500.A15a4/350
Memorandum by the Acting Secretary of State of a Conversation With President Hoover
I told the President that there was an increasing number of reports in the press that the disarmament conference scheduled for next February would be postponed. He asked if I thought there was any reason for these reports. I said that there emphatically was; that France had long wanted postponement and that now England might also wish postponement since the British may well feel that they want to devote their entire energies to rehabilitation of the financial system; further, that Mr. Henderson, Chairman of the Conference, was now no longer a cabinet minister29 but the leader of the party and that he might well hesitate to leave England for as long a time as the conference would take. I told the President that I was likely to be asked by the press as to the attitude of this Government and that I proposed, if he had no objection, to say that we should be exceedingly disappointed at any postponement; that we were prepared to go at the time the conference had been called and that we believed, in this time of World economic depression, a successful conference was unusually important. The President authorized me to make a statement along these lines and agreed also that we should tell Hugh Wilson to take the same line in Geneva. I said that there was only one reason why I hesitated to make a definite statement at this time, which was that I could not know definitely that Mr. Stimson might not have agreed with the British as to the necessity of postponement. Both the President and I felt, however, that this was exceedingly unlikely, since it would be quite contrary to what the Secretary had said in other parts of Europe.
- On August 25, 1931, Mr. Henderson was succeeded by Lord Reading as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.↩