Fight & Fantasy

Down a corridor in the Senate Office Building one day last week strode a squat, husky, red-headed Washington newshawk named Robert S. Allen. Outside the big Senate caucus room he spotted a thin, greyish ex-Washington newshawk named Paul C. Yates.

"Hello, you double-crosser!" snarled Allen.

Yates muttered something back. Both men swung fists, missed. Bystanders leaped to part them. The combatants wrenched loose, sailed into each other. It was all over in a minute. His face bruised, bleeding over one eye, Yates was assisted to a first-aid station. Capitol police trotted uninjured Allen off to the Senate's detention room, from which he was shortly released.

Bob Allen, whose wife is Scripps-Howard's able Washington Correspondent Ruth Finney, lost his job as Washington correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor four years ago when his employers discovered that he had helped write anonymous, gossipy Washington Merry-Go-Round (TIME, Sept. 21, 1931). When his good friend & colleague, Drew Pearson, was similarly discharged from the Baltimore Sun for his hand in More Merry-Go-Round, the two turned their bad luck into fame & fortune by starting a syndicated column called Washington Merry-Go-Round. Crack newshawks both, their knowing gossip has made them minor political powers around the capital, while Bob Allen's pugnacity has won him a certain extraprofessional renown.*

Year ago Bob Allen gave a helping hand to a friend when he got Paul C. Yates a job as executive assistant to his partner's father, Governor Paul Martin Pearson of the Virgin Islands. Paul Yates's behavior in that capacity curdled Bob Allen's friendship into the wrath which exploded in the Senate corridor last week.** Their fisticuffs were a fitting prelude to a solemn Senate investigation of Governor Pearson's administration.

"Poorhouse." Despite their respective advantages in size and population, Kent County, R. I. (174 sq. mi.) and Granite City, Ill. (25,000 pop.) would have to devote themselves exclusively and persistently to murder, rape, arson, embezzlement and kidnapping to make the stir which the Virgin Islands have created during the past year. Three beauteous tropic specks off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands have helped split a President's Cabinet, drawn a steady stream of investigators and newshawks, kept themselves prominent in the nation's Press by as fantastic a comedy of political manners as the U. S. is ever likely to behold.

Nothing much happened to draw attention to the Virgin Islands between the time the U. S. bought them from Denmark in 1917 for $25,000,000 and the day Herbert Hoover paid them their first Presidential visit in 1931. Following a brief inspection. President Hoover publicly labeled them "a poorhouse." Not bothering to mention the fact that U. S. Prohibition had ruined the Islanders by destroying their chief means of livelihood, the manufacture of rum, the President left the three little Virgins to Civil Governor Pearson whom he had just appointed, sailed back to bigger headaches in Washington.

Paul Martin Pearson was a professor of public speaking at Swarthmore College when he founded Swarthmore Chautauqua in 1912. For 18 years thereafter Professor Pearson sent his big, brown tents up & down the Eastern seaboard, bringing to small towns inspirational lectures, Russian quartets, acrobats, bell ringers. Kindly, high-minded, sincere, he plowed all profits back into the organization, was left almost penniless when cinema and radio finally brought his tents tumbling down. President Hoover, a fellow Quaker, rescued him with the Islands' governorship on the recommendation of Herbert D. Brown, chief of the now-defunct U. S. Bureau of Efficiency.

The new Governor took to the Islands a staff of old Chautauqua and college friends, mostly young and all resembling him in energy, enthusiasm, idealism and total lack of experience in colonial administration. He also took along 30 trunks full of old Chautauqua costumes, scenery, bells, drums, set to work organizing "rhythm" bands and teaching natives handicrafts. Before long, efficient Mr. Brown was imploring President Hoover to remove his appointee, chiefly on the ground that the Governor was paying an old Chautauquan $4,800 per year to stage Gilbert & Sullivan operas for the astonished populace.

Virgin Islanders, 93% Negro, lazy and primitive, somehow got into their heads the idea that a civil governor would give everybody a job and a vote. When the jobs were all gone, those left jobless set up an indignant howl. The voting prerequisite of $300 in yearly income kept all but a fraction of the people from the polls. Good Professor Pearson found that the Virgin Islands were notably lacking in virgins, infuriated Islanders by announcing to the world, as a first step in improving their morals, that 65% of insular births were illegitimate.

Dollars & Politics. With the coming of the New Deal, Governor Pearson seemed for a time to be living in a world of dreams-come-true. Some two millions of dollars turned the Islands into a post-graduate laboratory for New Deal experiments. More than 300 blackamoor families were set up on neat little homesteads with Government bulls, plows and tractors to give them a start. A quasi-Governmental Virgin Islands Co. was created to administer cane plantations, sugar factories, rum distilleries, a tourist hotel with $1,000,000 of PWA money. Tons of food were sent down for relief.

