Jinnee Jones

There were signs that Franklin Roosevelt was trying to stuff Jesse Jones, the jinnee he created, back in a jar.

Last week WPB Chief Donald Nelson appointed tall, modest Arthur B. Newhall, in charge of rubber imports for WPB, as coordinator of the hodgepodge, over lapping rubber agencies in Washington. Though a coordinator was badly needed and coordination was Mr. Nelson's chief aim, the effect was a squelch for Mr. Jones who, as Federal Loan Administrator, had stretched out over the synthetic rubber program. In a showdown, Nelson's Newhall will have authority to tell Texas' Jones where to get off.

Week before, President Roosevelt authorized the Army, Navy and Maritime Commission to deal directly with the Federal Reserve Banks in arranging loans for contractors and subcontractors. Formerly all such deals had to be made through the Reconstruction Finance Corp., run by the octopoic Mr. Jones.

His enemies, who abound, admitted that in peacetime Mr. Jones had been a good jinnee from a banker's point of view. As boss of RFC, the Department of Commerce, a dozen other related and unrelated New Deal agencies, he saved many a bank, railroad and factory from the financial junk heap, made money for the Government.

Mr. Jones had handled every pre-Pearl Harbor proposition with a small-town banker's suspicion and a horse-trader's fishy eye. Mr. Jones haggled, saved the U.S. many a nickel, lost the U.S. millions of dollars' worth of them. When defense agencies pleaded with companies to accept wartime orders and expand, Mr. Jones demanded collateral as usual, saw to it that each deal was a rock-sound financial proposition before he certified a Federal loan. In the summer of 1940 he turned a cold shoulder on synthetic rubber manufacture, because he figured that synthetic rubber would cost 40-c- a pound to produce. Commented the Nation wryly: "If the United States loses the war, it will go down to defeat in a thoroughly solvent condition." Mr. Jones was accused of delay all along the line: aluminum, magnesium, ships, defense housing, steel.

But silver-haired, mountainous (6 ft. 3 in.) Mr. Jones turned the cold greenish eyes of his poker face to his enemies, warded off unlikely questions with a "Huh?" and heard only what he wanted to hear through his good right ear. Said he: "Of course we look out for protection of the Government. That's our job. We see that the contracts protect the United States."

Last week Jinnee Jones sat massively in his Washington office atop the Lafayette Building and fumingly defended Jesse Jones: "I'm not a banker and never wanted to be one. I haven't got a banker's mind. . . . We don't have any delays here. . . . The best evidence that we've been working is the fact we've gotten out $12,500,000,000 in about a year and a half on this war stuff."

Mr. Jones was still far from being put in a jar. Dispenser of billions of dollars, as smart at politics as at financing, he has always had Congress eating out of his hand. His removal would unloose a roar of thunder in his home State, Texas, and the South, which has received a goodly portion of Mr. Jones's well-distributed loans. But one man in the U.S. still looms larger: Mr. Roosevelt.

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