Old & Tested Codes

Standing in the broiling sun of an Iowa state fair one day last week, the only living ex-President of the United States cast his mind back to the days of his Iowa boyhood and from them drew a moral for a later, more troubled age. In a speech accepting a bronze plaque for distinguished citizenship, he took as his text four words which were almost a paraphrase of his own citation: "Honor in public life." Said Herbert Hoover:

"I sometimes wonder what the 56 Founding Fathers, from their invisible presence in our congressional halls, would say about the procession of men in responsible positions who have come before its committees of this day. What would they have thought of the 'sacred honor' of the five-percenters, the mink coats, the Deep-Freezers, the free hotel bills?

"What would the Founding Fathers have thought of those who coquette with traitorship? Or of secret and disastrous commitments of our nation which were denied at the time? Or high officials under oath contradicting each other as to well-known facts?"

In Search of a Code. "We have a cancerous growth of intellectual dishonesty in public life which is mostly beyond the law." At least part of the reason is the current preoccupation with things that are "New"--"the New Order, the New Freedom . . . the New Deal, the New Religion . . . several New Foreign Policies and certainly a lot of New Taxes." In the process, the U.S. is forgetting some of the "Old Virtues"--the virtues "of religious faith . . . of integrity and the whole truth . . . of incorruptible service and honor in public office . . . of economy in government, of self-reliance and thrift . . .

"In its frustration, the Congress is groping for some sort of code of ethics . . . Might I suggest that we already have some old and tested codes of ethics? There are the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and the rules of the game which we learned at our mother's knee. Can a nation live if these are not the guides of public life? . . ."

The Greatest Danger. "The issue today is decency in public life against indecency . . . Our greatest danger is not from invasion by foreign armies. Our dangers are that we may commit suicide from within by complaisance with evil. Or by public tolerance of scandalous behavior. These evils have defeated many nations many times in history."

But speaking from the perspective of his 77 years, Elder Statesman Hoover saw no reason for "frustration or despair." Said he: "The fact that we are vigorously washing our dirty linen in the open is a sign that moral stamina still survives in our people . . . We sense the frauds on men's minds and morals. Moral indignation is on the march again in America."

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