Dr. Feis Gives Notice

Last week Cordell Hull may have harvested abroad the greatest triumph of his career (see p. 13), but in the corridors of his State Department there was a distinct scent of resignation, in every sense of the word. The family, neither little nor happy, was breaking up. Latest withdrawal from a team that isn't there: Dr. Herbert Feis, since 1931 the chief economic adviser in the Department.

Of expert Herbert Feis it was once said "he looks like Harpo and talks like Karl Marx." The Harpo crack is an exaggeration, the Karl part a misunderstanding. Feis, a Hoover holdover, loves fast conversation and the intellectual paradox, but, stripped of provocative verbiage, his opinions would be generally acceptable. Never a New Dealer, he belongs to none of Washington's "ideological" factions.

In leaving, Dr. Feis had lost not a fight but his patience. His economic credo--free trade, moderately state-controlled international movement of capital--is Mr. Hull's too. But under a Secretary sometimes praised for basing his foreign policy on economics, the Department's economic division has been reduced to mediocre research. Economic world policy for the U.S., if any, is to be shaped in the Treasury and in Leo Crowley's newly begotten Foreign Economic Administration. From Mr. Hull's economic advisers nothing seems expected beyond long-staled routines.

More resignations are likely to follow. There is embittered boredom among the Department's economists.

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