THE PRESIDENCY: The Hoover Week: May 25, 1931

To his Rapidan camp President Hoover last week took his tall, angular friend Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, Secretary of the Interior, and eight Wilbur assistants. Their purpose: to devise Interior economies to help reduce the prospective billion-dollar budget. When the executives came down the mountainside (their cars in low gear because of mud), a plan had been worked out whereby $4,000,000 would be snipped out of Interior expenditures this year, $6,000,000 next year, $8,000,000 the year after. Added to the War Department pruning planned the previous week-end (see p. 19), the Interior cut will take $8,000,000 off the 1932 budget. Next Departments for presidential pruning: Agriculture, Post Office, Treasury. ¶Last week President Hoover engaged a new literary secretary to replace French Strother, resigned. He was George Aubrey Hastings, 46, of New York, oldtime newshawk and press agent. His title will be Executive Clerk instead of Administrative Assistant and he will do the research and “ghostwriting” the President requires for public pronouncements, in addition to supervising the President’s quasi-official conferences and commissions on child health. Press photographs showed him to the country wearing a little dark mustache and goatee. But he shaved these off his round, pleasant face some time ago. ¶President Hoover again turned to the personnel of the Wartime Food Administration when he selected Harvey H. Bundy, Boston attorney, as an Assistant Secretary of State. For two years Mr. Bundy was assistant counsel under Food Administrator Hoover. Also appointed last week by President Hoover, to be Surgeon General of the Army, was Col. Robert U. Patterson. ¶The State Department keeps a list of special anniversaries in all foreign countries of which the President of the U. S. should take notice. On each anniversary the Department sends out a message of congratulation and signs the President’s name. Last week such messages went to King Carol II of Rumania, President Guggiari of Paraguay, President Moscicki of Poland (two Independence Days, one Constitution Day).

¶Edwin Thompson, Lord Mayor of Liverpool, lately called on President Hoover. Last week he broke the White House tradition whereby a visitor never quotes the President. He told a luncheon audience in Manhattan: “President Hoover said he felt a great deal of the difficulties of the present commercial situation were due to the mental condition of business.”