Transport: Hoover Affair

Slowly making her way through dark, unfamiliar waters last fortnight, the Dollar Line's crack 21,936-ton President Hoover ran hard aground on a reef 18 miles off Formosa's east coast, 450 miles north of Manila. There was a heavy swell on, and by daylight the 615-ft. vessel was fast on the rocks for more than half her length. A few hundred yards away the 503 passengers and 330 members of the crew could see tiny Hoishoto Island, and within a mile or two a handful of other Japanese islands—all small, bleak, sparsely inhabited. Early messages from the President Hoover's Captain George W. Yardley minimized the disaster but by last week, after six grim days of escape and rescue, the first group of passengers landed in Manila. What they had to say added up to one more shocking charge of undisciplined hooliganism against the U. S. Seaman, New Style.

Although the seas were heavy, Captain Yardley decided to take his passengers off by ship's boats attached to a line sent ashore. The inexperienced sailors—last minute pickups from West Coast hiring halls—according to passengers, capsized two lifeboats in shallow waters trying to land the line. Miraculously without loss of life, all passengers landed on the islands during the next 36 hours. Meantime, on board the President Hoover an unruly group of the crew—estimated from "a dozen" to "most of them"—broke into the bar and began a party. They then decided to visit the passengers on shore and, commandeering boats, the roistering, singing band descended on the island early the first night of the accident.

According to Dr. Claude Conrad, a missionary official of Washington, D. C.: "A majority of the ship's crew came into camp more or less incapacitated and abusive from the effects of free indulgence in the ship's liquor stores. Out of control of officers partially in the same condition, many of the crew men continued most of the night terrorizing passengers and natives." However, when the liquored seamen began hunting for women passengers sleeping in scattered houses ashore, some officers and other passengers formed a vigilante group to protect them. There was no actual molestation. There would have been no disturbance at all ashore, said some of the passengers, if the Hoover's officers had been permitted by Japanese police to land with their guns. What cleared the air was the arrival of two U. S. destroyers, whose crews did come ashore with guns and put an end to the unsettled situation.

In Washington, New York's voluble Senator Royal S. Copeland had been sitting for days as chairman of the Senate Joint Maritime Committee considering last month's Maritime Commission report. That 17-page document by Joseph Patrick Kennedy bluntly declared: "Labor conditions in the American Merchant Marine are deplorable. . . . The employer, for his part, has fostered long hours, low wages and cramped quarters. The employe, meanwhile, has abused his employment in a manner that would not be tolerated in any other industry."