Home, Sweet Home

"Next to food and clothing, the housing of a nation is its most vital problem. . . . The sentiment for home ownership is embedded in the American heart [of] millions of people who dwell in tenements, apartments and rented rows of solid brick. . . . This aspiration penetrates the heart of our national wellbeing. It makes for happier married life. It makes for better children. It makes for courage to meet the battle of life. . . . There is a wide distinction between homes and mere housing. Those immortal ballads, 'Home, Sweet Home,' 'My Old Kentucky Home' and 'The Little Grey Home in the West' were not written about tenements or apartments. . . . They were written about an individual abode, alive with tender associations of childhood, the family life at the fireside, the free out-of-doors, the independence, the security and the pride in possession of the family's own home. . . . Many of our people must live under other conditions. But they never sing songs about a pile of rent receipts. . . ."

Over these warm words and some 1,900 others like them President Hoover had worked with a full heart for two months. One evening last week he took them all, in the form of a keynote address, to Constitution Hall and there, in a voice brimming with emotion, delivered them to the assembled delegates of the President's Conference on Home Building & Home Ownership. At this great gathering President Hoover again demonstrated his ability and leadership in an unofficial activity outside the constitutional realm of the Presidency.

The conference's major purpose, President Hoover said, was "to stimulate industrial action," not "to set up government in the building of homes." To promote home owning the President urged a better system of home financing, thus keying his program in with his proposed Home Loan Discount system (TIME, Nov. 23).

With this problem P. C. O. H. B. A. H. O.'s Finance Committee chairmanned by Mr. Ecker wrestled long and hard. Its members, mostly conservative financiers, appeared slightly out of step with the President's ideas. They found little to remedy in the home credit field, opposed any stimulation of new building on the ground that the market is already oversupplied and must wait for population to overtake it. A minimum 25% down payment was the Committee's recommendation, and only for purchasers with ability to save.

P: Last week President Hoover cancelled his third press conference in a row. Reason: preoccupation with his Message to Congress on the State of the Union (see col. 3). Calvin Coolidge used to finish his Messages a week or more before Congress sat, distribute them in advance to the Press in time for mailing to the Pacific coast. Receipt of the Message in confidence automatically estopped all news speculation as to its contents. But because President Hoover was slow finishing his, the public prints last week rioted in guesswork. Asked whether it would be long or short, Private Secretary Joslin gravely declared: "All I can say at this time is that the message will not be a long one--and also that it will not be a short one." For weeks President Hoover has been carrying around a little 5-c- pad of paper in his pocket, jotting down random message ideas with a stubby pencil.

P:On the Tariff Commission's recommendation President Hoover last week upped the duty on green peas (3-c- to 3.9-c- per lb.) and McKay sewed shoes (20% to 30%). He downed the duty on egg plant (3-c- to 1 1/2-c- per lb.), green peppers (3-c- to 2 1/2-c- per lb.), crude feldspar ($1 to 50-c- per ton), turned shoes (20% to 10%), window glass (25%). He left unchanged the tariff on (among other things), lumber, cement, pens, Spanish moss, pineapples, snap beans, cucumbers, okra, fresh tomatoes and lima beans.

P: For Christmas presents Mrs. Hoover paid $80 for 40 pairs of candlesticks fashioned from the copper of illicit liquor stills. They were the product of veterans undergoing occupational therapy at Walter Reed Hospital. The Washington Police Department contributed the material following 'legger raids about the city.

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