The Barnacle Scraper

Once a year, as directed by law, Harry Truman sends a committee of private citizens off to Philadelphia to visit the U.S. Mint to make sure it isn't cheating on the metal content of U.S. coins. Before the group's departure, he gravely signs ornate commissions for each. Afterward, he receives a solemn report which notes that the mint is making no wooden nickels, no nickel-plated dimes.

A man with Truman's interest in history might find all this musty rigmarole* fascinating enough--if he didn't have to cope with the same sort of trivia every day in the week. In the years since 1789, Congress has imposed some 1,100 specific duties upon the President, and fully half of them are now outmoded or inconsequential. Last week, with the consent of Congress, Harry Truman finally began shucking off some of the barnacle growth.

By executive order, he turned over a batch of 20 functions to the Secretary of the Interior. Among them was the duty of taxing people in the Virgin Islands who import, manufacture, produce, compound, sell, prescribe or administer marijuana for medical purposes. He also gave up the duty of removing and appointing the principal chieftains of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek and Seminole Indian tribes, and of approving resolutions of their tribal councils.

At the same time, he turned his back squarely on migratory birds; until last week he not only had to regulate hunting of migratory wild fowl, but promulgate rules concerning transportation and sale of their drumsticks, wings and necks (in case a wily scofflaw dissected them). He also shucked off responsibility for toll-fixing on roads and trails in Alaska. This was just a beginning; abolishing obsolescent chores such as the mint commissions is still to come. Eventually he hopes to confine presidential decisions and paper work (he signs from 600 to 800 papers a day) to matters more directly concerning the Atomic Age.

Last week the President also:

>Asked Gordon Gray, former Secretary of the Army and now president of the University of North Carolina, to become director of a new national psychological strategy board. The board's function: to tie together the work of at least seven agencies in the cold war.

>Pleaded with both Congress and the public for extension and stiffening of price, wage and rent controls. "If we let inflation run away," he warned, "the Russians will win the cold war without firing a shot." The issue was above politics, he told a congressional delegation from both parties. The same day, Democratic Party Chairman Bill Boyle mailed out 50,000 copies of a letter calling the Republicans the "inflation party."

>Announced that with regret he had abandoned plans to attend the annual reunion of his old World War I outfit, the 35th Division, at Topeka, Kans.--the first he has missed since becoming President.

>Made it plain that he just wouldn't work hard to enforce the Kem amendment, which bans economic aid to countries shipping goods of war to Russia or her satellites. The Administration (which has no quarrel with the purpose of the legislation) argues that it is so unrealistically drawn that the friendliest, countries could not qualify for aid under its terms, and that if it were enforced, it would wreck the very nations on which the U.S. depends for military assistance. If the Kem amendment were literally applied, only Tito's Yugoslavia among European nations would be eligible for U.S. aid.

>Gave the back of his hand to Illinois' Democratic Senator Paul H. Douglas. Asked at his weekly press conference about Douglas' proposal that both parties nominate Eisenhower for President, Truman replied with a sarcastic counter-question: With Senator Douglas as Vice President?

* The committee has been going to the mint yearly since 1793 after President George Washington approved legislation calling for an annual "Trial of the Coins." Money from the mints at Denver and San Francisco is included in the test. Coins minted at Denver are stamped with an initial D, from San Francisco with an S. Except for wartime 5-c- pieces which contained no nickel and bear the initial P, coin from the Philadelphia mint is unmarked. In 158 years, the committee, usually from twelve to 14 people, has never found a defective coin.

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