Morrison Out

Last winter when President Roosevelt assigned his new Federal Reserve Board appointees to the staggered terms provided by law, he gave the shortest term (two years) to Ralph Waldo Morrison, a husky Texas utilitarian who had contributed $25,000 to the Democratic National Committee in 1932. Mr. Morrison's tenure proved shorter than the shortest term. Last week, after only four months in office, he sent his resignation to the White House. In his home town of San Antonio Mr. Morrison offered no explanation for his resignation, simply issuing this statement: "The obligations of the Federal Reserve Board are such that any public announcements relating to its personnel can with propriety come only from that Board or from a higher source in the Government."

Though no official explanation was available and none of any value was expected, the story seemed to be that Mr. Morrison found his job uncongenial. Upon all Reserve Board governors falls an immense amount of detail, which demands long, hard, exacting hours. Only one of Mr. Morrison's four months in office was spent on the job in Washington.

Presumably Mr. Morrison also found his fellow governors uncongenial. While a U. S. delegate to the 1933 London Economic Conference, he considered himself rather ill-used by ironic foreign correspondents of the U. S. Press. Even more did he resent the general acceptance of his Reserve Board appointment as an unvarnished political award. He went to Washington determined to demonstrate that he was more than a rubber stamp for Reserve Board Chairman Marriner Stoddard Eccles. There he ran into something worse than a clash of opinions: his New Dealing colleagues did not take him as seriously as he took himself.

Mr. Morrison's resignation leaves two vacancies on the seven-man board of governors of the Federal Reserve System, since President Roosevelt has never named a representative for agriculture. On a showdown in the potent Reserve Board open market committee, the five committeemen elected by the Federal Reserve Banks could, if they would, force a tie with the five remaining members of the Board.

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