Encyclopaedia

When Warren Gamaliel Harding entered the White House in 1921, he brought with him a middleaged, snub-nosed, soft-spoken man named Judson Churchill Welliver. Mr. Welliver was an oldtime Washington correspondent and magazine writer for the late Frank A. Munsey. President Harding put him to work gathering factual material for Presidential addresses, outlining speeches, making ponderous platitudes interesting. So well-trained was he in his craft that Mr. Welliver soon could ape the Harding literary style to the complete bewilderment of the White House newsgatherers. He had another duty: to sit in the executive office lobby and amid much blue cigaret smoke converse in low important tones with older Washington correspondents about White House doings. In each "conversation" was planted the germ-idea of a news story and each story reflected credit upon President Harding.

Calvin Coolidge in the White House carried on the same system, roughly, through the appointment of F. Stuart Crawford as research secretary. This post, however, went under a cloud when it was found that the Coolidge addresses, when dealing with geography and other indis- putable facts, followed with a striking literalness the text of the International Encyclopaedia. Besides, Mr. Coolidge had a certain vanity about his literary style which he considered inimitable. Lobby gossip went out through Good Friend Frank Waterman Stearns or Private Secretary Edward Clarke not through Mr. Crawford.

Last week President Hoover appointed French Strother, California Democrat, to this post of research and literary secretary. Mr. Strother will burrow through many a tome to fill the Hoover speeches with new and illuminating facts. No one more than the President knows the value of judicious publicity and the White House press relations staff will do all it can to suppress the customary tittle-tattle that surrounds the Presidency by offering instead good substantial material for publication.

Mr. Strother achieved a Washington reputation on the World's Work in the days when it dealt seriously (though safely) with politics. The World's Work, under Barton Wood Currie, onetime editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, now devotes itself to popular business tales, leaving to President Hoover the Strother erudition.