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July 3, 1937 NEWS-WEEK
that 12 per cent is the correct rate of in-
terest. Webster Knows All: In your Number 23, ¥- ‘ June 5, you employ on page 37 the word co P Pullman: In your‘issue of May 29 in pa - ~! ‘ : commenting about a movie star traveling Raeranno wring ” Webster knows only the word S on the Twentieth Century Limited from Considering your exemplary style and ar New York to Chicago in a drawing room at - orthography I would like very much to 4 $15.95 less than last year’s rate, you have have your opinion in this case - > somewhat understated the facts because F BLUMENTHAL , when the present rates were adopted the Oakland, Calif " cost of using a room by one passenger was 2 F the subject of additional reductions. The EDITORIAL Nore: Mr. Blumenthal is mis- rs actual figures illustrate this: informed. The unabridged Web : : ‘ 4 ge ebster knows For one person’ to occupy a drawing both unwieldy and unwieldly—which are room between Chicago and New York prior synonymous 2 , to June 1, 1936, exclusive of extra fare, - , 5 tee would have cost $96.90. Since June 1 the it cost is $49.10—just about one-half. This is Punster: Page 3 of your June 12 issue: V due to the reduction in rail-fare require- “Editorial Note: The note translated: nc ment from a minimum of two fares to a ‘NEWS-WEEK thanks Tzeng-Jiueq Suen for €* minimum of 114, and the Pullman Com- clearing up the confusion’.” It appears that yo pany’s new lower single-occupancy charge the same note might have been translated It ’ as well as the elimination of the surcharge. as “NEWS-WEEK thanks Tzeng-Jiueq Suen at You will see from this there has been a for clearing up the Confucian.” co 4 substantial reduction in the cost of com- DAVID V. LANSDEN m P , fortable rail travel. Cairo, Ill. th CWS E. P. BURKE oe , ei - Passenger Traflic Manager The Giftie Gie Us: Please do not send us ’ , icago, itl. any more copies. The country is full enough } ae now of damn cheap propaganda sheets of Twelve Per Cent: In your issue of June The Saturday Evening Post-Chicago Trib- r 4 om ce b ars : une type without endeavoring to disgrace 12 you had an article on Commercial Credit . so § Co. in which the so-called “6 an the intelligence of the American people by all * ; per cent” adding any more. This terrible stuff anc ac e plan for installment financing was re- }) 5 on an mr : a oo eo Sus and pe ferred to as “giving an interest rate of 18 € papers who printed it were most cer- th : ae i ire tainly repudiated at the last election. r § | Det cont per aunum. Haven't you birds found that out yet? “ , It does seem too bad that when writers No aged = anet this. out yet: do ‘ , , 2 | write about something with which they » FOU Wont Prm rs ik Clie T ¢ What are the real | are not definitely familiar they are not , , _ as 4 ; : . ce , , Ladysmith, Wis. P P 4 4 either sure to have their facts right or per- ré reasons for last week’s ; mit someone who is familiar with the sub- . . : gate ’ J m ject to review the article. Most anybody ever Norma otton: Economic fal- WwW > headlines. What whis ’ ought to realize that 6 per cent on the face lacy and stupidity reach a new height in gr per in a diplomatic ear | of a note payable in twelve monthly in- the proposal to apply the “ever-normal we 4 stallments is less than 12 per cent per an- granary” scheme to United States cotton, “D --- what seeret confer- § | num—not 18 per cent. because the foreign markets for United ve P A. E. DUNCAN States cotton are being destroyed by trade at ence ... what hidden Commercial Credit Co. barriers. le: Baltimore, Md. Formerly, the United States supplied 60 on eaused 3 pplie human emotior per cent of the world’s requirements. Now, the