been such an undecipherable figure as Herbert Hoover, and not in many years has the popular judgment of an individual contained so much of the paradoxical.

HER

ERE is a man whose last fourteen years have been dedicated to public service. For four of them he served without financial remuneration, and his personal outlay for the more efficient discharge of his Cabinet duties has exceeded his official salary. From feeding Belgium and piling up food on the wharves for our warriors overseas, he turned to the task of saving Central Europe from post-war starvation.

Subsequently, as a member of the Cabinet, he became America's jack-ofall-trades; two Presidents called on him for aid and advice more often than on all the other members of their official households combined. His jobs ranged from mopping up after Mississippi and Vermont floods to protecting owners of mortgaged flivvers from British rubber monopolists. In the pre-normalcy period he sat by the bedside of every ailing industry; he midwived many others born of changing conditions. In his spare moments he has acted as President of the American Child Hygiene Association, and supervised a study designed to make America's streets safe for pedestrians. In short, his labors these many years, including the official and unofficial,

of our Presidents, has shed its benign influence among groups which know not the name of the Chief Executive except when they memorize it so that they or their kinder may pass the naturalization examination. These are only a few of the things which may be listed under the heading of "Lest We Forget."

Such have been some of his accomplishments for the greater glory and good of the greatest number; and yet he stands accused of being mechanical and materialistic, of being indifferent to the human considerations that loom so large in the normal man's existence. He has been belittled as the arch-representative of a standardized society and the apostle of cold-blooded efficiency. His enemies have assailed him as one who would reduce life and government to the ruthless routine of a factory shop wherein each worker pirouettes on a dime and exercises God-given faculties in fabricating or polishing a minute piece of machinery. Some profess alarm at the thought of an engineer controlling the destinies of this democracy. And though these fears and characterizations find inspiration only in his philosophy as reflected in his public career, the man himself is held by many to be cold, ambitious, self-centered and self-willed.

THY this mystery or misunder

account with Angel Gabriel, have touched such sacred things as stomachs, street traffic and trade. Only the weather reports have appeared on front pages oftener than accounts of his achievements. The Hoover dynasty, beside enduring for six years longer than the traditional two terms

been constantly in the public eye and whose name became a household word during the war because so many of his activities were directed kitchenward? Why does Hoover himself remain a rather legendary figure? The answer, perhaps, is that the public, having heard and read so much of his genius

for organization, his reputation as an engineer, his amazing and unbelievable rise from obscurity to world fame, his part in reorganizing industry and trade, his preachments on specialization and standardization, has quite naturally associated him with other manifestations of the mad but mechanical age which has followed the war period. Rightly or wrongly, it has chosen to regard him as the champion of an industrialized and commercialized era in which government no longer belongs so much to the governed as to the governors. Hoover, the engineer, is a reality; Hoover, the man, is a figure as misty as Olympian gods to which troubled tribes of ancient days offered up prayers and incense taxes.

UNFO

NFORTUNATELY for himself, HooFor has ver has done nothing to dispel this belief. If he stands in the mists and shadows, it is because he has chosen to take his place there; the mists and shadows are of his own making. He has deliberately avoided the spotlight; in fact, he may be said to have smashed the spotlight whenever its beneficent beams fell upon him. The lack of human interest stories about his personality, the scarcity of revelatory biographies, is significant; so are his experiences with biographies and biographers. Years ago he is said to have bought and destroyed the plates of a certain book because he thought it portrayed him in too romantic a rôle. He coöperated in the preparation of a campaign life, but he is understood to have barred all attempts to picture him in an appealing light. Though a more recent work by William Hard, personal friend and sympathetic Boswell, struck off Hoover quite felicitously and recreated

the atmosphere and spirit in which he has built his amazing career, Hoover accepted with enthusiasm the author's dedication of the biography to him as "its victim" rather than "hero".

His hatred of heroics is innate. It is, perhaps, compounded of his Quaker origin, his natural shyness and an environment which for years kept him in the silent and shunned places of the earth. Though a "hound for publicity," as irreverential Washington correspondents call him, the tons of stories emanating from his offices since he entered public life have been concerned with his work rather than himself. In the campaign there has

been almost no effort to dramatize him for the voters; his political speeches and publicity have been confined to an elucidation of his views on public questions.

LL the wiles of correspondents and ALL photographers could not persuade Herbert Hoover to pose for pictures such as are commonly taken of campaigners. His one vice is smoking a pipe, that symbol of kinship with the common man, but he declined to be photographed with it. "There are times when a man has a right to privacy," he responded humorously, 'and one is when he is smoking his favorite pipe." To requests that he kiss an attractive baby lifted up to his train platform, he replied: "I will kiss no babies for publication." The only photograph approximating conventional shots of office-seekers was of him and the engine crew that piloted his train over the Wyoming plateau. He had sent for them to question them about the operation of the train, the details of the slackening in speed from 75 miles on the plain to 25 on the

slope, and he failed to protest when asked to line up before the camera with his engineering colleagues. He also stood for a picture of himself holding an ear of Iowa corn at his birthplace, but he grasped the ear too awkwardly for one seeking to catch farm votes, and too gingerly for one contemplating a bite of the succulent vegetable that has brought fame to the State and trouble to the Republican party. All through the campaign he has been the most elusive figure veteran press men and photographers have ever pursued.

F CLOSE Contacts between candidate and chroniclers there were only a few, and yet these were sufficient to increase their wonder at his disinclination to mingle more frequently with folks. Liking humanity in little lumps rather than wholesale lots, Hoover can be a delightful companion in a small group. His usually stolid counte

more ago. This man who has spent most of his days in the midst of international affairs since the Boer War can, if he cares, become a loquacious and enchanting encyclopædia of latterday romance. All his life, even during the turbulent days of the World War, he seems to have passed from adventure to adventure with an eye for the oddities of places, persons and policies. Despite his participation in great events, he appears never to have lost the perspective of the observer, and therefore his reminiscences possess the truly fascinating quality of objectiveness. A book of memoirs by Hoover might not precipitate another World War, but it might conceivably lead certain great nations and many great men to throw up either their hats or their hands. It would be more than a best seller; it would be a knock-out.

N THE stump or in his casual con

whether grave or gay, and though his shy smile vanishes from his lips almost before it touches them, its very character of evanescence gives it an engaging quality.

As is true of most great men, his eyes are his most expressive feature, and for that very reason, perhaps, he rarely permits a glimpse into them; those windows from which, one guesses, he looks out on life with some cynicism and amusement, he keeps clouded or averted.

Even those who do not like him grant that he can be a charming conversationalist in a friendly atmosphere. His talk turns to homely and simple things, or shifts with startling suddenness to stirring events and illustrious personalities of a decade or

thick wall of natural and protective reserve, but in these intimate talks he is a revealing figure; he is, moreover, simplicity itself. There was, for instance, a reminiscent glow in his gray eyes and an amused smile on his lips as he recalled for the writer the unwild and unwoolly days he spent as boss of the Carlyle mine thirty years ago on the frontier in New Mexico - his first managerial job.

"My most abiding recollection of those days," mused Hoover, "is of a very efficient sheriff who once used two of my mine shafts as a hoosegow. It was the frontier, but it was not wild, and in my year there I never carried a gun. But the sheriff had arrested more hard characters this night than he had room for in his jail, and