THE PRESIDENCY: The Hoover Week: Oct. 7, 1929

• Share

He would go down in history as indeed a weak-kneed President who, within the first year of his office, should let slip from the office's authority so great a power as the one which was given the President in the Tariff Act of 1922, the power to raise or lower duties by 50% upon recommendation of the President-appointed Tariff Commission.

Hearing that Democrats and insurgent Republicans were planning to alter this so-called flexible clause* so that Congress instead of the President should receive the Tariff Commission's recommendations, President Hoover last week waited until the eve of the Senate's debate on the matter, then issued a statement defending his rate-changing power as it stands. He said it was a wise power, protecting public interest from long delay, guarding against too-frequent revisions of the whole tariff. It had been held constitutional, he reminded. It did not make the President a despot, etc., etc. Having thus broken his silence on the Tariff, President Hoover once more fell silent, watched the Tariff War from afar. (see p. 14).

¶ Chance put one Hoover in the White House. The electorate put in another. Last week the second Hoover added a third Hoover to the household. President Hoover appointed Lieut.-Commander Gilbert C. Hoover of Columbus, Ohio, to be his Naval aid. The first Hoover, as everyone knows, is tall, greying Irwin ("Ike") Hoover, chief usher at the White House since the time of President McKinley. Hoovers Nos. 1, 2 and 3 are not related.

¶ Neither of the other two Hoovers looks like the President (though George Akerson, presidential secretary, is held by many to be almost the "double" of his chief). Yet trickery of some sort might have been suspected one day last week when this amazing episode took place: The President was seen to leave his executive office, clad in his usual sack suit. The Japanese Ambassador, Katsuji Debuchi, was waiting in the Blue Room to present the officers of some visiting Japanese warboats. Precisely six minutes after the sack-suited President vanished, there appeared to handshake the Japanese a President neat and calm in full formal morning wear. Midshipmen from the Japanese warboats were reviewed on the south lawn. Followed a luncheon, with the Secretaries of State and the Navy present. Then, after an elapsed time of 1 hr. 40 min., back in the executive offices appeared the sack-suited president.

¶ President Hoover reappointed George Alexander Parks to be Governor of Alaska (second term).

To represent the U. S. at Spain's International Exposition at Seville, the President named Fred R. Zimmerman, last Governor of Wisconsin.

¶ By order of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army & Navy, the Department of Justice undertook a separate investigation of William B. Shearer, self-styled "big bass drum," big-Navy lobbyist (see p. 14).

¶ From the semiprivate Red Room, where they had hung since Roosevelt's time to the spacious East Room, were moved the full-length White House portraits of George and Martha Washington. . . . Upstairs, in an alcove off his study, Herbert Hoover has hung a growing collection of portraits of himself. Mostly by amateurs, mostly crude and amusing, all gifts, they are what President Hoover calls his "one-man show."