CAMPAIGN: Symbol

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Said Hoover of quick remedies: "I have no word of criticism but rather great sympathy for those who honestly search human experience and human thought for some easy way out, where human selfishness has no opportunities, where freedom requires no safeguards, where justice requires no striving. . . . Such dreams are not without value and one could join in them with satisfaction but for the mind troubled by recollection of human frailty, the painful human advance through history, the long road which humanity still has to travel to economic and social perfections. . . ."

With the New Deal's emergency measures for recovery he would not quarrel. But because a nation's greatest moral, spiritual, economic and governmental change is involved in a shift in its fundamental social ideas, the big question remained: Does the New Deal represent such a shift? Said Herbert Hoover: "This is solely an issue. Honest men will treat it as such." Analyzing New Deal policies in currency, in finance, in agriculture he found such a change; a similar change in its insistence that the U. S. social system is outworn and in its tendency to increasing regimentation, towards delegation of power to the executive. The New Deal involved no revolution: it was dangerous, on the contrary, because "In our blind groping we have stumbled into philosophies which lead to the surrender of freedom."

Just as U. S. history proved that freedom released man's creative impulses, led to the development of productive forces, stimulated inventions, spurred the commercial development of them, European experiences under Fascist and Communist dictatorships proved that freedom was never lost by a direct assault. He wrote: "The drama moves swiftly in a torrent of words in which real purposes are disguised in portrayals of Utopia; [in] slogans, phrases and statements destructive to confidence in existing institutions; demands for violent actions against slowly curable ills; unfair representation that sporadic wickedness is the system itself; searing prejudice against the former order; dismay and panic in the economic organization which feeds on its own despair." And in Europe's dictatorships "those desperate people willingly surrendered every liberty to some man or group of men who promised economic security, moral regeneration, discipline and hope."

Personality. After the Hoover legends of the past ten years, Republicans meeting him for the first time are surprised to discover that he is a very able man and promptly conclude that he is badly maligned. He does not do the things that politicians are supposed to do: he cannot tell a joke, seldom even laughs at a good one and cannot go through the complicated ritual—throwing back the head, slapping the thigh—which immemorial tradition holds is the proper U. S. politician's response to a bad one. His handshake is no heartier than the usual political handshake deserves to be. To reporters who pry into his political plans he talks on & on—about the need to develop new inventions, the need to build 550,000 new houses, how much more employment was provided by the aggressive commercial development of the gasoline engine than by the land grants. This leads them to report that he has no sense of humor.