CABINET: Lean Men

When the New Deal, tackling Depression, launched NRA, WPA, PWA, AAA, a host of new officials turned up in Washington to tackle new jobs. Last week the vanguard of a new host appeared to tackle the problem of a world at war.

New men for new jobs, new jobs for old hands abounded, as Franklin Roosevelt began to make over his Government to wartime specifications. Changes extended from the Cabinet (see p. 9) down to bureaus where the urgencies of peace-in-war abruptly supplanted the routines of peace. Great was the demand for lean fellows, hungry for action. Under the new faces which went to Washington appeared hardly a single paunch.

The Treasury in time of Neutrality is a fiscal balance wheel, an enforcement agency of the first magnitude. Its Secretary Henry Morgenthau scurried home from vacation (in Scandinavia) by cutter to St. John’s, Newfoundland, from there to Washington by plane, dashed to his office at 4 a.m. Within 48 hours he had called up a corps notable for a preponderance of 1) competent, stable businessmen, 2) economists who comb their hair.

To be Assistant to the Secretary (at $10,000 a year) in charge of Neutrality operations having to do with shipping, tall, knife-nosed, wealthy Basil Harris quit his vice-presidency of U. S. Lines in Manhattan. The better to watch over U. S. ports, he also became Commissioner of Customs, succeeding venerable (80), goateed James Henry Moyle of Utah. Spry Mr. Moyle during part of World War I was an Assistant Secretary. Last week he was gently upped to Assistant again, temporarily without portfolio.

A new job called Assistant Secretary Herbert Gaston: to coordinate the activities of Treasury’s 10,578 Coast Guardsmen, 750 Customs agents, 250 Secret Service men, 250 income-tax inspectors, 1,250 alcohol inspectors. Tall, worn Mr. Gaston is an ex-newspaperman who lost out at 50 (when the old New York World expired), came back as Henry Morgenthau’s trusted man Friday. Because he clamped down on departmental publicity in 1933, he rates as a stuffed shirt in the ribald, nude-daubed Treasury press room. But columnists and other “think piece” composers who value the long view applaud his emergence as Treasury No. 3 man (No. 2: Under Secretary John Hanes).

Herbert Gaston’s chief job within a job is to direct the Coast Guard on peace patrol. Along with the Navy (which last week began to recommission 116 ancient destroyers for patrol), the Coast Guard will range the Atlantic Coast and 200 miles at sea.

“I’m just trying to be forehanded,” Henry Morgenthau explained, as he made an announcement that wakened memories of 1917: the appointment of the first dollar-a-year-men of World War II. They were three bankers: able, affable Tom K. Smith, 57, of St. Louis, a distinguished veteran of the Liberty Loan campaigns in 1917-19, who in 1939 is to be “a sort of coordinator of all banking problems for the Treasury”; Warren Randolph Burgess, 50, of Manhattan’s National City Bank, a military statistician during World War I, recalled to duty last week as an expert on Government financing; shining-eyed Earle Bailie, 48, of J. W. Seligman & Co., drafted to gauge war’s effects on international exchange.

The three “fastest thinkers in the country,” Mr. Morgenthau called a trio of economists whom he added to his advisory staff. One of them, short, tart Jacob Viner, 47 (University of Chicago), who got disgusted with Roosevelt Spending last year and quit the Treasury, returned from Norway last week with Secretary Morgenthau. Another, Winfield William Riefler, 42, used to work for the Federal Reserve Board, since 1935 has taught at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. The third, also a veteran of Federal Reserve and a professor at the Institute, was Walter Winne Stewart, 54. They, will be expected, said Mr. Morgenthau, “just to sit and think.”

The State Department recalled one of its perennial servitors, lanky Breckinridge Long, 58, who during World War I was Assistant Secretary of State. At the bidding of his onetime colleague, he is to head a new Special Division for “handling special problems arising out of the disturbed conditions in Europe.” Sample problems: repatriation of U. S. citizens caught in war zones; representation of Great Britain and France in Berlin, where the U. S. has taken over their embassies.

Agriculture’s Secretary Henry Agard Wallace set up an advisory council of 28 to see that the farmer does not suffer during, neutrality, or “if the situation grows worse.” Among them: Publisher Barry Bingham (Louisville Courier-Journal); famed Cotton Trader William L. Clayton of Houston; brisk, brittle Hector Lazo, whose Cooperative Food Distributors of America* can be highly useful when & if a worsened situation makes food distribution a real war problem in the U. S.; Chicago Packer Thomas E. Wilson (Wilson & Co., National Livestock & Meat Board); President Earl Smith of the Illinois Agriculture Association. Said Henry Wallace in a statement eloquent of Washington’s worries: “New and difficult problems . . . can be solved without resort to the methods of dictators . . . within the framework of our economic democracy.”

Army & Navy, suddenly boomed by decree to their biggest proportions in peacetime, smoothly dispatched men, planes, guns, ships to: 1) the Panama Canal (where Major General David. L. Stone as military governor was placed over the civil administration as well), 2) Puerto Rico, where both services are fashioning a new first line of Caribbean defense, 3) the Philippines.

To his new War Resources Administration, Assistant Secretary of War Louis Arthur Johnson added a seventh member: Manhattan Banker John Milton Hancock, unlean but exceedingly active, who directed Navy purchasing during World War I, as a partner in Lehman Bros, recently tried to persuade SEC to loosen its Stock Exchange regulations.

Of all the appointments-made last week, John Hancock’s was the most disturbing to the New Deal wing of the Administration. To them it suggested that although they have pretty well succeeded for six years in keeping Reform ahead of Recovery in the President’s mind, the time might come when war might come ahead of Reform.

*A trade association of 20,680 independent grocers using joint buying, advertising, etc. to fight chains and supermarkets.