Rebels and Ripsnorter

Secretary of State Hull trudged into the White House one day last week looking glum and tired. Despite his reiterated warnings that war abroad was imminent, and that if it came the President of the U. S. should have a hand more free than he is allowed under the present Neutrality Act, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had just voted finally not to revise Neutrality at this session of Congress. The Committee's vote was close: 12-to-11. It was particularly painful to Cordell Hull because one of those who voted against him was his old friend Walter George of Georgia, upon whom he had exerted long and prayerful suasion. Now revision of Neutrality was lost, probably unless and until Adolf Hitler should march, and then Mr. Hull thought it would be too late.

If Cordell Hull was worn and downcast, his chief was furious. Walter George was one of the Senators whom Mr. Roosevelt tried to "purge" last year. To his mind this just showed how right he was in seeking to rid his party of such obstructionists. And a Senator who voted with George was Iowa's Guy Gillette, another purge-marked man. Mr. Gillette denied that his motive now was revenge for 1938, but that made Franklin Roosevelt feel no better about his worst defeat of all this session. He conferred with Cordell Hull about what they should do next.

Two days passed and then the Washington Times-Herald headlined: "NEUTRALITY NOTE SPLITS F. D., HULL." This was over a United Press story to the effect that Mr. Roosevelt wanted to blast at the Senate, that Mr. Hull was restraining him lest he irreparably widen the gulf between him and his Senate opponents, and further antagonize the Rome-Berlin Axis.

Anger that he had not publicly vented on the Senate now poured out of Franklin Roosevelt upon the United Press. In a special statement that marked a new high in bad blood between him and the working press, he called the U. P.'s story false. The U. P. stuck to its guns and, when Mr. Roosevelt's next Neutrality move did come, had the satisfaction of noting that it was a moderate statement by Mr. Hull, not a Roosevelt ripsnorter.

For the record, Mr. Hull patiently reiterated once more that, in his view, with war threatening, the President should be relieved of the necessity of declaring an embargo on "arms, ammunitions and implements of war" at war's outbreak. The need to preserve a neutral's rights under international law was his formal argument for revision, but he restated Franklin Roosevelt's interventionist intentions to the satisfaction of the Isolationists who had blocked them, when he said:

"I profoundly believe that the first great step towards safeguarding this nation from being drawn into war is to use whatever influence it can, compatible with the traditional policy of our country of noninvolvement, so as to make less likely the outbreak of a major war."

Fact is, polls of public opinion on Neutrality have strongly supported the well-known Hull-Roosevelt desire to support the Democracies (with arms but not men) against the Dictators. The Bloom bill, passed by the House but now allowed to die in the Senate, was not wholly unacceptable to Messrs. Hull & Roosevelt because its embargo exempted airplanes, motors and the like, which England and France need badly. Under the present Neutrality Law if Hitler marches before September U. S. manufacturers must be stopped from delivering some $175,000,000 worth of airplanes, etc. which" have Been ordered.

>> Chairman Key Pittman of the Foreign Relations Committee followed up the Administration's defeat by asking Secretary

Hull's opinion on a straight war-materials embargo resolution against Japan, promising his committee's Isolationists he would not let a Neutrality rider be attached to it if it went before the Senate.

>> The President of the United States last week received a petition from the president of the American Federation of Labor and a committee, seeking his intercession to restore prevailing wages for union men on WPA. Contemplating the disorders being indulged in by their followers throughout the land, the President of the U. S. answered them by dictating a statement to his press conference: "You cannot strike against the Government."

>> Franklin Roosevelt's new Federal Security Administrator, Paul Vories McNutt, was confirmed in office last week by the Senate. He promptly proceeded to evacuate the Public Health Service (one of his charges) from its handsome three-story stone home on Constitution Avenue. "Finest campaign headquarters in America," cracked an observer, and at White House press conference, reporters asked Franklin Roosevelt sly questions about his appointee's chances for the 1940 nomination. This irritated the President, who lectured his hearers about reading political implications into the appointment. But he, too, was sly. He explained that Indiana's McNutt should not be regarded more seriously as a candidate than any of a dozen other charming young men. What their friends in the "sticks" might try to do for them, said he, was beyond their control. Thus, for the moment, was Candidate McNutt relegated to the shadow of his superior, and the press thwacked one more time.

>> "A passion for anonymity," and the ability to get things done, were prime requisites set by Franklin Roosevelt for six $10,000-per-year executive assistants asked by him last year and granted this year in Reorganization. Last week he chose three of them: sparse-haired Lauchlin Currie, 36, an economist with the Federal Reserve Board; line-faced William H. ("Mc") McReynolds, 59, Administrative assistant to Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, recipient this year of an LL.D. for being Washington's most successful civil service careerist (since 1906); stocky, shock-haired James H. ("Bim") Rowe, 30, out of Montana by way of the Harvard Law School and a term as secretary to the late Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, into the New Deal by way of Tommy-the-Cork Corcoran and Son James Roosevelt, whose secretary he was until the latter left politics for cinema. Chief functions of these three "human ciphers" will be as legmen between the President and those parts of the Government they know best. Cipher McReynolds will specialize on administrative and personnel problems, particularly those connected with Government efficiency. Cipher Rowe's appointment was interpreted as leaving Patron Corcoran free to continue roving on special assignments, such as engineering labor union relations and lining up State delegations for 1940. Cipher Currie will transmit White House drive to the many-ciphered program aimed at recovery.

>> The Senate last week confirmed President Roosevelt's appointment of Elmer D. Davies to be a U. S. district judge in middle Tennessee, then asked the President to return the resolution because New Jersey's Senator Barbour, absent at the vote, wanted to protest against Mr. Davies as no friend of Negroes, a onetime Klansman. President Roosevelt replied that the Senate was too late: he had already signed and mailed Judge Davies' commission.

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