Presidential Prose

To the world at large a quarter century ago the name of Herbert Clark Hoover meant exactly nothing. But Californians, particularly Stanford alumni, were already proud of Engineer Hoover's success and, regarding him as their most distinguished Londoner, usually carried letters of introduction when they crossed the Atlantic. Hence it was inevitable that when Benjamin Shannon Allen, a scholarly young reporter with an A. B. and A. M. in history from Stanford, was assigned to Associated Press's London bureau in 1910, he should soon make his way to the Hoovers' "Red House." For four years the friendship of the two expatriates ripened in private. Then came the War and the beginning of the astute and spectacular publicity build-up which ended by making Herbert Hoover a World Name and 31st President of the U. S. The publicity artist who sketched the solid outlines of the Hoover portrait which the world came to know was Ben S. Allen.

After he had consented to feed starving Belgium, Mr. Hoover borrowed Newsman Allen from AP to do his publicity. The Press, especially in the U. S., was promptly flooded with news of the prodigious feats of organization, diplomacy and greathearted endurance by which a modest U. S. engineer was keeping an entire nation alive. When Mr. Hoover went home to be U. S. Food Administrator, Ben Allen went with him. Their joint efforts added a new word, "Hooverize," to the national vocabulary, made Mr. Hoover and his food edicts an intimate part of the daily life of every man, woman & child in the land. By 1920 Mr. Hoover bulked large enough in the public mind to be discussed seriously for the Presidency despite the fact that he could not make up his mind whether he was a Democrat or a Republican.

Ben Allen did not share in his hero's glory as Secretary of Commerce or in the greater glory yet to come. What happened to the Hoover-Allen association has long been a subject of speculation among political observers. There were rumors of a blowup, a serious breach. These stories are now hotly denied by Ben Allen, and his friends testify that the only resentment he ever displayed in the years of separation was against those who he felt had shouldered him out of his place at Mr. Hoover's writing elbow. Ben Allen declares that he returned to California after the War simply because he and his wife longed for home. Mr. Hoover's money helped start him off as owner of the Sacramento Union. Later he worked as a farm journal editor, finally as a free-lance publicity man.

Meantime Secretary of Commerce Hoover was handling his own press relations with surprising skill. A picked group of Washington correspondents, headed by Jay Hayden of the Detroit News and Roy Roberts of the Kansas City Star, went regularly to the Hoover office to be treated to encyclopedic and immensely helpful disquisitions on current national and international problems. Their mentor's name did not appear in the resulting dispatches, but the grateful newsmen saw to it that the Secretary of Commerce's light was not hidden under a bushel.

In 1925 Secretary Hoover supplemented his own efforts by hiring George Akerson, roly-poly, glad-handing Washington correspondent for the Minneapolis Tribune, as his private secretary and political manager. No intellectual. Newsman Akerson knew how to keep his old colleagues on receptive terms. The Mississippi flood of 1927, for which Secretary Hoover directed relief and rehabilitation in person, occasioned a magnificent flood of publicity which carried the Wartime legend of the Great Humanitarian to high tide, helped sweep him on next year into the Presidency.

Chiefly as a result of a mellow essay on fishing, the new President was regarded as being, in his lighter moments, a passable prosewriter. In October 1929, at Henry Ford's Golden Jubilee of Light in honor of Thomas A. Edison, he delivered a speech which, though no literary model, possessed considerable grace and gentle humor. Then Depression overwhelmed him with the World's woes. He grew cold to newsmen, turned his press conferences into funereal mummeries, finally began canceling them altogether. With a sense of the historic importance of his utterances in the crisis there came to the President an enormous pride of authorship which forbade the altering of so much as a word in his public messages. As each day's cares weighed him further down, his literary style reached new depths of wooden ponderosity. He left office with a reputation as the pettish, totally unamiable author of some of the world's most elephantine prose.

The nation at large was amazed, therefore, when Herbert Hoover began two months ago to belabor the New Deal in speeches touched with humor and irony, studded with short, vigorous sentences which passed in the Press for epigrams (TIME, Oct. 14 et seq.). Oldtime newsmen thought they understood the change. Almost simultaneously with Mr. Hoover's literary distinction there had returned to him. as adviser, contact man and traveling companion, Ben S. Allen.

At 52, genial, button-eyed Ben Allen is greying, looks older than his years. Father of four sons, he boasts that he is the only man who has a key to one of the Mills College girls' dormitories. (His wife is Mills's chairman of residence departments, lives in one of the dormitories during the week.) The Aliens' home is a modest frame house in Palo Alto, about two miles from the Hoovers'. Ben Allen now serves Mr. Hoover simply as a friend, without pay.

Observers who believe that Mr. Hoover aspires to be something more than the prime mover at next year's Republican Convention have noted with interest the way in which Ben Allen, old master of publicity, has set out to erase the Depression portrait of Mr. Hoover from the public mind, restore his original masterpiece. After the Hoover address in St. Louis last fortnight, which kept Republicans roaring with laughter, Friend Allen declared to newshawks: "All this talk about 'The New Hoover' is wrong. What you are seeing now is the natural Hoover. He always had a humorous nature and he always ends his letters with a witty quip." After being crushed by care while in office, said Friend Allen, Mr. Hoover was now "like an athlete hitting his stride."

As proof of "The Chief's" humor, Ben Allen told of the time Mr. Hoover signed his name six times for a small girl autograph-hunter, explaining: "You might want to do a little autograph trading some time and I understand it takes five Hoovers to get one Babe Ruth."

During a stop-over at Omaha next day Ben Allen made just the kind of news a Presidential candidate likes to see in the papers when he confided to the Press that Mr. Hoover gets into his white tie & tails in seven minutes flat.

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