TERRITORIES: Minister of Colonies

Two months ago President Roosevelt bunched the Washington government of Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands all under a new Division of Territories & Island Possessions in the Department of Interior. Last week he found a man to run the lot along New Deal lines. The man was Dr. Ernest Henry Gruening.

Dr. Gruening is no doctor of philosophy like Dr. Tugwell or Dr. Moley, but a real M. D. His medical practice, however, has been devoted mostly to curing social ills. In 1911, even before graduating from Harvard Medical School, he started as newshawk, became copyreader, city editor, managing editor successively to Boston’s American, Herald, Traveler, Journal, then to Manhattan’s Tribune. Nine years of such experience convinced him of the pathological condition of U. S. society.

In 1920 he was ready to go forth to heal society. For that job he became managing editor of The Nation. Chairman Medill McCormick of a Senate committee investigating U. S. occupation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, sent him to those countries to look into condi tions. Thereafter Dr. Gruening became a bitter critic of U. S. policy in Latin America, a champion of all the little nations on whose soil and soul the U. S. had stepped. In 1924 he publicized the presidential candidacy of the venerable Robert La Follette Sr., helped to throw a “Red Scare” into the U. S. electorate. For two years thereafter he retired to Mexico to write a book (Mexico and Its Heritage], but in 1927 he was back in the U. S., founding the Evening News at Portland, Me. There he promptly discovered another evil worthy of his attack. The Insull utilities, developing Maine’s water power, wanted the privilege of selling that power in adjoining States. Dr. Gruening led and won the fight to keep Maine’s power in Maine and thereafter became a prime foe of public utilities (TIME, Sept. 22, 1929). In January 1933 he rejoined The Nation. With the coming of the New Deal two months later, his hour had struck.

For his criticism of U. S.-Latin American relations, President Roosevelt made him general adviser to the U. S. delegation at the Pan American conference at Montevideo. Last December J. David Stern, an ardent New Dealer from Philadelphia, bought the New York Evening Post and in February hired Dr. Gruening as editor. The association lasted only a few weeks. For all their enthusiasm for social reform, Stern of Russian-Jewish extraction and Gruening of German-Jewish extraction were unable to see eye to eye.

Last week the chief of the New Deal found a new job for Ernest Gruening, managing what U. S. imperialists like to think of as U. S. colonies.* His appointment as “Minister of Colonies” promptly threw Hawaii, relatively comfortable and prosperous, into a state of alarm. Not happy over its treatment by Dr. Tugwell, an editor of The New Republic (Island sugar planters last week filed suit against the sugar quota he had set for them), Hawaii feared what might befall it at the hands of Dr. Gruening, an ex-editor of The Nation. For nothing does Hawaii dread more than that the New Deal’s doctors, medical and philosophical, may cause map-makers to tint U. S. possessions with the color hitherto traditionally assigned to Britain’s colonies—a bright pink.

*Not included in the portfolio of colonies is the Canal Zone (governed by the Army for military reasons), Guam, American Samoa, Wake and Midway Islands (governed by the Navy for reasons of strategy), nor the Philippines whose freedom is around a ten-year corner.