RFC's Cross

Cloyd Weaver Miller, an Ohio little businessman, is self-appointed gadfly to RFC. Last week stocky, white-haired Mr. Miller, with a crusader's gleam in his glacial blue eyes, laid plans to go to Washington to bring to a pestiferous climax the strangest one-man campaign of harassment ever waged against a New Deal agency.

Cloyd Miller, in his 58 years, has seldom hesitated to give annoyance where he thought annoyance was due. At 19 he was fired for writing a sassy letter to his boss; unabashed, he proceeded to use the boss's name as reference in seeking other jobs. He has been mad at RFC since 1938, when he applied for a $60,000 loan to reopen his Hickory Clay Products Co. (tile) at Mineral City, Ohio. The plant had been shut down most of the time since 1929, had lost money steadily. When he asked RFC to finance improvements and provide new working capital, RFC looked at the company's record and flatly refused.

To Miller, RFC was henceforward an arrogant bureaucracy aligned with the big railroads and dead set against the little businessman. He began a long series of trips to Washington, letters to big and little RFC shots, visits and letters to Ohio Congressmen. He got out a mimeographed letter, Hickory News, whose main purpose was to give bureaucracy hell. In one issue he referred to RFC 'as "Railroad's Fat Cat" and to ICC (which he also dislikes) as "Iscariot's Carnal Cat's-paw." Every time RFC turned him down on a new application (total to date: six) his mimeograph whirled faster and hotter. Last year he decided to switch to making smelter linings, hired a ceramics engineer to take charge, was sure he could get a $50,000 loan in the name of National Defense. When RFC indicated that any loan would depend upon continued employment of the engineer, Miller fired the engineer, lost the loan, turned the mimeograph faster & faster. His interpretation: RFC was trying to get control of his plant by using the engineer as "its man."

Once Miller got in to see Jesse Jones--a visit that ended quickly with both men hopping mad. Afterward he wrote to Jones: "You are so cloistered I do not think you know what is going on in your office. . . . RFC's officiousness, ill will bad temper and manners have interested me." When he heard that one of Jones's secretaries had described him as "obnoxious and a nuisance," he wrote in Hickory News: "The reason I am a nuisance . . . is that I remind these men of their carelessness, inefficiency and incompetence." Such colorful invective appealed to anti-New Deal newsmen and columnists who reprinted a lot of it. Some of it was inserted in the Congressional Record by obliging Congressmen.

Miller's forthcoming visit to Washington is not to apply for another loan. Instead he has a better idea: to organize a new operating company and offer stock to Jesse Jones and other RFC officials. Now said Mr. Miller, he would learn once and for all "whether New Dealers have the courage to invest in American enterprise. I should have some fun interviewing the directors of RFC and trying to get their names on the dotted line." What he expected to have on the line when his trip ended: dots.

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