er the War, as a superman, if you will; but not as a man, not as
a human being.

All his advertising has made him appeal to the American
imagination, but not to the American heart. He is a sort of
efficiency engineer, installing his charts and his systems into
public life,--and who loves an efficiency engineer? There are no
stories about him which give him a place in the popular breast. It
is impossible to interest yourself in Hoover as Hoover; in Hoover
as the man who did this, or the man who did that, or the man who
will do this or that, yes,--but not in Hoover, the person.

The reason is that he has little personality. On close contact, he
is disappointing, without charm, given to silence, as if he had
nothing for ordinary human relations which had no profitable
bearing on the task in hand. His conversation is applied efficiency
engineering; there is no lost motion, though it is lost motion
which is the delight of life. At dinner, he inclines to bury his
face in his plate until the talk reaches some subject important to
him, when he explodes a few facts, and is once more silent.

Had he a personality with his instinct for publicity, he would be
another Roosevelt. But he is a bare expert.

I doubt if he really thinks of human beings as human beings; on the
contrary, some engineering graph represents humanity in his mind.
It is characteristic of him that he always speaks of the relief of
starving populations not in terms of human suffering, but in terms
of chemistry. The people, of whatever country he may be feeding,
have so many calories now, last month they had so many calories; if
they had ten calories more, they could maintain existence. Many
times have I heard this formula. It is a weakness in a democracy to
think of people in terms of graphs, and their welfare in terms of
calories; that is, if you hope to be President of that democracy--
not if you are content to be its excellent Secretary of Commerce.

When he came to Washington as a Food Administrator, he brought with
him an old associate, a professor from California. A few days later
the professor's wife arrived and went to live at the same house
where Mr. Hoover and her husband resided. Mr. Hoover knew her well.
She and her husband had long been his friends. He met her in the
hall, shook hands with her, welcomed her and then lapsed into
silence. After some moments, he said, "Well,--" and hesitated.

"Mr. Hoover," she said, "I know you are a busy man. Y