The Hoover Week

Surrounded by Admirals, Secretaries, experts both naval and diplomatic, for hours last week the President considered tonnages, gun sizes, British statements of naval requirements, U. S. counter-requirements. Then, while the White House, the State Department, the Navy Department still boiled with naval and financial statistics, long code messages were sent to Ambassador Dawes in London and presently it was definitely known that Britain's white-headed Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald would sail for the U. S. on Sept. 28 to confer personally on naval reductions with President Hoover. This milestone in the Hoover administration was soon followed by its bigger, better corollary: Secretary of State Stimson was enabled to announce that the details remaining for the Messrs. Hoover and MacDonald to discuss are so few, so sure of settlement, that the U. S. and England will be ready to appear together at a naval conference of the five Sea Powers in December, this to be followed in 1936 by still another, greater conference (see p. 25).

P: Guests at the White House for dinner one evening were three people who once lived there several years--Theodore, Kermit and Alice Roosevelt (now Longworth.) Theodore said that he was studying Spanish, not in order the better to converse with the President who knows it well, but in preparation for his duties as Governor of Porto Rico, in which the Senate had just confirmed him.

P: President Hoover announced that if Congressmen from the lower Mississippi Basin were willing to assume responsibility by requesting it, he was willing to delay Mississippi flood control work in that region.

P: Washingtonians discussing the President's problems with tariff-makers, big-navy advocates and whatnot, were interested last week to hear bruited the following dialog:

The President: There is one law I should like to see passed. The President ought to be allowed to hang two men every year without giving any reason or explanation.

An Old Friend: Would two be enough?

The President: Perhaps not, but I could get word to 20 or 30 that they were being considered for the honor.

P: Col. Thad H. Brown of Ohio is the man who nearly two years ago received a letter, first public intimation, from the then Secretary of Commerce that he would run for President. Col. Brown managed the Commerce Secretary's campaign in Ohio. Last week a piece of paper fluttered down into the Senate, seeming to say "Eureka." President Hoover had at last found a Federal post appropriate for his friend, had nominated him to be Chief Counsel for the Federal Power Commission.*

P: The expected arrival of James Ramsay MacDonald early in October necessitated changes in President Hoover's plans to visit the West next month. It was an- nounced at the White House that the President would not be able to go to Texas for the celebration at El Paso of the 75th anniversary of the Gadsden Purchase./- Instead he will probably make a trip to Cincinnati and Louisville for the formal opening of locks on the Ohio River. Oct. 21 he is due in Detroit to help Henry Ford and the Edison Pioneers celebrate the Golden Jubilee of the electric light bulb.

The White House confirmed the news from Cuba that the Cuban government had decided that Harry F. Guggenheim, scion of the great mining family, administrator of the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, would be persona grata as minister to that country.

P:. Gathering a party of friends about him on Saturday afternoon, the President for the first time since taking office visited the Washington Navy Yard. He was saluted with 21 guns, boarded the presidential barge, was ferried out into the Potomac near Haines Point, received another salute, boarded the revenue cutter Apache. Leaning over the rail he watched intently while Imp II, driven by Financier Richard Farnsworth Hoyt of Manhattan, won the President's cup for motorboats. The Pres- ident then accepted another salute, was ferried ashore and motored--reversing a decision of the week prior--the 100-odd miles away from Washington's heat and humidity to his Rapidan camp for one more weekend. Guests at the camp included Secretary of Commerce Lamont, F. K. Heath, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury; Mrs. Jean Large, sister of Mrs. Hoover, and her two children; Charles Kellogg Field, college classmate of the President; James Putnam Goodrich, one-time (1917-21) Governor of Indiana; and, most noteworthy of all, William Joseph Donovan, ardent Hooverite in last year's campaign for whom the President did not find a cabinet position and who refused the governorship of the Philippines. Apparently any Hoover-Donovan breach was all patched up.

* This post is not to be confused with that of Solicitor for the Commission, now filled by Charles A. Russell, whose recent opinion that power company stocks are being watered to make their eventual recapture by the Government unduly expensive (TIME, Sept. 2), has aroused a storm of protest among public utilitarians.

/- The Gadsden Purchase made by President Pierce in 1853, named for James Gadsden who negotiated it, is a strip of land across the southern part of New Mexico and Arizona, bought from Mexico for $10,000,000 to "rectify" the international boundary. Five years earlier, following the Mexican War, the U. S. had taken all of California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, paying only $15,000,000. The Gadsden Purchase is something of a synonym for Conscience Money.