CAMPAIGN: Symbol

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Answers. Presumably he will go on doing what he has been doing recently. He has been driving his tan Cadillac from one small California town to the next, accompanied by the two Aliens (no kin): Ben, 56, grey-haired, heavyset, silent, long (and wrongly) considered Hoover's ghost writer, and Jacob, dark, short, relative newcomer to the Hoover circle. He has been making speeches, like the one to the college branch of the Young Republicans at San Francisco, where he described his talks with Polish and Finnish Government leaders like Kyösti Kallio and Rudolf Holsti (see cut). And he has been keeping in touch with the Republican "Circles" that he has been organizing since he returned from Europe in 1938. These Circles are groups of 20, organized by counties, each officered only by a secretary. Each county Circle creates a town or district Circle, making a minimum of 400 Circlers in each county. Purpose: to gather at dinner to listen to Herbert Hoover whenever he comes through, to back up other Republican organizations, to oppose the New Deal. There is a Circle in each of California's 58 counties, with others in nine Western States, a few in the East that lie dormant for long periods, come back to life when the ex-President appears.

Last week correspondents making a hasty check-up heard strange and contradictory reports. In the State of Washington they heard G.O.P. bigwigs proclaim: "He has learned more since being out of office—about his nation, his party, the world—than he ever did in office or all his years before the Presidency." In Oregon, where Hoover often goes to fish with his old friend Homer Bunker, president of the Coos Bay Lumber Co., and Arthur Priaulx (rhymes with Creole), publisher of the Eugene News, they heard he has been in & out of the State often, but not among the politicians.

In Colorado, they heard from Frank Fetzer, 240-lb. chairman of Denver's Republican Club, that Colorado Republicans now found Herbert Hoover's speeches "inspirational but sobering," were still discussing his visit last August. In Missouri, they found G.O.P. leaders who called Hoover's increased political stature extraordinary, heard that what most pleased Republicans was the conviction that Herbert Hoover is the one Republican who makes Mr. Roosevelt uneasy in his political mind. Everywhere it was admitted that Mr. Hoover had his uses in G. O. P. adversity. Everywhere his prestige—and with it, the prestige of the party—was rising. A Washington State G. O. P. man summed up Republican feeling about Mr. Hoover: "We cannot win without him as a counsel, or with him as a candidate."