n the Democrats were most
seriously impressed with his availability, the manager of his paper
in Washington said to me, "This talk of Hoover for the Democratic
nomination is moonshine. He won't take it."

"Why not," I asked him.

"Because," he replied, "he does not think it is worth having," a
quite practical reason which differed wholly from the official
explanation that Mr. Hoover was waiting to see which party was
progressive so that he might oppose reaction.

His subsequent support of the more conservative candidate and the
more conservative party bore out the truth of what his newspaper
manager had said. And in reality, Mr. Hoover is as conservative as
Mr. Harding himself, being a large capitalist with all the
conservatism of the capitalist class.

A little while ago, Mr. Roosevelt had made it unfashionable to
admit that you were conservative. You wished it to be understood
that you were open-minded--"forward looking," as Mr. Wilson, who
turned reactionary at the test, called it; that you were broad,
sympathetic, free from mean prejudices, progressive, in short. Our
very best reactionaries of to-day all used to call themselves
progressive. Some still do.

The young editor of a metropolitan newspaper, born to great wealth,
and imbibing all the narrowness of the second generation, once
asked me in those bright days when everybody was thrilling over his
"liberality," "Would you call me a radical, or just a progressive?"
He was "just a progressive." In a somewhat similar sense, Mr.
Hoover was quite unconsciously "just a progressive"--a belated
follower of a pleasant fashion, having lived abroad too long when
he made his announcement to note the subtle changes that had taken
place in our thinking--the rude shock that Russia had given to our
"liberality."

But living abroad, it is only fair to add, has created a difference
between his conservatism and that, let us say, of Judge Gary. He
has grown used to labor unions and even to labor parties, so that
they do not frighten him. His is conservatism, none the less,
definite conservatism, if more enlightened than the obscurant
American variety.

His hesitation and indecision in the spring of 1920 thus did not
spring from doubt of the Republican party's progressiveness. He
always desired the Republican nomination; but his vanity would
suffer by the open seeking of it and the defeat which seemed
likely; and his sensitiveness would suffer from the attacks, like
that