Tubs & Toilets

Even the longest and bitterest battles must end some day and last week it seemed that day had come for the sarcastic name-calling feud between Clarence Darrow and Hugh S. Johnson. Three reports, all violently critical of NRA's treatment of the "little fellow" under "monopolistic" codes, had Mr. Darrow's NRA Review Board slapped down on President Roosevelt's desk in two months. The first was held from the public until General Johnson prepared a reply bristling with Johnsonese (TIME, May 28). The second somehow found its way to the Press before the NRAdministrator could lay lown his counterbarrage of epithets (TIME, June 25). Last week General Johnson unleashed his reply while Clarence Darrow was delivering his final blast to the White House, handing in his resignation and preparing to spend his summer in Europe.

These two champions of rough language parted company with talk of tubs and toilets. In his second report Mr. Darrow charged, among other things, that the code for plumbing fixtures discriminated against small manufacturers. These manufacturers, he declared, produced three-quarters of the output of bathtubs, washstands, toilets, etc. with trifling defects. In the trade these are classed as "culls" or seconds and were formerly sold largely to hotels. Now under the plumbing fixture code such "culls" can be sold only for export. General Johnson breezily defended the code on the ground that defective plumbing "is a grave menace to health," citing, by way of proof, "an epidemic of deadly amoebic dysentery in a Chicago hotel last summer."

Addressing the country as if it were a jury. Lawyer Darrow sought to demolish the NRAdministrator with the following personal mockery:

"Yes? If this is so, General Johnson's courage is daily demonstrated more effectively than we believe it has ever been upon the battlefield, for almost every day he eats his luncheon in a hotel that is furnished from top to bottom with 'culls' and nothing else; he and his deputies meet almost daily in rooms supplied with 'culls.' He has slept thousands of nights in such rooms, because the best hotels in the United States have them.

"When he proceeds from this achievement to ascribe to 'culls' an epidemic last summer of amoebic dysentery in a Chicago hotel built 30 years ago, and we recall that the origin of that epidemic is fairly well known and had nothing on earth to do with 'culls' or anything else connected with plumbing, we discover in the General a quality of imagination that seems to have been too long unknown to an admiring public, and we take pleasure in playing an impresario's part to this rare gift."

To confuse the plumbing code issue completely with ribald personalities, Lawyer Johnson shot back: "Here we have dear old Clarence at his sweetest--at last! The man who asked Mr. Bryan if the fish all drowned in Noah's flood, and how the snake navigated before he was cursed to crawl in the dust on his belly, is at last speaking for himself. Here, finally, is a flash of heat lightning-in the sunset sky--scintillatingly brilliant but illuminating nothing.

"Clarence here talks of plumbing of the baser sort and discloses an expert knowledge of what Shakespeare called 'Jakes' and of those mundane matters of which those of us with rural upbringing are admittedly hardly qualified to speak.

"I love Clarence Darrow for his flair for the underdog. . . . Nobody in the world was ever more adept in convincing twelve men that another man, who had bombed somebody, or poisoned somebody, or taken a Kanaka for a ride in the most approved gangster style, or, with some psychopathic urge, taken a little boy out into the Michigan dunes and beaten the life out of him, hadn't either bombed, or poisoned, or ridden or beaten anybody.

"Dear Clarence, requiescat in pace."

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