Howell Report

When public clamor on some vital issue becomes too loud for White House comfort, a favorite Presidential trick is to appoint a batch of Big Names to a special commission to investigate the matter. By the time the commission gets around to making a report, the public has usually cooled off, forgotten what the outcry was all about. Most notorious use of this prolonged investigational device was the Wickersham Report on Law Observance and Enforcement, which President Hoover chose to ignore (TIME, Feb. 2, 1931). Last winter President Roosevelt found himself in his first hot water following precipitate cancellation of the country's airmail contracts. Adopting the familiar strategy, he telephoned that good Democrat, roly-poly Publisher Clark Howell of the Atlanta Constitution, asked him to chairman a Federal Aviation Commission to investigate all U. S. aviation. Mr. Howell, whose ignorance of aviation appalled even himself, was glad to do his old friend a favor.

The Commission spent $65,000, heard 200 witnesses, filled 4,500 pages with testimony, sent Chairman Howell on a fine European junket. Last week it filed a 254-page report containing 102 suggestions which President Roosevelt sent to Congress with a short, lukewarm message. It was painfully apparent to the six Commissioners that the President was much less interested in their findings now that public feeling over the airmail contract cancellations had subsided than he was a year ago when he solemnly launched them on their labors. Noncommittal was he in his message to Congress on such Commission recommendations as the following:

1) Creation of an airmail rate structure based on actual postage receipts, the difference to be made up by direct Federal subsidy.

2) Experiments with 2-cent airmail postals and 3-cent single-sheet letters to increase airmail volume.

3) Governmental participation in trans-atlantic & transpacific air services with flying boats and rigid airships, the latter to be Government-built.

4) Government construction of a large dirigible for training Navy personnel, to replace the decommissioned Los Angeles.

5) Completion within six years of the War and Navy Department expansion programs, raising the total number of planes from 2,400 to 4,230 (2,320 Army, 1,910 Navy).

6) Procurement of military aircraft by negotiated contract where competitive bidding would mean undesirable delay.

The Howell report would have made a small splash indeed in the news if President Roosevelt had not seen fit to slap one of its recommendations down with a curt "No" and to tie a long policy string to another. The investigators thought it would be a good thing to set up a semi-permanent Air Commerce Commission with broad powers over U. S. civil aviation including jurisdiction over rates. Said the President: "In this recommendation I am unable to concur. ... At a later date I shall ask the Congress for general legislation centralizing the supervision of air and water and highway transportation. . . ."

The Commission also recommended that the Interstate Commerce Commission be empowered temporarily to revise airmail rates under Postmaster General Farley's "bargain" system, pending permanent legislation. Zealous lest the New Deal's attitude toward the "profit motive" be overlooked, the President said: "I concur in this recommendation . . . provided always that the grant of this duty to the Interstate Commerce Commission be subject to provisions against unreasonable profits by any private carrier. . . . It is only fair to suggest that during this period any profits at all by such companies should be a secondary consideration. Government aid in this case is legitimate in order to save companies from disastrous loss but not in order to provide profits."

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