War Conference

There was a big war conference last week on the Rapidan. To his mountain camp President Hoover took Secretary Hurley, Assistant Secretary Payne, Chief of Staff MacArthur, Chief of Engineers Brown, Quartermaster General De Witt and Congressman Will Wood (appropriations). The President ushered them into a room by themselves, told them they had to find ways & means of cutting Army costs. While they pondered snipping and trimming the military establishment, the President went outside, sat down under a tree, worked over the rough draft of the address he will give at Valley Forge on Memorial Day.

The President was obviously, seriously, troubled about the deficit, which last week rose above the $900,000,000 mark. Plain to him was the necessity of economizing somewhere, somehow. The Army was chosen to be whittled first because it is spending $446,000,000 this year, will spend $450,000,000 next year. What the President wanted to see was 10% shaved off all military activities without impairing the Army's efficiency or jeopardizing national defense. After the men in the closed room had tussled alone with figures, the President went back to their conference, was told that reductions were possible. What the cuts would be, Mr. Hoover kept to himself.

P: Because Senator Norris treats Regular Republicanism as he does, presidential patronage is something of which his Nebraska gets very little. This situation is specially well known since a Pulitzer Prize was awarded to an editorial on the subject. Therefore gossipy tongues were set wagging last week when President Hoover picked a Nebraskan to be Agriculture's member of the Federal Reserve Board, vice Edward Henry Cunningham, deceased. The new man is big, husky, talkative Wayland W. Magee, 49, of Bennington. Mr. Magee did not have Senator Norris' endorsement, but he had the next best thing, the endorsement of Senator Robert Beecher Howell of Nebraska. Senator Norris' close political crony. Others who urged his appointment included Senator Carey of Wyoming, Samuel McKelvie of the Federal Farm Board, Governor Willis J. Bailey of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, and many an agricultural college president. Mr. Magee, who runs a two-section farm in Nebraska and a 3,000-acre ranch in Wyoming,has served as a director of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, has a good working knowledge of the relation between farm and finance. Married, father of four, he was educated at the University of Chicago (1905), went west as a lawyer. Said he: "I'm a real dirt farmer and can catch my own bronco. The West holds a man like sticky flypaper."

P: The campaign to "humanize Hoover" last week went on the air. To the White House went Jay Jerome Williams, oldtime newsman, who as Edwin Alger now works as a "radio reporter" for National Broadcasting Co.He arranged with Hoover Secretary Joslin, chief humanizer. to spend a day about the White House, interview the President. Reporter Williams arrived at 7:45 a. m., talked with the President for 20 min., roamed about the house, sat in the Lincoln study, played with the six presidential dogs, watched the Hoover grandchildren from a distance, departed at 6 p. m. Last week in a "folksy" broadcast of his experiences, he declared: "Within the White House you can hear the shrill, excited laughter of little children. What if their grandfather is the President of the U. S? That does not prevent him from keeping in the top right-hand drawer of his desk a glass jar of sticks of peppermint candy. . . . What if a small girl and her younger brother swarm onto their grandfather's lap and after them and onto the same lap leaps a flop-eared and gangly puppy dog while the grandfather is at breakfast? . . . The puppy dog can see and reach the presidential plate. . . . A lightning-like snip is made and a carefully fried egg, prepared for President Hoover himself, disappears into that bottomless pit that is every puppy dog's stomach."

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