Herbert Hoover: on and off topic

[Jonathan Lighter]

Was just watching a 1960 NBC special called "A Conversation with Herbert
Hoover."

http://www.c-span.org/video/?320919-1/conversation-herbert-hoover

Hoover, who grew up in Iowa and Oregon, was 85 at the time. By any
standard, he was extraordinarily articulate, rarely pausing to think of a
word and speaking in long, well constructed sentences.  Even if he'd had a
chance to rehearse  his answers to NBC Correspondent Ray Henle, he was
remarkably eloquent. And I'm not sure he did.

But never mind that. I was struck by Hoover's use of "futher" for "further"
even though his dialect was otherwise entirely r-ful.  More interestingly,
perhaps, he spoke of seeing German "bumming" in WW1 and of being wounded by
the fragment of a German "bum."  (Please, no cracks.) The schwa was very
evident.

Factoid: one of the most conservative Republicans of his era, Hoover said
nevertheless that "government regulation" of business was necessary to the
extent that it would protect the public from "abuses."  That makes him a
"liberal" by certain people's standards today.

And more: Having made a fortune (a "competence") as a mining engineer when
the federal income tax was "one per cent," he refused to accept any
"compensation"i n his subsequent decades of managing famine relief
worldwide. In federal service, he said, he did take "compensation" - but
"expended it on matters outside of my own needs."

Why? Because, he said, he "owed to my country a debt that was unpayable
and...had *no right* to ask *her* to pay *me.*"

Believe It ... Or Not!!

JL



-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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