"Fadeout"

Franklin D. Roosevelt can point with pride to the fact that, in the two years and four months since he took office, the breath of scandal has blown but two piddling puffs on his Administration. First puff was the flatulent product of that impressionable Gary, Ind. school superintendent, Dr. William Wirt. whose charges that the Brain Trust was all but in the pay of Moscow made a farcical Congressional investigation last year (TIME, April 23, 1934). Second puff flurried up portentously fortnight ago when Ewing Young Mitchell, whom the President had to oust as Assistant Secretary of Commerce because he would not resign, charged that the Commerce Department was rife with "serious derelictions . . . scandalous abuses . . . improper graft and favoritism" (TIME, June 24). Again Congress did its inquisitorial duty and the Senate Commerce Committee spent three footling days last week investigating the Mitchell allegations.

As it turned out, sole witness to support garrulous, bespectacled, aging Mr. Mitchell's grave charges was Mr. Mitchell. A small-town lawyer from Springfield, Mo., he became "the original Roosevelt man in Missouri," was rewarded after the New Deal's victory by being made the biggest Missourian in the Roosevelt official family. Early last autumn, Secretary of Commerce Daniel Roper came to the conclusion that he and Mr. Mitchell could not get along, asked for his resignation. As a sop, Mr. Mitchell was offered a job in the graveyard of RFC's legal department or as Minister to Rumania. But Mr. Mitchell did not want to leave the Department of Commerce, hung on there from week to week by repeatedly promising Secretary Roper that very shortly he would produce evidence of serious departmental irregularities. This went on for nine months until Mr. Mitchell was finally dislodged by an order from the White House.

The "scandalous" revelation which Mr. Mitchell had to offer the Commerce Committee last week concerned the Leviathan. In 1931 International Mercantile Marine, which controls United States Lines, which owns the Leviathan, contracted with the Shipping Board, a division of the Commerce Department, to run that old ex-German monster for five years for a $3,000,000 subsidy. Last winter, I. M. M. struck another bargain with the Government whereby it could lay up the Leviathan but keep the $1,720,000 which it owed the Government in liquidated damages for retiring the ship by agreeing to build a new ship of the Washington class. To Mr. Mitchell it all spelled "favoritism and appearance of corruption," the broad inference being that the favorite was Vincent Astor, who happens to be a director and one of I. M. M.'s big stockholders as well as President Roosevelt's creditor in the matter of yachting trips on the Nourmahal.

This news raised Committee eyebrows to about the same extent as would have occurred if Mr. Mitchell had revealed that the Declaration of Independence was signed July 4, 1776 at Philadelphia. It had all been hashed out by Comptroller General McCarl, was an old story. Not even the Committee's Republican minority was free to get edited about the Leviathan subsidy, because Republican Kermit Roosevelt is an I. M. M. vice president.

"Have you any untapped sources, any new facts?" snapped Oregon's McNary. Mr. Mitchell had none. So New York's Copeland, the Committee's chairman, ended the first day's session by suggesting Mr. Mitchell come back tomorrow, and Florida's Fletcher added: "Bring some facts with you. Let's have some facts."

Even less factual was the next two days' testimony from Mr. Mitchell. He declared that the Morro Castle before its fatal voyage had virtually no inspection from the Department of Commerce Bureau of Navigation & Steamboat Inspection. But he was unable to prove it. He "understood" that inspection officials made a practice of accepting "gratuities," narrowed the charge down to five inspectors in San Juan, Puerto Rico who had taken $560, failed to give their names, then admitted that the Department of Justice had investigated the case and dismissed it for lack of evidence. Most damaging charge Mr. Mitchell brought against higher-ups in the Department was that a man hired at $8,000 a year as a transportation expert served in reality as Secretary Roper's pressagent.

At that point Secretary Roper, who was anxious to get the charade over with so the Senate would confirm his fellow-South Carolinian J. Monroe Johnson as the new Assistant Secretary of Commerce, took the stand. To him his ousted assistant was "of an exceedingly suspicious temperament," responsible for "a veritable log jam" in the Department. Said he:

"The attitude of Mr. Mitchell in the present situation occasions no surprise to me or to others who have been in close contact with him in the conduct of Governmental affairs. He is prone to treat every rumor or unsupported statement as true. . . ."

Shortly thereafter, no one was left on the Committee dais except Chairman Copeland. "Will the next witness please step forward?" he asked. There was silence. Chairman Copeland looked around him. "Apparently the Committee has faded out just like these allegations have faded out." He declared the investigation ended.

Discredited though Mr. Mitchell was, he had touched on one issue which may rise from the over-ailed Midwest to plague President Roosevelt in 1936--his intimacy with Vincent Astor and Mr. Astor's interest in I. M. M. Still unmindful or unworried about the hazard in spite of his warnings from his own political pulse-takers, President Roosevelt went out of his way last week to repeat that he favored the I. M. M. deal 100%.

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