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THE STRANGE ATTACKS ON HERBERT HOOVER, A CURRENT EXAMPLE OF WHAT WE DO TO OUR PRESIDENTS, Arthur Train, hardcover, 1932. BOOK CONDITION: near fine. The text block is in near fine condition, with no tears, dogears, or marks. Pages are age-toned as are endpapers with added discoloration caused by pastedown paste. No bookplate or signature of a prior owner. Not a library book or remainder. The black boards are in very good condition (minor bumping to spine; edge wear). 7 ½ x 5, 51 pages, 10 ounces. XX [From the text] A great deal is said and written about the duty of young men to go into politics, but if the price of the highest service to the state is inevitably to be made the object of venomous attacks against which he is powerless to defend himself, a young man may well feel justified in hesitating to expose himself and those whom he loves to that slander whose tongue outvenoms all the worms of Nile. If Huldah Hoover, when in 1874 she first looked down at her baby in the one-story cottage across from the blacksmith shop in West Branch, Iowa, could have foreseen that half a century later human scavengers would go prying into the details of her family life and history, hinting at abnormal physical defects in her child, holding the impoverished family up to scorn as pious humbugs and implying that at the age of thirteen her son was already a fully developed bunco-steerer, she might, even more than in fact she did, have wished, in spite of the high office he would ultimately attain, that the boy had been born a girl. Would she have wished to raise her boy to be a president? Within the last six months a veritable library of scurrilous books has appeared attacking the President of the United States and purporting to expose his unfitness for his present office, written in terms of the foulest abuse. Most of them are conceived either in virulent partisan animosity, in the mere lust for profit, or in the surreptitious hope of blackmail. Behind one, at least, is a trail leading through the underworld of crime to a plot to block the course of justice and extort a pardon for Al Capone. Scandalmongers and libelers batten on one another. There are hijackers in bootlegged literature as in other illicit traffics, and in the next six months we may expect to see other such books, all compounded out of the lies purveyed by the first. Written with tricky art and apparently challenging libel suits, these spotted snakes with double tongues, adroitly evade direct misstatements of fact upon which such proceedings could be based, but accomplish their ends by malicious innuendo, deliberate false interpretation, and poisonous generalities. They are, for the most part, such disconnected hodge-podge and so unutterably dull that one would dismiss them for the garbage that they are, save for the possibility that by mere reiteration, and their loudly asserted claim to be based upon documentary proof for every syllable, they may be accepted as true by the ignorant and credulous, along with those who would like to make the President a scapegoat. Seller Inventory # 002624
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