WHO BUT HOOVER?

Despite the fact that a cut and dried proceedure perversely realized all the confident predictions of its outcome, despite the fact that all its planks were ground up to make sawdust with which to stuff empty promises, despite the fact that all the favorite sons rejected favoritism and agreed with the Saturday Evening Post, the results of the Republican Convention produced as formidable a mixture as the Republican voters themselves could have hoped to have chosen. Selecting a candidate for the most "important position in the world" as the croaking orators repeatedly informed them, the delegates were sheep-like if sincere in their tumultuous acclamation of Hoover. But the unusual choice of a defeated presidential possibility for vice president in the good fellow Curtis, and the amalgamation of Wall Street and the wheat growers by this happy union, may well dismay the brown derbied tiger as he passes out his slogan banded cigars.

Before plump Mr. Hoover alone, a typical big business choice, the Houston Papists could at least evince an impudent sanguinity even if they did not feel it. But when he is backed by the bristing Senator Curtis and the latter's farm states lulled by pious Republican promises, the only Democratic hope lies in a decided stand for repealment of the Prohibition Act. And since the Democratic party does not even possess a Nicholas Murray Butler to table, this is equivalent to no hope at all.

From Lowell Schmalz to Andrew Mellon, the country exalts the Coolidge tradition: and the nomination of the silent and efficient Hoover is no divagation. Before Friday night he had no private life, and what he has since acquired is powerful and touching. In his habits he is not of the people, as he is for them, like the Tammany giant whose "damp shirt sleeves" and proclivity for spittoons the engaging weekly "Time" has unworthily noticed. This New Yorker is Anteus at present, it is true, in the bosom of his native city, but when he is lifted high into the spotlight of national polemics, he must inevitably weaken, and leave for workaday Hoover, and agrarian Senator Curtis, only the Harvard supported competition of formidable Norman Thomas.