St. Francis

Frank Murphy was confirmed in the Catholic Church at Harbor Beach, Mich., when he was twelve years old. That year all the children in his class at the parish church pledged themselves to drink no alcoholic liquor before their majority. For fervid Frank Murphy that was not enough. He went home, took a further pledge: to his adored mother he vowed he would not touch a drop so long as he lived.

Also that year in Owosso, 100 miles from Harbor Beach, little Tommy Dewey, aged 3, toddled about his Episcopalian father's home, unaware of religion or abstinence.

Thirty-three years later Governor Frank Murphy ran for re-election in Michigan; Thomas Edmund Dewey tried for the Governorship of New York. Both lost. But neither became inactive.

Last January, when Frank Murphy was appointed No. i law enforcement officer of the U. S., Tom Dewey was already better known as New York County's Republican prosecutor of crooked Democrats. Tom Dewey convicted Tammany Hall's notorious Jimmy Hines.

But Democrats also can--and sometimes do--jail Democrats. The high moral character of Democrat Frank Murphy, who says he has never made an appointment for purely political reasons, permits no recognition of party lines if Evil is involved. Attorney General Murphy's men put mighty Boss Pendergast of Kansas City behind the bars (TIME, May 29). They went after judges they thought were crooked (see p. 17). High-minded, capable judges and law enforcement officers replaced unsavory political characters.

Through all this Frank Murphy was no shrinking violet. Last April he charged into the Midwest to be in at the Pendergast kill, taking with him G-Man J. Edgar Hoover, a great hand for being in on the kill himself. Everywhere Frank Murphy and John Edgar Hoover went they looked like Good, battling Bad.

Last week the devout Attorney General was charging through the skies again, his G-Man beside him. When their plane halted at El Paso, Frank Murphy told the waiting press he was on the trail of "an enormous swindle." But Frank Murphy did not say what the "big swindle" was.

"We're interested," said Mr. Murphy, who long since had been inevitably labeled "St. Francis," "in uncovering any corrupt situation in any part of the country to which there is a Federal angle." In other words, observers cracked, Frank Murphy was going to catch crooks everywhere, while Tom Dewey jailed a few bad New Yorkers. Columnists Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner quoted Frank Murphy's good-&-great friend Franklin Roosevelt as telling a caller that before Frank Murphy got through Tom Dewey's achievements would begin to look like pretty small potatoes. Cherubic Columnists Alsop & Kintner also speculated on a New Deal "dream ticket" for 1940: Roosevelt & Murphy.

Meanwhile, the underworlds of a dozen cities quaked as virtuous Bachelors Murphy and Hoover flew back east. For some unexplained reason even the local law was being enforced in Chicago.* As abstaining Frank Murphy winged toward Chicago it became harder to buy a drink after the legal closing hour than it ever had been during prohibition.

*Chicago's Mayor Edward Joseph Kelly last week offered his three-story brick house to Cardinal Mundelein for use of the Church.

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