"Pish & Piffle"

Socialite Washington arrayed itself in spring finery one day last week and drove to the new House Office Building. Horrendous doings had been promised. In the big caucus room,* while flashlamps winked, newsreel cameras purred and squads of radio engineers and reporters elbowed through the jampacked spectators, a special committee of Representatives sat down to investigate charges of the utmost gravity: that the President's intimate advisers were plotting to overthrow the Republic, add one more S to the U. S. A. Early this year Dr. William Albert Wirt, superintendent of the Gary, Ind. public schools and innovator of a widely accepted plan for regimenting elementary school curricula, had written his famed memorandum (TIME, April 2) on his interview with the Brain Trust saying: "The most surprising statement made to me was the following: 'We believe that we have Mr. Roosevelt in the middle of a swift stream. . . . We believe that we can keep Mr. Roosevelt there until we are ready to supplant him with a Stalin. We all think that Mr. Roosevelt is only the Kerensky of this revolution.'" Last month when Manufacturer James H. Rand Jr. flashed Dr. Wirt's dire alarum on the House Interstate Commerce Committee, Republicans, on the lookout for an autumn campaign issue, at once cried out that the country must learn the source of such traitorous beliefs, demanded last week's investigation. Testimony. Impatiently the audience waited while the committee of three Democrats and two Republicans haggled along strict party lines over the rules of procedure, chief decision being that cigar-gnawing onetime Senator James A. Reed of Missouri (who would not divulge who had retained him) would not be allowed to examine his client, Witness Wirt. More than half an hour had passed, with 60-year-old Dr. Wirt nervously chewing his index fingernail, when Democratic Chairman Alfred Lee Bulwinkle of Gastonia, N. C. put the epic question: "Doctor . . . you stated . . . that you 'asked some of the individuals in this group what their concrete plan was for bringing on the proposed overthrow'. . . . Who were those persons?" Witness Wirt--They were a group present at a dinner in Virginia, near Washington. Chairman--When was that dinner, Doctor? Witness--As I remember it, it was on Friday evening, Sept. 1. Chairman--Who was present then? (High excitement in audience. All ears prick to catch the names.) Witness (solemnly)--Robert Bruere . . . Laurence Todd (no signs of recognition) . . . David Cushman Coyle . . . Hildegarde Kneeland (titters) . . . Mary Taylor . . . Alice Barrows (muffled derisive laughter) . . . Thus, flatter than a crepe Suzette, fell the Red Scare of 1934. Beside it, Congressman Hamilton Fish's comic alarums of the previous decade assumed the proportions of an accomplished and bloody revolution.

"Brain Trusters." To the nation which had been waiting to hear some potent name like Tugwell or Berle or Pearson or Warren or Frankfurter, the names of Dr. Wirt's "brain trusters" meant a little less than nothing. Washington correspondents had to hump themselves to identify the list for the afternoon editions.

The hostess of the suburban dinner party last September, Miss Barrows, is a curly-headed blonde with a wide drooping mouth, a Vassar graduate and a divorcee. From 1914 to 1917 she was Dr. Wirt's assistant when he was reorganizing New York City's schools. Now she is a school building expert in the Office of Education. The other two women conform, like Miss Barrows, to a familiar Washington type: bright, obscure incumbents of small Government jobs, unmarried, unbeauteous as a rule, and with fairly elemental ideas about politics. Mary Taylor is editor of the AAA's Consumers' Guide. Hildegarde Kneeland has served for ten years as a minor official in the Home Economics Bureau.

Among the male guests was Robert Walter Bruere, a social theorist from Sneden's Landing, artistic colony up the Hudson from New York. He is chairman of the cotton textile code's advisory board. David Coyle is a theoretical writer on business & finance as well as a consulting engineer, graduate of Princeton and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He worked on the New York Life building, the Roerich Museum and built a home for himself at Bronxville, N. Y. with no heating arrangements on the second floor because Mr. Coyle believes that people should sleep in very cold rooms. Just before joining the technical review board of PWA, he had finished planting a nut farm in New Jersey. Laurence Todd is known to Washington newspapermen as a Social Registerite, has served for 14 years as Washington correspondent for Federated (labor) Press. He has recently become U. S. representative for Tass, official Soviet newsgathering organization.

