CHEMICALS: Paddlin’ Aniline Home

Judge John E. Mack, a Dutchess County lawyer who nominated Franklin D. Roosevelt for his first political job (New York State Senator in 1910), who went on to nominate him for President in 1932 and in 1936, got a new job last week. He became president of General Aniline & Film Corp. (originally formed by the German Dye Trust), whose real owners’ nationality is still beclouded (TIME, July 28).

Franklin Roosevelt’s “old friend and neighbor” did not look like the operating’ head of a big dyestuffs and camera com pany at first blush. His most famous previous jobs: 1) defense counsel (successful) of Mrs. Anne Urquhart Stillman in the scandalous 1921 divorce suit brought against her by her husband, the late New York Banker James A. Stillman; 2) representing Edward (“Daddy”) Browning in the “Peaches” Browning 1926 separation action; 3) defense counsel (un successful) for U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Martin T. Manton against bribery charges in 1939.

But Aniline does not need chemists or executives as much as it needs friends. Judge Mack replaces D. A. Schmitz (brother of the German Dye Trust’s Hermann Schmitz) who disappeared last month in an offhand Aniline announcement that he was “not now . . . president.” Mack’s election, the Aniline board evidently believes, will help uncloud the company. But the solution of the Aniline problem is not so simple as that.

Next month (or maybe sooner) the chairman of Aniline’s parent I. G. Chemie, Felix Iselin, will arrive from Switzerland to see about selling Chemie’s large interest in Aniline stock. He will confront a tangled lineup of interested parties. The Treasury, which must unfreeze the stock if any money is to change hands, has already vetoed one would-be purchaser and may veto others. The Department of Justice is investigating Aniline’s relationship both to Chemie and to the German Dye Trust. Several Wall Street groups, which admire the company more than its present management, are trying to buy control from the Swiss. But the present management wants the management control left where it is now. Mack-for-Schmitz is their opening gambit.