FOREIGN SERVICE: To the Reds

In Moscow last week Communist comrades blinked in amazement at themadness of Americans. The fresh snow in the backyard of the famous Spiridonovskaya Palace was littered with new bathtubs and other plumbing fixtures. One of the handsomest houses in the city, it was built only a few years before the revolution by Spasso, a fur tycoon (soon afterward murdered by his son), and its plumbing, barely 25 years old, is among the most modern in Moscow. But those crazy Americans who rented it as a home for their Ambassador have to have still newer plumbing.

Little did the simple Russians know that even the rich Spasso’s palace had to be brought up-to-date if it was to compare with the 66-room triplex apartment in Manhattan to which the wife of the new U. S. Ambassador is accustomed. For last week, when President Roosevelt sailed for Buenos Aires, he left behind him a commission making Joseph Edward Davies U. S. Ambassador to the U.S.S.R.

On a strict cash-politics basis Mr. Davies was not entitled to the job. He gave only $17,500 to the Democratic campaign chest this year, whereas his rival for the job, Curtis Bok, esthetic son of the late great editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, gave $30,000. Moreover, Curtis Bok once worked in a Soviet candy factory and now is judge of an orphans court in Philadelphia. After election, however, Mr. Bok was let know that Franklin Roosevelt did not want any amateur diplomats in big jobs during present international complications. Young Mrs. Bok was given a job on the President’s farm tenancy commission and they went out to Nebraska for Thanksgiving while Joe Davies went around to the State Department to “take instruction” for his new job.

No amateur is he. He will be 60 years old this Sunday and nearly 20 years have already elapsed since he was first offered the job of Ambassador to Russia by Woodrow Wilson. In 1912 young Lawyer Joe Davies. Democratic National Committeeman from Wisconsin, ran Woodrow Wilson’s western campaign headquarters in Chicago. When Wilson was elected Mr. Davies was made U. S. Commissioner of Corporations, later upped to chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. He was one of the bright young men of the Wilson Administration, and from another of that group he still has an old photograph inscribed. ‘To my old side kick,” signed “Franklin Roosevelt.” He declined the job of Ambassador to Russia, or to Italy, or of Governor General of the Philippines, and elected in 1918 to run for Senator in Wisconsin. He was beaten by Republican Irvine Lenroot by a bare 2,500. So he returned to Washington to be a corporation lawyer (expert on the anti-trust laws) and “private diplomat.”

It was a profitable practice. He represented the late Senator Couzens and others when some of Andrew Mellon’s bright young men in the Treasury tried to assess extra income taxes on a new valuation of the oldtime minority stockholders’ interest in Ford Motor Co. Herepresented Senator James J. Davis of Pennsylvania, who was tried for conspiring to conduct a lottery for the Loyal Order of Moose. His diplomatic efforts consisted in acting on various occasions as counsel for the U. S., Mexico, Peru, in arbitration cases. Three years ago, after the Democrats came into office, he succeeded Edward Everett Gann as counsel to President Trujillo of Santo Domingo. For merely arranging during Depression a postponement of one year’s amortization payments on the debt of the Dominican Republic he, asked a fee of 1% or $48,000.

In September 1935, when his wife of 33 years divorced him in Nevada he settled on her a reputed $1,500,000. Three months later he married Mrs. Marjorie Post Close Hutton, who got a divorce the same month that he did.— The second Mrs. Davies is not such a rapidly marrying woman as her name might indicate for she was married 14 years to her first husband, Major Edward B. Close, before divorcing him and 15 years to her second husband, Broker-Edward F. (“Ned”) Hutton. Having inherited originally some $20,000,000 from her father (Postum), and having always engaged in social and philanthropic enterprises on an appropriate scale, she and Mr. Davies were married very quietly in her triplex apartment, the entertainment costing only about $100,000, of which $4,800 was for flowers, and they went on their honeymoon abroad in her huge yacht the Sea Cloud (known as the Hussar during the Hutton era). To Communists who elevate women to high places in industry she may well seem an admirable figure, for she is a director of General Foods Corp. in which Postum has been amalgamated.

Philadelphia socialite William C. Bullitt, now Ambassador in Paris, is said to have been considerably disillusioned in his faith in Communism during his two-year stay in Moscow. Succeeding Mr. Bullitt, Mr. Davies, although a liberal in politics, will probably have few illusions to lose. He said last week with true diplomacy: “Ever since the Russian revolution, I have manifested an intellectual interest in the Communistic experiment.”

*His daughter Eleanor Davies Cheeseborough was in Nevada getting a divorce at the same time as her mother, and she, too, was married again, to Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland, fortnight after her father’s remarriage.