Almost nobody was grateful. Homesteads for a few made many jealous. Island capitalists squawked, "Government competition." Mobs shrieked that Welfare Commissioner Alonzo Moron, doler of relief food, held back supplies.

Meantime more trouble was brewing in Washington. There were only some 25 political plums to be picked in the Islands, but plenty of hungry Democrats wanted them. Maryland's Senator Millard E. Tydings quietly wangled a Virgin Islands job as government attorney for a Jewish constituent named Eli Baer. Island Police Director Michael J. Nolan shortly reported that CWA funds were being diverted to the purchase of refrigerator parts, the repair of Government House radios, the hiring of taxicabs for parades. At once Attorney Baer set out to investigate the administration of public funds in the Islands. He turned up screaming with 101 charges of graft, waste and corruption. A refrigerator salesman mysteriously committed suicide but, sifted by two Interior Department investigators, Attorney Baer's 101 charges simmered down to the case of one poor quadroon named Mclntosh who had innocently appropriated $38.40 worth of government cement and lumber in exchange for various odd jobs he had done. Attorney Baer and Police Director Nolan lost their jobs.

A Cabinet deal transferred the Islands' Federal judgeship from the Interior Department to the Justice Department. Thereupon Mississippi's Senator Pat Harrison persuaded Attorney General Cummings to give the job to T. (for Thomas) Webber Wilson, a Mississippi Democrat who had lost his seat in the House by running, unsuccessfully, for the Senate. Negro-wise Judge Wilson soon roused the Islanders' fury against Governor Pearson to fever pitch. Looming up as a likely successor if Pearson could be dislodged, he made national news by pouncing on poor Quadroon Mclntosh. Acting as combined prosecutor, jury & judge, Judge T. Webber Wilson denounced the pilferer as "a Judas and Benedict Arnold to your country," found him guilty, sentenced him to pay a $200 fine.

It remained for mild-seeming Paul Yates, as assistant to Governor Pearson, to make the biggest noise of all. Turning, against his superior, he posted his resignation to Washington by airmail last autumn. While it was en route, Secretary Ickes discharged him, denounced him as a "trouble-maker." With Senate and House Committees on Territories & Insular Affairs, Mr. Yates filed charges of extravagance, inefficiency and corruption against Governor Pearson, demanded an investigation. Senator Tydings took up the cause, persuaded the Senate to let him head an investigating committee. By that time the Islands had become such a snarling, spitting, riotous cage of political tomcats that both sides welcomed the prospect of a Congressional airing.

''Not a Trial." Paul Yates was waiting to lead off investigation testimony last week when Newshawk Allen temporarily incapacitated him. Nonetheless the investigation got away to a flying start. First off, Secretary Ickes bobbed up to demand permission to cross-examine witnesses.

"This is not a trial," ruled Chairman Tydings, rejecting the request.

Charles Henry Gibson, onetime government attorney in the Virgin Islands, took the stand. Pearson-ousted predecessor of Pearson-ousted Eli Baer, Witness Gibson could offer little against the Governor except a hodgepodge of hearsay. But the committee's counsel read a report of two Interior Department investigators declaring that Mr. Gibson was "not normal mentally," that he was "afflicted with a monomania concerning Pearson and spends most of his time walking the streets damning the Governor."

Dr. Ernest H. Gruening, director of the Interior Department's Division of Territories & Island Possessions, denounced Mr. Gibson as a "troublemaker" who "was responsible for much of the unrest in the Islands," said he had been fired for "incompetence and neglect of his official duties." And for removing nine government documents from his files when he left office, Secretary Ickes threatened Mr. Gibson with an $18,000 fine and 27 years in jail.

* To one of Drew Pearson's socialite parties last June went, without invitation, small, boyish-looking Francis Marion Stephenson, White House correspondent for the Associated Press, whom President Roosevelt fondly calls "Little Stevie." His dander was up because Columnists Allen & Pearson had accused him in print of coloring his press reports in the President's favor. For an hour he called Bob Allen hard names. For an hour Bob Allen kept his temper. Then he led "Little Stevie" into the garden, gave him a sound thrashing.

**A Washington fistfight which did not come off began last week at a dance in the Shoreham Hotel when Senator Huey P. Long waltzed up to a table at which sat Attorney Burr Tracy Ansell, whose father, Brigadier General Samuel T. Ansell, has a $500,000 libel suit pending against Senator Long. Enraged at the sight of the prancing Kingfish, Son Ansell took a wild swing at him. The Senator's bodyguard detained Mr. Ansell while the Senator prudently withdrew.

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