Statesman's Letter

"I beg you to believe me that this opposition of mine is no mere political dispute; it is a deep conflict of principle. I hold that no man should ascend to the bench to pass upon the rights, even the lives, of other men when he is obligated to a political boss.... Still worse, it seems to me, would be a judge long associated with and long beholden to a man who says that and acts as if the law begins and ends with himself." So wrote Governor Edison of New Jersey.

To get re-elected next fall, New Jersey's ruddy, sleek Senator William H. Smathers must have the help of Boss Frank Hague. So Smathers recently backed Hague's man Thomas F. Meaney for a Federal judgeship. And, although Senator Smathers has not distinguished himself in the Senate, President Roosevelt, who wants 100% New Dealers reelected, obligingly appointed Meaney (TIME, May 18). The deal was a piece of routine politics.

But Jersey's handsome, aristocratic, hard-of-hearing Governor Charles Edison is no routine politician. Independently wealthy as head of his father's "Edison Industries," he went into public life to earn his pay, not just to get it. He was made Assistant Secretary of the Navy by his great & good friend Franklin Roosevelt, later ran for Governor in 1940 as a personal favor to the President. As Governor, he has waged a bitter, housecleaning battle to purify New Jersey politics by sweeping out the ubiquitous Hague cockroaches.

Governor Edison knew that President Roosevelt's appointment of Meaney was the routine sort of kick-in-the-face that practical politicians must learn to shrug off. He knew that, unless he held his peace, he would embarrass Friend Roosevelt. Yet last week, with the philosophic detachment of the deaf, and the practical detachment of a man to whom politics is more than a game, he sat down and wrote a statesman's letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"From the day when his name was first mentioned, I have opposed the appointment. . . . Not because I have any personal antipathy to [Meaney]--so far as I know I have never met him--but because he represents an attitude toward the judicial office which is to me repulsive, and is and ever will be, I hope, repulsive to all Americans. . . .

"The recent career of Mr. Meaney has demonstrated that he is a pawn in the hands of a man who has expressed his conception of the nature of justice in the now-famous phrase, 'I am the law.' . . . Can it be assumed that he will divest himself of the habits of a lifetime and administer his court with a justice unstained by politics?"

Statesman Edison put the issue of making Tom Meaney a judge up to the statesmen of the U.S. Senate.

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