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The sort of man this group had in mind is illustrated by the fact that they suggested Charles M. Schwab. Harding steered between the two views by appointing a man who in his youth had been a member of an iron workers union, and who has carried his union tard during a subsequent period when he is really a business man and banker rather than a laborer. Davis is enough of a business man not to be utterly disapproved by business; and, because of his connection with a popular fraternal order, and because he is sufficiently sympathetic to union labor he gives them, if not as much satisfaction as some official of the American Federation of Labor would have given, at least a sense of sympathetic understanding.

WALLACE'S TASK

AGRICULTUurin in this country will face big

GRICULTURE in this country will face big

problems during the coming four years. In truth, it is facing big problems now, but these problems, so far as they can be solved by government at all, will be met by legislation on the part of Congress rather than by any specific thing the Secretary of Agriculture in his official capacity can do. For the new secretary, Mr. Henry Wallace, of Des Moines, there should be no tasks noticeably greater than those that faced the other two lowa men who have filled that Department in recent years, Meredith and Wilson. Wallace is the editor of a progressive farm paper, who advocates many innovations in the relation of farming to the rest of the community, but who stops far short of the kind of radicalism that has swept parts of the agricultural Northwest during recent years.

Denby was a last minute emergency choice. He didn't even know enough about Harding's thought of him to be a sad Cinderella. The appointment came to him with the unexpected suddenness of a midnight telephone call. Lowden had declined the Navy portfolio, the declination became pub

licly known, the other places were nearly all

gone, and the friends of about two score men who had had hopes and been disappointed, began to bring pressure on Harding. The newspaper men who were on the scene felt that Harding suddenly chose Denby to end the embarrassment and importunity. Denby without his knowing it, had been strongly recommended to Harding by Weeks, who had learned his quality when they sat in Congress together and had been further impressed by Denby's joining the marines during the war at a

time when he was close to fifty, and by the unique and useful service he performed in the navy.

One such case as this generally happens in every Cabinet-making. It nearly always occurs during the closing five or six days of excitement that some perfectly contented and unambitious man in a distant city, who has never entertained a thought of the Cabinet, is suddenly struck by the lightning. In Wilson's Cabinet-making, Franklin K. Lane was such a case. One day during the latter part of February, 1913, when Wilson was at Princeton putting the finishing touches on his Cabinet, I happened to meet Mr. Lane in Washington, walking along Pennsylvania Avenue toward the building of the Interstate Commerce Commission, of which body he was at that time a Republican member. We stopped and chatted for a few minutes about Wilson's Cabinet as so far known and about Wilson's personality; and the conversation closed with Lane's remark that Wilson interested him greatly and that he was looking forward to a chance to get a first look at him when he should arrive in Washington for his inauguration. The next time I saw Lane his rotund form was filling one of the chairs in the Cabinet room, a last minute choice for the Department of the Interior.

Denby is a big, frank, friendly man, of direct mind and simple heart. The qualities that led him as a man of wealth and an ex-Congressman, and nearly fifty years of age, to enlist as a private in the marines as his idea of the best way he could help to win the war, are just the qualities that are best adapted to what is said to be the most important of the Navy's present needs, the need to restore morale and good feeling to a force that is a little restless and unhappy in the reaction from the high feeling of active war.

COOLIDGE

Et, and yet not of it, is Coolidge. Coolidge

NE unique personality who is in the Cabi

in many ways and under conditions that may readily arise is one of the two or three most promising figures in American politics. The thing that makes Coolidge unique is the fact that he is most preoccupied with Emersonian things. All the other leaders in the Republican Party are busy with material things, and the damaged economic organization of society makes that, for the moment, the immediate need. The other leaders are going to give us bread, but

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*Secretary of Commerce and Labor.

James J. Davis

No Secretary of Labor, the Department of Labor being combined with the Department of Commerce.

THE CABINETS OF THE LAST FOUR ADMINISTRATIONS

Coolidge has it in him to give us the kind of sustenance that was meant when it was said that man does not live by bread alone. For the moment, superficially we all seem intent on material things; but if the time comes when the public mood demands what Roosevelt supplied, then Coolidge, different though his personality seems from Roosevelt's, is the leader who will supply us with that.

Coolidge is one of the original Puritans who came over on the Mayflower and has been preserved on ice for three hundred years. This hint of coldness which new acquaintances think they find in Coolidge's personality, disappears in the warmth of more complete understanding of him. It arises chiefly out of Coolidge's reticence of speech. He is the most un-loquacious man in public life. About this characteristic a

whole anthology of Coolidge anecdotes has grown up. If Coolidge himself were asked to put his acutely analytical mind to explaining this trait of his he would probably say that it all comes down to two things: not speaking unless the circumstances call on him to speak, and not saying anything unless he has something to

say.

Coolidge is the son of a Vermont country store keeper of the race of rural New Englanders who have preserved through ten generations many of the Puritan traits that originally started them off to found a new society in a strange country. He has most of the Puritan preoccupations, with the ethics of the relation of man to his fellow-man. He has also the Puritan doctrine of salvation through personal works.

