Two Rewards

In 1907 Hubert Durrett Stephens was holding public office (a district attorneyship) when Charles Thomas Fisher Jr. was a suckling babe. Last week they both received like privileges, the right to suckle Uncle Sam's payroll for $10,000 a year as directors of RFC. But these identical privileges were to them quite different rewards.

The reward in Mr. Fisher's case was not the money. His father, one of the seven Fisher Body Brothers, has enough of that. Less than seven years ago young Mr. Fisher was a student at Georgetown University. He emerged to become a vice president of one of Detroit's two great arid now defunct banking groups. He emerged from Detroit's banking fiasco with the personal commendation of Jesse Jones tangibly as well as verbally expressed. He was made RFC's representative in Michigan. His elevation to the RFC board, to succeed the late Senator John J. Elaine of Wisconsin, was to him not a plum but a plume.

The reward to Mr. Stephens was a juicy plum, for party regularity. For 22 years Mr. Stephens served the Democratic Party in Congress, twelve of them in the Senate where he succeeded the greatest of Mississippi's statesmen, the late John Sharp Williams. No one ever accused Mr. Stephens of being a counterpart of Williams, but he was well liked by his colleagues. Last year he ran into hard luck.

While Mr. Stephens enjoyed the dignity and $10,000 pay of a U. S. Senator, one of his former political opponents in Mississippi was glad to hold the lowly job of newspaper clipper in the AAA at a salary of $6,000. The paper clipper was ex-Governor Theodore ("The Man") Bilbo. Before primary time arrived "The Man" rushed back to Mississippi, proposed a 27-point platform for the beatification of Mississippi, attacked the record of Senator Stephens particularly because he had almost voted to give a Republican, Dr. Willard Thorp, a $9,000 job as an expert in the Department of Commerce (TIME, Oct. 1). Mr. Bilbo made great capital of that near sin, declared that such jobs were for good Democrats, that if Senator Stephens should lose his seat to Bilbo, The Man would see that even Stephens, rather than a damyankee Republican, got a job.

When Mr. Stephens did lose his seat to Bilbo, his old friends, John Nance Garner and Pat Harrison, were afraid that The Man Bilbo would block Senate confirmation of an RFC appointment for Mr. Stephens. They undertook a diplomatic mission to Senator Bilbo.

"Certainly," said that magnanimous man, "one of my campaign pledges was to get Hubert Stephens a job. He wouldn't let me have a good job, and hasn't spoken to me since 1922, but I'm bigger than he is."

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