The Quiet Fellow

The newspaper correspondents did not fight last week, nor the photographers jostle one another for places, as they did at the opening of the President's Air Inquiry Board and other "feature" conferences. The Fourth National Radio Conference opened with very little splurge. There were not even any political controversies to be touched on. The Radio Conference had a little business to do. That was all.

The whole Government has a little business to do. But somehow it gets mixed up in politics, and then there is a fight and there are sensations, and frequently both of these lead to blunders. Perhaps the whole business of government could be efficiently carried on according to the formula of "doing a little business" quietly, but that is not how it commonly is under our system of government.

But the Radio Conference was not without problems to the solution of which different members were attached. Foremost among these was the question of broadcasting stations, for the practical wave lengths to be used in broadcasting are limited and stations cannot be placed close together without interference. Already the stations are crowding one another, and the Department of Commerce has applications for 120 new stations. There are other similar problems, but this is the chief one.

So Herbert Hoover, the quiet, plump little Secretary of Commerce, got the Fourth National Radio Conference together, as he did the previous ones. Hitherto the radio industry has kept rather well out of politics and away from legislative regulation. It has done so because of the success of the previous conferences in settling their problems. Mr. Herbert Hoover has been largely responsible for that.

It is amazing the number of pies in which he has his fingers. There are those who say he practically represents the brains of the Administration, although he and the other junior member, the Secretary of Labor, sit at the foot of the Cabinet table. There is no question of the multiplicity of his problems, not only of industry (standardization, etc.) and of trade (establishing connections abroad, etc.), which fall within his own Department, but in other Departments as well. Presidents Harding and Coolidge both have leaned upon him in solving some of their most onerous problems. He is called upon in labor troubles (in coal mining, etc.), in the settlement of War Debts (he is one of the Debt Funding Commission); he is Chairman of the St. Lawrence Waterway Commission; he is an expert on economic conditions in Europe and the Orient. The Bureau of Mines and the Patent Office were recently transferred to his control. He will probably have a controlling voice in Government policy towards commercial aviation. Last week a civil committee, appointed by him without anyone's urging and long before Colonel Mitchell stirred up the President's Air Craft Inquiry Board, reported on commercial aviation, recommending government encouragement but no subsidies.

These are some of the reasons why it has been said, "There is more Hoover in the Administration than any other one person."

He has been offered two Cabinet posts besides his own at times when the posts were problems for the President: Mr. Harding offered him the Interior portfolio when Mr. Fall retired, and President Coolidge offered him the Secretariat of Agriculture after Mr. Wallace's death. He refused both jobs. But his policy in regard to agriculture won with the President, and Secretary Jardine, a man of the Hoover school of thought, was appointed at his suggestion.

He is a very good business man and that is why he is a poor politician. He gets into the papers with his economic pronouncements, but he has no small talk. Anecdote finds him very stony soil in which to take root; he has none of the blandishments nor much of that kind of acumen necessary to politicians. Many men think that he threw away the best kind of chance for the Presidency in 1920.

But he sticks to his job a good deal more than eight hours a day, and he masters his facts and has the confidence of business men. He has made a real job out of the Secretariat of Commerce, and because of that he can handle such a problem as the radio industry, sprung in five years from sales totaling $1,000,000 to sales of over $400,000,000, and get results without fuss and with very little legislation.