Rost

STEMMING THE
RED TIDE

II

Taking Over the Economic Control of Central and Southeastern Europe. The Encounter with Orlando. Karolyi Falls and Bela Kun and Bolshevism Overrun Hungary

T

By T. T. C. GREGORY

HE Interallied Food Mission, created by Herbert Hoover under authority of the Supreme Council of the Allies in Paris, was the agency charged with the task of succoring the desperately needy peoples of the new states of central and southeastern Europe after the Armistice, and the further, and certainly more vital, task of aiding those peoples to rehabilitate their social life and bring out of their economic chaos a semblance of order and efficiency. The Paris conference had, of course, a certain altruistic impulse, but the motive was primarily selfish: the two alternatives faced were, to let the new states go their own way, which would have led inevitably straight to Bolshevism, to check the growing unrest and menacing disquiet within by supplying food and work. In theory a simple programme!

or

We who went to carry it out were not deceived in this respect, however; time disclosed to us complexities and difficulties that even those of us who had made a preliminary survey of the field of operations had not dreamed of encountering. The Mission, organized by Mr. Hoover in February, 1919, comprised the Hon. Cyril K. Butler for Great Britain; Commendatore Giuffrida, one of the strongest of the Liberal Italian group and assistant food minister in his country, for Italy; the French representative, M. Olivari, who had trained one of the American divisions in France; and myself. As the representative of the United States I was compelled to take the initiative and the responsibility for getting things done, both because our Government was the principal source of supplies and because, as Hoover's personal agent and head of the American Relief Administration in Central Europe, it was neces

sary for me to establish and maintain the leadership which Hoover held in Paris. His power at the time was steadily increasing; when we had perfected a communication system which kept him in touch with conditions, almost minute by minute, in our territory, it grew tremendous, bringing to him world responsibilities which, as far as operations in the field were concerned, automatically passed from him to myself. For weal or woe, in this crisis, we dominated central and southeastern Europe, for once we had set our hands to the plow there was no turning back!

Picture a population as great as that in the states east of the Mississippi, grouped in half a dozen states fighting amongst themselves; Washington no longer the capital; New York shorn of its financial supremacy-it's great banks, insurance companies, and transportation corporations with their properties sequestered under the control of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois, with nothing left them but stocks and bonds worthless or almost worthless because of the confiscation suggested above, and faced with discovery that stocks, bonds, or even gold will not do for breakfast; picture the New York Central, the Pennsylvania, and the Southern Railway broken into half a dozen bits and each state trying to run its share independently, each state trying to grab all of the cars and locomotives it could lay its hands on; the coal-miners hungry, sullen, and striking; all factories closed; the I. W. W. bold, fearless, and uncontrolled; Samuel Gompers a conservative back number shorn of all influence; the militia of the several states fighting bloodily for the control of production and distribution areas and centres; picture clouds of soap-box orators, dreadfully in earnest, provided with

innumerable texts and most of them secretly subsidized, each proposing to the public the panacea which would cure the ailing body politic-multiply all these factors of chaos by a coefficient representing a thousand years of national hatreds and with such a picture one can visualize something of what we found.

Hope lay only in a change. Salvation lay only in our Mission. We saw that we should have been blind if we had not seen it.

We could not even begin our task without means of communication. Mr. Hoover had already established a courier system of American army officers carrying mail sacks across Europe when every other medium of international communication had faltered and broken down-but this, at best, was a makeshift, despite the fact that the courier "tortoise" did defeat the telegraphic "hare" of those countries, so disorganized was their telegraph and telephone service. We promptly seized control of the special military lines which had been used by the German and Austrian general staffs, and which radiated from Vienna, to which capital we went presently to establish headquarters because of its strategic and geographic central location. With this nucleus operated by forty of our signal corps and naval operators we finally connected up our offices, not only with the capitals and principal distributing centres of the entire territory, but also, by a special line through Coblenz, direct to the office of Hoover in Paris. I am convinced that what we were able later to accomplish would not have been possible without this speedy service. Five hundred messages a day went through our central exchange in Vienna in many of the hectic twenty-four hours we experienced; not only was Mr. Hoover in constant touch with every move on the board but also he knew what was going on forty-eight hours ahead of all the other Allied representatives. We Americans had the jump on the ball!

A SUDDEN INTERRUPTION

EANTIME we had already seen the necessity for immediate restoration of railroad service, first for food movements and second for coal. To put men at work we had to open factories, to open factories we must have fuel, and to move fuel we had to have railroads. But political differences, as I have suggested in the picture above, had broken most of the lines at all border points; equip

ment was in appalling condition; bridges had been destroyed and tracks torn up in military movements preceding the Armistice; and finally there were still martial activities enough on every hand to make uncertain what few train service attempts were made and to fill most of those trains with supplies or soldiery. To complicate a situation already sufficiently complex the Italian military at Trieste for the moment, our point of entry with supplieswere exceedingly arrogant and independent when our needs were presented to them; the Italian civilians in our Mission made noble efforts to get tracks cleared for our vital demands but found themselves immediately enmeshed in red-tape and halted by military circumlocution. At the moment Italy was involved in a wrangle with Jugo-Slavia and civilians of all sorts were relegated to the rear by the Italian fighting men.