news to break as it ‘ EDITORIAL NOTE: NEWS-WEEK regrets an it supplies between 40 and 45 per cent. r } unfortunate error. Financial experts agree This year the world will consume 30,000,- did. $ el | be § NEWS-WEEK seeks and : ar < a finds this news behind- ; x t oo S - « E - B ™ ( 2 the-news ... brings to 3 Registered U. S. Patent Office i $ youadeeperandmore | , be , , fa $ thorough understand- Raymond Moley, Editor S. T. Williamson, Executive Editor ha 2 ing of the world’s sig- Editorial and executive offices: Rockefeller Center, New York, N.Y. - $ nificant events. It gives ei W you the reason why tor INDEX for JULY 3, 1937 ty 2 the headlines of today. COVER—The Second Horseman: And there went out an- ee . , —_ ther horse that.was red: and to him that sat thereon it w ‘ I S- — : as th Subscribe to NEW given that he should take peace from the earth ... anda da WEEK now. The cost is great sword was given to him. Apocalypse, 6:4 (See Spain). small ...only 84 for ; News-Week from European ~ 4 one year— 52 issues. ee 6 2 ete a SE OO he ik n- ee CS B . , j Tr 2 ‘ Gen 2 6 le = oe Sr ee, SR. ee ae ee ee BD W. > » N 4 th } Mail The Coupon Now Ere | os try J. E. Lowes, Jr. er ee a: | Ee ee ee an an ‘ at Circulation Mgr. OO lll * > = ae: th , News-Wrex Pas: ENTERTAINMENT (Screen, Stage) 20 SCIENCE ......... 25 — 1270 Sixth Ave., N.Y.C. on FOR YOUR INFORMATION . . 34 are rr te er ee ta Send me News-WeeEk for 1 } 4 ’ FOURTH ESTATE ...... 32 TODAY IN AMERICA ... . 36 pit yr. $4 2 yrs. $6 Dl: FRONT PAGE TRANSITION od cabestels thdtimbtene dabdansdothics si me er: aoe ee Nee oe PUBLISHED BY WEEKLY PUBLICATIONS, INC., 350 Dennison Avenue, Dayton, Ohio. Entered as second class matter February 13, 1933, 4 at the Postoffice at Dayton, Ohio, under the Act of March 3, 1879. EDITORIAL AND EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS: Rockefeller Center, 127° Sixth Avenue, New York, N. Y. VINCENT ASTOR, Chairman; MALCOLM MUIR, President; S. WINSTON CHILDS, JR., Vice President: to a sees ee ee eee GORDON S. HARGRAVES, Advertising Director; F. D. PRATT, Business Manager; CHARLES F. BOMER, Secretary-Treasurer; J. E. LOWES, Fe . 717 4 JR., Circulation Manager. Publication Office: Dayton, Ohio. SUBSCRIPTION PRICES: United States, its territories and possessions, Canada, th 4 Cuba, Mexico, Central and South America: one year, $4; two years, $6; three years, $8; single copies, 10 cents. Add $2 per year foreign post ' 4 age for all other countries. Two weeks’ notice required for change of address. Please give address to which magazine is now being delivered 4 as well as new address. Annual subscribers may have NEWS-WEEK sent to them on vacations by giving two weeks’ notice of itinerary. caitlin S$ | July 3, 1937 Copyright, 1937, by WEEKLY PUBLICATIONS, Inc. Volume X, No. !
Jul NEWS-WEEK July 3, 1937
000 bales, an all-time record. But of that, the United States will supply only 13,000,000 bales, while foreign producers will supply about 17,000,000.
What will the government do with the cotton it accumulates in the ever-normal granary? There.will be no market for it. Consequently, it will exist only as a burden and as an embarrassment.
No friend of the cotton South will ever wish the ever-normal granary atrocity on it.
WALTER PARKER Directing Economist Interior Bureau of Economics, New Orleans, La.
—
Habit: Life might not turn black but it would be very empty without NEWwS- VEEK. It has become a habit which will not break easily, I fear.
This last issue is great [June 19]. I hope you will continue to use the same cover. It is not necessary for me to say anything about the inside because as far as I am concerned the same high quality is always maintained. In fact I even enjoy reading the advertisements.
