The Mob

Few presidents are bold enough to belittle the great mass of U. S. citizens to their-face. No matter how much he may privately agree with Alexander Hamilton's aristocratic theory of government, a president must, as a political officeholder, appear before the voting public as an apostle of Thomas Jefferson's Democratic doctrines. He must seem to exalt the mob's wisdom, bow to its righteous power, inflate its sense of selfimportance, cater to its emotional reflexes.

Last week when the Yale Daily News printed as direct quotations from Herbert Hoover a set of views in clashing discord with this accepted presidential custom, it was small wonder that the editors of great metropolitan newspapers picked up the story for first-page reprinting. The News, which has been presenting a series of especially prepared statements on ''leadership" by public leaders, quoted the President as follows:

"Leadership is a quality of the individual. If Democracy is to secure its authorities in morals, religion and statesmanship, it must stimulate leadership from its own mass. . . . Acts and ideas that lead to progress are born out of the womb of the individual mind, not out of the mind of the crowd.

"The crowd only feels; it has no mind of its own. The crowd is credulous. It destroys, it consumes, it hates and it dreams but it never builds. . . . Man in the mass does not think but only feels. The mob functions only in a world of emotion. The demagogue feeds on mob emotions. . . .

"Popular desires are no criteria to the real need; they can be determined only by deliberative consideration, by education, by constructive leadership."

So startling was this statement, so out of tune with what most presidents say about the crowd, that newsmen hastened to the White House for verification. There they were informed that President Hoover had given no statement to the Yale News, that the quotation was in fact a reprint from an essay he had written ten years ago on "American Individualism."

The enterprising News editors, unable to get an exclusive statement from the President, had dug through old Hoover writings for a selection which would fit the needs of their "leadership" series. That it gave the impression of being a current revelation of the President's thoughts in no way invalidated the fact that the News had disclosed to the Mob what Herbert Hoover, private citizen, once thought about the Mob.

The White House was too shrewd to attract additional attention to these Hamiltonian views by any denial that they represented the ideas of Herbert Hoover. President of the U. S.

P: Mrs. Hoover was confined to her room with a wrenched back, a bad cold. President Hoover who also had a cold attended Easter services at Friends Meeting House without her.

P: Last week President Hoover addressed the American Society of Newspaper Editors, answered questions. As in his press conferences, he refused to let his speech or answers be quoted, gave them as "background".

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