"Incurable Amateur"

"Incurable Amateur"

Darkly, like water dripping through the grounds in a coffee urn, an idea last week percolated through the minds of professional G. O. Politicians: Franklin Roosevelt's press conference declaration for centralized Federal control of business (TIME, June 10) would somehow make them a cracker jack issue for 1936. On one of his cross-country pilgrimages to Republican shrines, Herbert Clark Hoover snatched at it like a starving man snatching at a crust of bread. At Des Moines, in his native Iowa, he asked the graduating class of Drake University: "Will government permit you to breathe the pure air of liberty in the spirit of the Bill of Rights?" Then, whisk, and the Hoover motor car flashed into Illinois and up the driveway to Sinnissippi Farm, 5,000-acre country seat of Frank Orren Lowden.

It was an historic occasion. In 1928 Mr. Lowden was Herbert Hoover's chief rival for the Republican nomination. When the party platform at Kansas City went rankly reactionary, the progressive son-in-law of the late George Pullman (sleeping cars) withdrew in a huff, left the convention delegates with but one answer to the question "Who but Hoover?" Last week Mr. Lowden, 74. was no longer a candidate but his work and words were still an important factor in Midwestern Republicanism. And furthermore he was about to be the chief speaker at a great Republican rally at Springfield, Ill. Mr. Hoover, who attends no rallies, wanted to see him first. What they had to discuss appeared that evening when a newshawk caught up with Pilgrim Hoover in Chicago. In one sentence Mr. Hoover described their conference:

"We discussed the effect upon the future of America of the Administration proposals to change to a European form of government."

Would he amplify his statement?

"I won't go on with that any further," snorted the country's only living ex-President.

Whether he meant to or not, Mr. Hoover thereby injected one more catch-phrase into the forthcoming constitutional contest--"a change to a European form of government." Apparently the man who called Prohibition a "noble experiment" (literally "an experiment noble in motive") and who harped for four years on "rugged individualism" was already itching to get into a momentous fight, the form of which even Franklin Roosevelt, smart politician though he was. did not yet clearly perceive. It remained for Pundit Walter Lippmann. once a good friend of Herbert Hoover, to take most of the wind out of that Republican's sails with these caustic words:

"[Hoover's] statement . . . looks wishful in the light of the fact that there are no proposals to change to any other form of government. It does disclose Mr. Hoover's ambitions and his hopes: what a windfall it would be for an eager candidate of the opposition if only Mr. Roosevelt would propose to abolish the Federal Constitution! But it is the idea of an incurable amateur. Mr. Hoover must think that the President is as lacking in political insight as he is himself. He must think the President does not know that an amendment to turn over to the national Government omnipotent powers to regulate wages, hours, working conditions, trade practices and prices would not be ratified by ten American States, that it would divide and wreck utterly the Democratic party, that it would be just about the most superlative piece of idiocy by which any public leader ever sought to cut his own throat."

Meantime, Herbert Hoover, traveling eastward for a little fishing in Vermont, continued to make headlines by running into more Republican friends, including Governor Charles M. Smith; going to Plymouth, standing with bowed head at the grave of Calvin Coolidge.

Franklin Roosevelt has been too long in public life not to have left a well-documented trail of opinions on most subjects, including the Constitution, behind him. Republican editors, like bloodhounds on the scent, soon sniffed out and printed with gleeful gusto a speech he made by radio in 1930 when he was Governor of New York. Broadcasting to the nation Mr. Roosevelt had declared: "It was clear to the framers of our Constitution that . . . any national Administration attempting to make all laws for the whole nation, such as was wholly practical in Great Britain, would inevitably result ... in a dissolution of the Union. ... To bring about Government by oligarchy masquerading as democracy, it is fundamentally essential that practically all authority and control be centralized in our national Government. . . . We are safe from the danger . . . just so long as the individual home rule of the States is scrupulously preserved. . . ."

Meanwhile in Springfield, Ill. the Republican cohorts of the Midwest were assembling. At their "grass roots" conference, the grassrooters turned out to include Hanford MacNider (Hoover Minister to Canada), Patrick Jay Hurley (Hoover Secretary of War), Arthur M. Hyde (Hoover Secretary of Agriculture), Arch Coleman (Hoover First Assistant Postmaster General).

"We are drawing a creed, not a pla-form," declared Harrison Earl Spangler, Republican National Committeeman from Iowa and one of the promoters of the convention.

Before the delegates were all assembled it was apparent that they would have no trouble in writing their creed. As they dropped off the train, one after another cried, as if with a common inspiration: "Save the Constitution."

Then the convention opened and Frank Lowden rose to contribute his keynote address. Said he: "The preservation of the basic principles of the Constitution: this is the supreme issue of the hour."

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