Finding of Fact

A dust-dry little dispatch out of the U.S. Court of Claims last week almost legally proved that Franklin Roosevelt once made a mistake--a thing he has only once publicly admitted (TIME, June 2).

In a 115-page finding of fact, Court Commissioner Richard H. Akers found that there was no fraud in the airmail contracts canceled in 1934. Mr. Akers almost charged the President with a mistake, but then backed delicately away, leaving final decision to the Court. But one fact seemed clear: the Army need not have taken over the airmail routes; the deaths of twelve Army pilots were needless.

The seven-year-old controversy had almost been forgotten. In 1934 in the midst of a wave of public righteousness Hugo LaFayette Black, then Senator from Alabama with a preternaturally sharp nose for scandals, "exposed" the mail-carrying airlines of the U.S. Black charged that Walter Folger ("High-Hat"*) Brown, Postmaster General under Herbert Hoover, had granted lush mail-subsidy contracts to major airlines, had thus evaded the law requiring competitive bidding for Government contracts. The President did not wait to ask questions. He called in Postmaster General Farley, Attorney General Cummings, Secretary of Commerce Roper, Secretary of War Dern. Then he canceled the airmail contracts and ordered the Army to take over the flying of the U.S. mail until a new contract-subsidy system had been worked out.

Army pilots suffered the consequences. On the third day of trial flights two pilots were killed in a plane stall in Utah. That night another flew into the ground in Idaho. Less than a week later another boy, with ice on his wings, fell in Ohio. Next day an engine failed over Long Island Sound: one drowned, two injured. At Cheyenne two died when a spitting motor sent a plane into a spin after the takeoff. Another flier broke his neck in an Ohio snowstorm. Engine failure killed a pilot in a Daytona Beach takeoff. Eight days later another plane went into a spin at Cheyenne. Bad weather crashed a flier in Iowa; a pilot, lost in a thick Pennsylvania fog, jumped at too low an altitude.

The U.S. grew angry with the President and Big Jim Farley. Franklin Roosevelt consulted his Cabinet again, ordered the mail returned to private lines as soon as possible, on conditions barring the "evils of the past." Last week Commissioner Akers cagily found certain of these "evils of the past" were nonexistent, although he did not settle the spoils charges. He indicated that High-Hat Walter Brown's seeming collusion-&-conspiracy policy was an effort to reorganize a chaotic industry. He left the way clearly open for the old companies, since reorganized under new names, to claim damages amounting to about $2,500,000. He said that the Government had no case.

* At a cost of $3,500, Postmaster General Brown amused the U.S. by turning in his official Cabinet automobile, for a second model with a higher roof so that he could get in & out without crushing his top hat.

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