Inventory

From quarters close to Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City, than whom Alfred Emanuel Smith has few abler or more intimate lieutenants in his campaign for the Democratic nomination, came a report:

Just prior to the convention at Houston, Governor Smith will announce the Cabinet he would select if nominated and elected.

Should it happen, it would be a political thunderclap. Its boldness would be equalled only by the uncertainty of its effect, for it would be wholly unprecedented. Its folly would lie in staking much where nothing needs be staked; in prematurely disappointing many an ambitious man whose attachment Candidate Smith would need until November.

Its wisdom would be in its sheer temerity; in its novelty for a time that is used to novelty; and in the directness with which it would strike to the heart of such issue as there is between the two parties this year. When Prohibition, Religion, Corruption and Party Feeling have been talked to nothing, there still remains Prosperity, which is what the status quo is still generally thought to be. Offering to replace the present administration the Democrats will have to offer some one to replace not merely President Coolidge, but the Secretary of the Treasury. Should Governor Smith pre-announce a Cabinet, the man chosen to challenge for Andrew Mellon's desk would instantly become a national cynosure.

The report from Jersey City was extremely premature and unreliable. Observers put not a jot of faith in it. But it quickened their notion that in the coming campaign as never before the Democrats will have to demonstrate that their ideals have hands and feet and that the G.O.P., whatever other trusts it shelters, has no monopoly of the country's brainpower.

Assuming Candidate Smith as the Cabinetmaker, what material is at hand in the Democratic party whereof he might construct the all-important centre panel, Secretary of the Treasury?

An inventory:

Three Has-Beens still active on the Democratic scene are three men who have already been Secretary of the Treasury. The first of this trio, William Gibbs McAdoo, who would rather be wrong than have Smith be President, can safely be laid aside, though a wise man has said: "If I were Smith, I would offer him something."

Carter Glass, who succeeded Mr. McAdoo in the Wilson Cabinet, would loom in a proportion exactly inverse to his physical stature, which is today the smallest in the Senate. A proudly independent Virginian, he has commanded nationwide respect ever since the day in 1912 when, after 10 years in the House of Representatives, he unexpectedly became Chairman of the Committee on Banking and Currency. Financiers marked the way he shouldered the Federal Reserve Act through the House. Farmers learned that he knows their business, being himself engaged in it, and that though he talks little he talks their kind of language: homely, directly, and red-head-hot with expletives like "dadbumit!" He is Southern. He is Dry. He could mightily help Candidate Smith.

David Franklin Houston, third of the has-beens, is another Dry Southerner. President Wilson regarded him as the ablest of all his secretaries. His seven years in the Department of Agriculture thoroughly modernized the business services of that important executive branch after its 16 years under James Wilson, who was an agricultural scientist but no sales-manager. From the Cabinet Mr. Houston's career has not led him back to college presidencies* but into finance to be President of the Bell Telephone Securities Co. and Vice President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. (to distribute that company's stock-ownership, now widest in the U. S.). Last year the Mutual Life Insurance Company obtained his presidential services. The Houston nature is perhaps a chilly one for vote-getting but coldness plus the inordinate Houston ability might be the best of recommendations for the Treasury Department.

Two Bankers. Since the Treasury is a banker's job and Manhattan the bankers' citadel, voters might be well content with someone like President Charles Edwin Mitchell of the National City Bank ("biggest in the world")--a strapping, tireless worker, politically independent, self-made--or President Jackson Eli Reynolds of the vastly rich First National Bank of New York--a quite stocky popular little man of 55, of pronounced legal ability and stout Democratic faith.

An Industrialist. In Owen D./- Young, the Democrats have superb Cabinet material--presidential material it would be if his position at the head of the General Electric Company and Radio Corporation of America were interpreted properly in the light of his industrial pronouncements, which are almost socialistic in their liberality. His international experience on the reparations commission might recommend him sooner for the state portfolio. If given the Department of Commerce he would probably make it the most important in the Government. But for electoral purposes the Treasury is the most important post. Announcement of his name would galvanize the Smith boom.

Two Lame Ducks. Politically jobless at the moment, but nonetheless Democratic assets, are two able onetime Senators from desirable sections of the country; one from Alabama, one from Oklahoma. The Southerner, Oscar W. Underwood, hails from that beehive of the new Southern progress, Birmingham. During his 20 years in Congress he became Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the House and his party's leader in the Senate. He is a "tariff-for-revenue" man, a law-respecting Wet. His prestige is of the sort which Republican Presidents acknowledge when they want to appoint a high Democrat to a treaty commission or a Pan-American Congress.

