," one of which was barely an inch too short to win him the "diamond button" awarded by the Sailfish Club of Florida for eight-footers.

New Year's Day the President & guests attended services at the Royal Poinciana Community Chapel, spent an hour driving about Palm Beach in a borrowed car. Early next morning he boarded a train to return to Washington and the last 59 days of his term in the White House. P: With the President absent, the White House offices were cleaned and painted for his successor. Because of the President-elect's lameness, short ramps will replace steps at the side door of the executive offices leading to the White House and in the east end of the second-floor hall leading to the Lincoln Study. Also under consideration was the construction of a small warm-water swimming pool in the White House basement, similar to the one Mr. Roosevelt had in the Executive Mansion conservatory at Albany, where he took regular underwater leg exercises between trips to Warm Springs. P: In December 1929, President Hoover, v.ith the aid of $500,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation, appointed a Research Committee on Social Trends "with a view to providing such a review as might supply a basis for the formulation of large national policies looking to the next phase in the nation's development." The committee: Wesley Clair Mitchell, chairman. Professor of Economics at Columbia: Charles Edward Merriam. Professor of Political Science at Chicago; Shelby Millard Harrison, general director of the Russell Sage Foundation; Alice Hamilton of the Harvard School of Public Health: Howard Washington Odum, Professor of

Sociology at the University of North Carolina; William Fielding Ogburn, Professor of Sociology at Chicago. With the help of more than 500 investigators the committee "looked at America as a whole," without prejudice or patriotism, weighed its government, law, science, education, trade, manners, morals, contrasted its skyscrapers and its slums, its censorships and its dirty literature, its Prohibition and its easy divorces. Last week it put into two fat volumes and 29 chapters its findings on the U. S. during the first third of the 20th Century. Declared President Hoover:

"The significance of this report lies in the fact that it is a co-operative effort on a very broad scale to project into the field of social thought the scientific mood and the scientific method. . . ."

Out of bales & bales of data the committee, with no thesis to prove, concluded that the jumble of U. S. life needs some sort of long-range, large-scale economic and social planning. Almost like a definition of Communist tenets was this committee observation on the U. S.: "Of the great social organizations, two, the economic and the governmental, are growing at a rapid rate, while two others, the church and the family, have declined in social significance, although not in human values. . . . Church and family have lost many of their regulatory influences over behavior. . . ."

Other comments on present trends and future drifts were:

"Modern civilization rests upon energy derived from inorganic matter rather than human or animal sources. . . . Immediately urgent is the need of preventing individuals with undesired inheritable traits from having offspring. . . . Crime fluctuates with the business cycle. More and more inventions are made each year and there is no reason to think that technological developments will ever stop. . . . Death rates are still much higher in the lower income groups than in others. Until the death rate does not vary according to income, it seems paradoxical to claim that wage earners are receiving a living wage. Poverty is by no means vanquished. . . . One man in ten is buried a pauper. . . . We devote more attention to making money than to spending it. . . . The bargaining power of women is weak. . . . Bad housing persists in part because of the durability of the construction materials used in old houses. . . .

"The alternative to constructive social initiative may be a prolongation of a policy of drift. More definite alternatives, however, are urged by dictatorial systems in which the factors of force and violence loom large. . . . Unless there can be a more impressive integration of social skills than is revealed by recent trends, there can be no assurance that these alternatives with violent revolution and dark periods of repression can be averted. . . . The committee does not wish to assume an attitude of alarmist irresponsibility but it would be highly negligent to gloss over the stark and bitter realities of the social situation and to ignore the imminent perils in further advance of our heavy technical machinery over crumbling roads and shaking bridges. There are times when silence is not neutrality but assent."

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