The climax came when, because of a reported Jugo-Slavian insult to the Italian flag at a place called Ljubliana, in Slavonia, the Italians promptly closed the borders to all traffic, tying up the southern railway running up from Trieste to Vienna. In effect this meant the complete stoppage of our programme of foodmovements and the summary end of relief measures. Seventy-five thousand tons of foodstuffs lay at Trieste, but now the thin line of relief to the starving in the interior was rudely broken.

The news of what we came to call the Ljubliana incident reached me when at Ragusa, south of Trieste, on the Dalmatian Coast, whither I had gone on an inspection trip in the U. S. destroyer Stribling, furnished us by the Navy. I knew that this meant a knock-down and drag-out row with the Italian military to determine at once, and once for all, whether or not we were to be interfered with in our future operations. It was no time for telegraphic or diplomatic parleys-my place was in Rome to have it out with Orlando, the Prime Minister, himself, using ammunition I knew I could count on from the indefatigable Hoover. For I had noticed in the press that the Italian Government was negotiating for a $75,000,000 loan with our treasury in Washington, and as we boiled down the mine-strewn Adriatic that night our wireless was sputtering to the chief in Paris a plan that, as he said later, kept him on the job twenty-four hours a day.

We floundered through that dangerous sea in the darkest night I have ever seen, headed

for Taranto, in the heel of the Italian bootfound ourselves in a regular London or San Francisco fog which, when it lifted, revealed the fact that we were in the middle of the mine field which protected that great naval rendezvous of the Italian and British Mediterranean fleets-were guided out of it by shouted admonitions to our cool-headed skipper, Van Auken, from the deck of a puffing and fussy tug sent to our aid-docked at last-made a rear-end connection, without tickets, with the Rome Express. And so to Rome.

Orlando at the moment was in a peck of trouble. The Italian military were on the bit and the country wild about the question which gave to d'Annunzio and Fiume their little time on the world's stage. But I had no choice but to confront him with our vital exigency. Our problem was to feed and rehabilitate countries inhabited by eight-five million people; Italian nationalistic sentiment was comparatively unimportant. Meantime we had not long to wait before Hoover, reënforced by Presidential authority cabled from America, where Mr. Wilson then was, on his trip home after the first Paris meetings, had given us all the desired backing. With it "up my sleeve" I went to Orlando and asked him to arrange an immediate opening of the railway lines from the Dalmatian Coast for the purposes of our relief work in central Europe.

A

A DIPLOMATIC STROKE

PERFECT flurry of messages began to pass between Rome and Paris. Orlando fought for time, or for a modification of my demands. But there was too much at stake on our side. My telegraphic news from Vienna and Prague were distressing; meantime Mr. Hoover was under compulsion to turn his cargoes of relief stuffs into money at once in order to keep his big machine functioning and the wheels of his project revolving. I was patient as long as I could be and then I fixed a final and irrevocable hour at which the Prime Minister must give me his answer.

The matter hung fire. Would we not wait another day to meet the King? It was proposed to decorate us in recognition of our services! It was a matter of high honor! One more day -what was a day?

Some of our Allied associates, who had come meantime from Trieste at my request to sit in on this game, were keen for the fête and the decorations. But I had come to Central Europe

to do a certain job-not to be decorated for coming-and I told them all that my declaration was in and that I stood pat on it. The appointed hour came without an answer. Despite protests on all hands we boarded the Venice Express for Trieste. I drafted and sent a note to M. Orlando stating my urgent reasons for departure, and adding that I confidently expected that he would have a telegram awaiting me at Trieste assuring me of the coöperation of the royal Italian Government, when I arrived there the following morning. Otherwise I assured him solemnly that I should ask Mr. Hoover to hold up the American loan to Italy indefinitely until another method of procedure in relief could be worked out.

A dashing Italian staff officer met our train at Trieste. He presented the compliments of the Prime Minister-in capitals!—and begged to be permitted to assure me of that renowned gentleman's gracious acceptance of my terms. Furthermore he was requested to inform me that the High Command at Trieste had been advised to favor us with prompt compliance in whatever request we chose to make regarding our work and its expedition. Undoubtedly this splendid officer would have concluded by kissing me on both cheeks. kissing me on both cheeks. But I was more concerned with getting back on the job and I left him.

That night, trains began moving out of Trieste, laden with supplies for the starving!

BUT

A ROUTE THROUGH GERMANY

UT we had not trusted the successful outcome of our transportation problems entirely to the whim and decision of the Italian Premier. Life was too short to have to plow through differences between the Italians and Jugo-Slavs, as well as the other sets of combatants who were brandishing military weapons to the detriment of commercial interchange. We were determined to take over the actual control of the railroads if necessary, and again Hoover as Director General of Relief became vested with a new authority. He was placed in charge of all the railways in central Europe. An Interallied Technical Commission was theoretically placed in charge to practically carry out our plans but plenary executive power was vested by the Supreme War Council in our Chief in charge of transportation of the American Mission, Col. W. B. Causey, while the other members had none but consulting powers. Causey is one of that rare type

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