Robert Latham Owen, who left the Senate in 1925 after 18 years there, was Carter Glass' collaborator in the passage of the Federal Reserve Act. An experienced banker, a farmers' friend with roots running back to Old Virginia on the one hand and the Cherokee Indians on the other, he is said to have a balance of power in five states where Smith needs help.

A Promoter. Ambitious to be Vice President, but doubtless open to persuasion, is Jesse Holman Jones of Texas. For four years he has been the Democratic Santa Claus. He is an astute banker and a big-scale builder as well as a booster. He can point with pride to having served with the late Henry P. Davison at International Red Cross conferences, representing President Wilson.

A Philosopher. Perhaps of equal calibre of any of these men, but not overshadowing them, because he keeps himself so far in the background, is Bernard Mannes Baruch, a unique figure of the contemporary scene.

In a radio speech last month, Candidate Smith said, "history records that down to the present day the Nation has not favored the election of a President of great wealth" with the exception of George Washington. Had he been talking about Secretaries of the Treasury he must have observed that the reverse is true--the richer the Treasurer the more trusted. That is part of the secret of Andrew Mellon's wide popularity.

Bernard Mannes Baruch made all the millions he thought he needed--a score or more--and withdrew from Wall Street in 1912. "Greatest speculator of his generation" he was called by men who knew. Envious men accused him of having a sixth sense--a feminine intuition that guided his financial darts and swoops. His own explanation was the original definition of the verb "to speculate." He said: "Analyze the word and you'll find that it comes from the latin speculare, to observe. According to the dictionary, it means to ponder a subject in its different aspects and relations; to meditate; to contemplate."

Great railroad, tobacco, rubber, sulphur and mining companies have been the products of his organizing genius. In 1916, as everyone knows, President Wilson appointed him as an advisory commissioner of the Council of National Defense. Because Mr. Baruch had contributed largely to Democratic campaign funds, the appointment was considered a complimentary one. But it soon became apparent that the Baruch genius could apply itself as well to public as to private affairs, and there was only applause when in 1918 President Wilson chose Mr. Baruch for chairman of the almost omnipotent War Industries Board, charged with controlling and purchasing all the raw materials and industrial fabrications the Allies required of the U.S. to prosecute the War. Upon accepting this post, Mr. Baruch sold out enormously valuable stock holdings lest they bias his judgment, and at Washington (as Writer Mark Sullivan said) went "flying down the road with his tail over the dash board . . . regardless of authorization, money or detail. When there isn't any money available, he uses his own." There being some trouble over renting an office floor, he said, "buy the building." To quote Sullivan again, "he is successful at getting things done, and with all his assumption of authority no one gets mad at him. . . ."

That was the Baruch crisis. Later, with the crisis passed, an equally characteristic action was quite opposite in nature. The Kansas State Board of Agriculture asked him to visit the Midwest and study the farm problem as a business man. He went quietly, slowly. He put a long finger on cooperative marketing as what the farmer needed. He submitted a masterly report which became the Magna Carta of the farm movement and a model for marketing legislation in two score states. The American Farm Bureau Federation asked him to be its advisor and asked what fee he would require. He smiled and said, "your confidence is my retainer."

Few people know that President Wilson twice asked Mr. Baruch to be Secretary of the Treasury before Mr. Glass, before Mr. Houston. And no one knows Mr. Baruch who thinks there was conceit in one of his reasons for declining. "Why should I take it when other men want it so much more than I?" It was a simple, honest, naive answer. Power and honor he had had. He wanted to go home to philosophize and "speculate" in his big, quiet office on a 14th floor in uptown Manhattan upon such social problems as farmers or taking the profit out of war.

Whether or not he would now accept a third invitation is a question unanswerable before the event, though the challenge of the Mellon record would not leave him unmoved. Towering tall, sharp of eye, with a thinker's knot between the eyebrows and a laughing man's wrinkles beside the eyes, he was not nicknamed "the lone eagle" for nothing. "If his party said it needed him he might fly again."

* In 1902, aged 36, he was President of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas; three years later, President of the University of Texas; then, 1908-1912 Chancellor of Washington University (St. Louis).

/-An initial only. Mr. Young has no middle name.