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Show Hoover Hears Call To Help Feed Hungry Cites Great Need for Food Grains Overseas; Asks Americans to Pull in Belts, Invite 'Invisible Guests' to Their Tables. By BAUKHAGE News Analyst and Commentator. aJmm Ft WNU Service, 1616 Eye street, N.W., Washington, D. C. I WASHINGTON, D. C. - The speed with which the American people have run away from the war is in- credible. Like the lazy workman who drops his hammer and leaps for the dinner pail at the first toot of noon, we began a stampede for the dining din-ing table on V-J Day. Stampedes always make trouble for someone. Many hundreds of people peo-ple will starve as a result, and heaven only knows how the cause of democracy throughout the world j may suffer. ; We could not foretell, but we could j have made allowance for possible ! crop failures. They were cata-; cata-; strophic in many countries. We I could have pursued a different food policy at home. We shook with fear i lest there would be surpluses, we tried to get the people to eat up their stored supplies and counselled restrictions on food production to prevent a glutted market, especially especial-ly in eggs and poultry. And how we ate! That is why, a few days ago, . we hailed back Herbert Hoover into j service. He said he had promised ing lives. Then, near the close of the interview, he said in the same matter-of-fact tone. "There is one message I would like to give to the households of America." There wai a long pause. Finally he spoke-looking spoke-looking at nobody, as is his habit "I would like to have them entertain enter-tain at their tables ah invisible guest." And so the old engineer, so often accused of having a heart of wood, the man of slide-rule and logarithms, painted a deeply moving picture In the simplest of words and in the simplest of ways. I left the interviev; feeling sure that however America Amer-ica had been stuffing itself since the end of the fighting (we have run up the biggest food bill in history) we would be willing to conserve enough so that Mr. Hoover's invisible guests wouldn't leave our tables hungry. . Semantics Aid to Strike Settlements When President Truman, at a recent re-cent White House press and radio conference, talked about the hundreds hun-dreds of labor disputes which were settled by conciliation without Mr. Hoover (left) addresses press conference on food situation. I his family for years to go fishing ; with them and he had only got started start-ed when he heard that ominous phrase on the telephone, "White House calling." He may have been reluctant to leave the enticing, fish-filled fish-filled Florida waters but there is no doubt that it was a keen satisfaction satisfac-tion to him to get back into harness har-ness again, especially since he was called upon to do a job he knew he could do well. Whatever the public pub-lic that snowed him under in the 1932 elections may have said and felt at that time, however glad the Republicans were to edge him out of politics, there were few who would deny that he was a success at feeding the hungry during and after World War L Ex-President Inspires Press It was really inspiring to hear Mlm. Not that Mr. Hoover could ever pull you out of your sat with frenetic oratory or raise your emotions to a fever heat with his personality. It was, indeed, the matter-of-fact, almost al-most prosaic way in which he made his appeal that gave it weight. We were gathered in a small hotel "parlor." "par-lor." It was crowded. We overflowed the chairs and sat on tables and In the window niches. Many of us couldn't see him. Most of the time I could catch only a glimpse of one fold In his generous, pink neck. He had the facts and the figures all right nine million tons of grain alone were needed to prevent starvation. star-vation. At present there was only enough good grain in sight to make up 60 per cent of the need, etc. But he gave us more than facts as he explained what America must do and what he was sure Americans would do. He gave us faith. He tossed the idea of rationing with cards out of the window without with-out even a gesture. He said the American people would ration themselves, them-selves, said they would have done it in the war that way too. And when reporters asked questions ques-tions with political implications he refused even to discuss that phase of the subject. He was talking about human beings, he said, about sav- strikes and which never made the headlines, I couldn't help thinking of a conversation I had with Maj. Charles Estes, one of the labor department's de-partment's anonymous heroes of these bloodless and successful encounters. en-counters. Estes has what it takes to be a conciliator and in his case it includes, in-cludes, along with a keen sensitivity to the human side of all relationships relation-ships among workers and employers, employ-ers, a keen sense for the nice use of words. Indeed, semantics (the science of meanings, as contrasted contrast-ed with phonetics, the science of sounds) is his hobby. "The ultimate goal of the conciliation concili-ation service of the labor department depart-ment is not merely the settlement of disputes but the prevention of disputes," said Major Estes the other day. And then he went on to expand on his thesis that the crux of labor - management relations is human adjustment, the adjustment of one person to another. The main trouble, he says, is poor communication, which is poor for three reasons: 1, poor reception, or imperfect listening and perception; 2, poor digestion, or inaccurate interpretation in-terpretation and assimilation of what Is read or heard; and 3, poor transmission, or inadequate use of speech and language. Estes can go on for hours on that subject and will, at the drop of a hat. In fact, once when, interested though I was, I had to tear my-self my-self away for a pressing engagement, engage-ment, I could only do so after convincing con-vincing him that I was not anti-semantic. anti-semantic. I wish I had space to develop his ideas for they represent a practical system which he and his colleagues have demonstrated in "hundreds" of successes as the President put it. Like most successful systems, the conciliation service's methods are based on a solid foundation of long, hard preparation and represent the concentrated ounce of prophylactic j procedure that is worth a pound of exhausting arbitration, adminis-tered adminis-tered after the patient i already i |
