Shocking Words

THE ADMINISTRATION Shocking Words

Twenty years ago, Leland Olds, like many another New Dealer, had some radical notions about capitalism. As a reporter for a labor news syndicate, he once wrote: ". . . Capitalism in the United States is rapidly passing into the stage which has marked the decay of many earlier social orders . . . The owners exist only [as] a privileged class of parasites whose idleness and dissipation become an increasing stench in the nostrils of the people."

Last week, 58-year-old Leland Olds found these old words still echoing in the ears of Congress. In the years since, he had risen to a position of power. As the dominant member of the Federal Power Commission for the past ten years, he had toughened Government regulation of utilities, helped cut wholesale natural gas and electricity rates by $40.6 million a year, successfully fought legislation to exempt the rich natural-gas business from federal control. In short, he had made himself the power lobby's No. 1 candidate for political electrocution.

Disarming Witness. When his nomination for a third five-year term on FPC came up for discussion in a Senate subcommittee last week, Senators from the oil states dusted off some of Olds's old clippings. The subcommittee "discovered" them with righteous horror, although the same stories had been aired on the Senate floor five years earlier. Olds, a plain-featured man with jutting ears and a smooth manner of speech, testified that he had written as he did "because I believed radical writing was needed in the 'golden '20s' to shock the American people. . . out of the social and political lethargy . . ." He emphatically denied that he had ever been a Communist; Communism was a "negation of democracy."

President Truman rushed to the defense of his nominee with a sharp letter to Subcommittee Chairman Ed Johnson of Colorado. "The powerful corporations subject to regulation by the commission," wrote the President, "have not been pleased with Mr. Olds." Colorado's tart old Democrat Johnson replied that subcommittee members were "shocked beyond description" by what Olds had once written. He had to admit that Olds as a witness was "very convincing. Like many crusaders for foreign ideologies, he has an attractive personality and is disarming to a very high degree."

But Ed Johnson was not disarmed. His committee voted 7 to 0 to reject Olds's nomination and two days later the full Senate Committee of Interstate and Foreign Commerce voted 10 to 2 against Olds. It would have been more honest, observed the Washington Post, had the committee rejected him ''on the candid ground that he has been stubborn in his opposition to the utility interests."

The Heat's On. Once before this year, the President had gotten another oldtime New Dealer--Federal Trade Commissioner John Carson--past a balky committee, by turning on some purely political heat. He decided to try again with Olds, sent for National Democratic Chairman Bill Boyle. On Harry Truman's orders, Boyle dispatched telegrams to every Democratic national and state committeeman, governor and mayor in the U.S.. told them Olds's defeat would be "a victory for the power lobbyists and the Republican Party," and instructed them to whip their Senators into line.

At his weekly White House press conference, Harry Truman was asked whether such heat-turning-on was "a new departure in policy." It was not new at all, replied the President. He recalled that when he was a Senator, National Chairman Jim Farley had put the heat on him, tried to get him to vote for Alben Barkley instead of the late Pat Harrison for Senate majority leader. Senator Truman, President Truman confessed, had voted for Pat Harrison anyway.

Then the newsmen heard the President air a surprising view of how an appointment to a key Government office should be regarded. The case of Leland Olds, Mr. Truman said, was a question of party discipline, party policy. The trouble was, there were a lot of Democrats on Capitol Hill who thought they had a say in party policy, too. At week's end, they seemed to be in a mood to follow the practice of Senator Truman instead of the preaching of President Truman.

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