Thick Blue Volume

A subject of much covert speculation among curious voters in the 1928 presidential campaign was: How and where did Nominee Herbert Hoover make his millions? A onetime policeman named James O'Brien and a writer named John Hamill sought the answer at Republican headquarters, were vaguely told that Mr. Hoover has prospered by large and successful mining enterprises during his 20 years foreign travel and residence. Democratic headquarters could not give them more information. Still curious, O'Brien decided to have the Hoover past researched and publish a book thereon. He employed Hamill to travel abroad, gather material. As Hamill was completing this assignment, a quarrel with O'Brien developed. Hamill took his manuscript to a notorious Samuel Roth who, under the name of William Faro Inc., specialized in smutty publications. Last September William Faro Inc. issued a thick blue volume entitled "The Strange Career of Mr. Hoover Under Two Flags" by John Hamill ($3.75). In three months the book has sold far & wide, caused much undercover comment, more private indignation.

In the "Strange Career" Mr. Hoover is depicted as an unscrupulous stock promoter who as an "insider" made a fortune at the expense of the investing public. He is followed to West Australia's gold fields as the agent of the London engineering firm of Bewick, Moreing & Cox of which he later became a partner. In detail his "taking" of the Kaiping coal mines in China is described, together with the London law suit in which an equity court found against his firm and in favor of Mandarin Chang. Tin enterprises in Nigeria, oil ventures in Siberia and Peru, gold digging in the Klondike, lead and silver mining in Burma--all are set forth as "stock deals" in which Mr. Hoover profited while outside shareholders were losing their shirts. The whole book is written in a vicious insinuating style with rhetorical questions ("Did Hoover do this? Why, bless your simple heart, no!") and cruel jibes. Regardless of onesided venom, however, each page is made to bristle with figures, names and dates about oldtime Hoover companies until the reader does not know what not to believe.

Last week Justice Salvatore A. Cotillo of the New York Supreme Court granted an injunction against the further New York sale of "The Strange Career" on petition of O'Brien who claimed that Hamill and Roth had stolen his idea and data. Looking beyond the Law Judge Cotillo remarked:

". . . History is no respecter of persons. . . . But to employ such material in publicly attacking a person's past life when he is engaged in high public duties and virtually powerless to defend himself, is unfair, unsportsmanlike and detrimental to the public interest. . . . The only purpose of the publication seems to be to provide profit to persons of unsavory reputation through satisfying morbid and idle curiosity."

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