Double Death

It was Franklin Roosevelt who, in one of his inspired moments, launched the Florida Ship Canal with $5,000,000 of relief money last autumn, day after the S. S. Dixie went aground in the treacherous Florida Keys. But it was Florida's senior Senator Duncan Upshaw Fletcher, to whom the President owed much gratitude for important New Deal service in the chairmanship of the Senate Banking & Currency Committee, who got credit for selling the idea at the White House and who became its champion in the Capitol. An inland waterways enthusiast since he went to the Senate in 1909, the 77-year-old son of Captain Thomas Jefferson Fletcher, C.S.A., was gravely dismayed when Michigan's Vandenberg last winter convinced the Senate that his latest & greatest project was not only useless but dangerous, might turn south Florida into a near-desert.

President Roosevelt washed his hands of the Canal and its legislative mate, Maine's Passamaquoddy Dam. Last fortnight he reconsidered, had Majority Leader Joe Robinson attempt to hitch them to the First Deficiency (Relief) Bill. Tired, ailing Senator Fletcher made a long, earnest plea for the Canal, and his colleagues, largely out of affection for the man who was senior in service to all of them except Idaho's Borah and senior in age to all except Virginia's Glass, voted a conditional $10,000,000 for the Florida ditch, though rejecting the Maine dam.

In his Washington apartment one morning last week a heart attack brought Senator Fletcher's life to a swift close. That afternoon the House rejected the Senate's Canal amendment, 108-to-62. Next morning the Senate, convening after a recess in honor of its dead colleague, accepted the House's action without protest, let Duncan Fletcher's ditch die with him.

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