But not even from the mouths of these obscure individuals was alarmist Dr. Wirt able, on the stand, to substantiate his lurid allegations. None of them had actually told the 60-year-old educator that the America of Washington, Lincoln, et al. would have to be destroyed. None had said that they sought to introduce a U. S. Soviet by "thwarting our then evident recovery." The tissue of the story sagged still further when Dr. Wirt, the glare of Klieg lights pitilessly burnishing his baldish brow, confessed that he had "done a great deal of talking." He also appeared to have been the one who broached the party's radical sentiments, quoting at great length from a three-year-old speech of Rexford Tugwell's to which, he said he apprehensively noticed, the others seemed to "nod approval." Most damaging direct quotation that Dr. Wirt could recall came from Miss Kneeland, Department of Agriculture subordinate: "Our group takes the leadership and recognizes the leadership of Dr. Tugwell [Assistant Secretary of Agriculture]." The Kerensky-Roosevelt analogy, according to Dr. Wirt, was made by Mr. Todd, who never had the remotest connection with the U. S. Government. Mr. Todd vehemently denied making the statement, or even one like it.

Dr. Wirt concluded his testimony with the dubious report that a member of AAA's staff suggested that "our objectives" would be furthered if less help for the hungry were forthcoming, that Dr. Tugwell had planned a $1.000,000 institution to incubate radical views among jobless young college graduates, that the government's subsistence homestead project near Morgantown, W. Va. was "communistic."

Reaction, The York, Pa. chapter of the Ku Klux Klan sent Dr. Wirt its commendations. But the more universal reaction to the Wirt hearing was voiced by Hostess Barrows who, recalling that the dinner was an utter failure because Dr. Wirt was a boresome "monologist," described the whole affair as "perfectly absurd, perfectly ridiculous." Miss Taylor echoed: "Pish and piffle." To politicians, aware that elections turn on thin threads and sensitive to a rising tide of anti-radicalism among the electorate, the affaire Wirt was not entirely piffling. Dr. Wirt had grotesquely caricatured a viewpoint, but he had nevertheless indicated its presence. Chairman Bulwinkle postponed the hearing one week after its first day, amid loud Republican protests that the Democrats were taking time out to mend their defenses. Nor was the Wirt testimony considered piffling by Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt. The West Virginia homestead project is dear to her heart. "I don't understand exactly why he considers it communistic to give people a chance to earn their own living," she bridled indignantly. "Stuffed Shirts," Most violent reaction to the null hearing came from a source within the Administration unlikely to soothe conservatives. Counsel Donald Randall Richberg of NRA, longtime labor lawyer and an avowed Leftist, bobbed up at Miami and telephoned a long and bitter tirade to a dinner of the Trade & Commerce Bar Association in Manhattan. In defense of the Brain Trust proper, declared he: ''The campaign of the League of Stuffed Shirts is the greatest menace to our economic recovery today. . . . There are a great many stuffed shirts who have access to avenues of great publicity, and so they pour their hysterical fears and their warped views of economic recovery into the public ears. They cannot use facts, even if they recognize them, so they create myths and hobgoblins and repeat nonsense over and over again. . . . "We are not in the slightest danger of a political revolution so long as we preserve our national sanity. We cannot possibly escape from an economic revolution, because that is in process throughout the world. . . . "Men with brains differ on so many subjects and are so independent minded there could never be a Brain Trust. But men accustomed to organizing hog trusts are unable to realize that brains cannot be herded together in the same way. When any man ventures to scoff at the use of brains in government, he should be asked to explain by what part of the anatomy he believes human affairs should be conducted." Mr. Richberg had arrived in Miami with NRAdministrator Johnson. At dinner in the same hotel with them was wry Columnist Westbrook Pegler. Mr. Pegler saw Messrs. Richberg and Johnson rise and leave the table in the middle of their meal. "They were gone for half an hour, and they came back laughing as though they had soaped somebody's windows. Johnson and Richberg sat down and laughed some more, and then it developed that they had been off at a telephone in some room and Richberg had been lumping together all the people who didn't agree with him and Johnson in a league of stuffed shirts. . . . Johnson and Richberg were ribbing the boys who had been ribbing them about their Brain Trust. . . ."

* Not to be confused with the caucus room of the Senate Office Building where the midget sat on John P. Morgan's lap last June.

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