LORRAINE JOHNSON
Chicago, Ill.
a
Solution: James Nangle’s problem (NEWS-WEEK, June 19, page 5) has been solved very simply by a 5-year-old of-my acquaintance. The youngster, indulging the perennial youthful penchant for taking things apart, had his terrestrial globe out of the stand—and replaced it “upside down,” i.e. with the South Pole on top. True, the lettering was upside down, but as my young friend has not yet learned to read, it matters not at all.
[ suggest to the gentleman in New South Wales, and to all who are concerned with giving children a proper conception of the world as a ball with neither “top” nor “bottom,” in either hemisphere, that the very best thing is to teach children to look at the globe both ways before they have learned to read.
A. ARNOLDSON
Missoula, Mont.
a
No Fluke: There are probably 30 golf- ers in this country who consistently score better than Sam Parks Jr. Perhaps there are more, but this, like Sam’s is a good round figure.
However, at the Oakmont Country Club in 1935, these 30 or more golfers either forgot to score better than Sam, or else they were so busy kicking about the “un- fairness” of the course that they didn’t have time to play golf. In either case, the fact that Sam won the title is now common knowledge.
In a golf tournament such as the Na- tional Open, one does not, to quote NEws- WEEK, “fluke” the title. Instead, one mere- ly, by the simple process of playing the best golf, wins it.
Take it easy men. Sam did not “fluke” the championship. Neither did Ralph Gul- dahl.
JAMES ALLEN
Sewickley, Pa.
+
Jungle Refugee: No wonder Samuel Thurston’s Congressman (June 19 NEews- WEEK, Letters) is bewildered when he thinks of Westchester and his countless commuting constituents! I know that coun- try. And have no doubt that all the beasts and malpractices he lists flourish there in abundance.
A week end spent among the natives of that unregenerate jungle turned my hair white: after one party there the bats, mole crickets, impotent hogs, and hungry moun- tain lions marched right into my room.
It may look civilized. But—the air is pitted with profanity when its inhabitants Play golf; their homes reek with the mal- odorous miasma of contract-bridge post- mortems; mad drivers maim the outland- ers who try to stem the stiffened traffic Stream in their arterio-sclerotic parkways.
Of course it takes more than pamphlets to change a suburban cesspool into an Eden, but in the meantime at least credit the poor legislator for his desperate efforts.
SAUL BREWSTER
Winsted, Conn.
July 3, 1937 NEWS-WEEK
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NEWS-WEEK July 3, 1937
Vol. X: No. |
NEWS-WEEK
July 3, 1937
LABOR: Guardsmen Distress Strikers; Girdler Speaks His Mind; Miss Perkins and Davey Disagree
They loved parades. Crowds were there to see fun or death, and they found splendor in the flags, the guns, the guardsmen’s ordered tread—and in the dimensions of Major Gen. Gilson Light’s khakied girth.
Along Mahoning Valley roads and the streets of Ohio steel towns, thou- sands awaited 7 A.M. and the promised reopening of Republic Steel Corp. and Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. mills. Some of the strikers carried rifles, knives, clubs, and some knew where dynamite bombs were handy. Sheriffs’ deputies and police stood by with fire- arms, gas, and clubs. The rest—and they included most of the throngs— just wanted to see what they could see.
They saw the troops come. They heard the officers’ yells to nonstrikers: “There isn’t going to be any work! The mills are staying closed. Go on home!” They heard union cheers: “We’ve won the strike!”
At Youngstown, Warren, and Canton, picket captains thinned the lines and sent home their men: with the soldiers there to do pickets’ work, the union would win in no time at all.
Frank Purnell, president of Sheet & Tube, berated Martin L. Davey: “What right has the Governor to send in troops to keep men from working?” Pro-company citizens’ committees, back- to-work employes’ associations, and Youngstown’s Mayor, Lionel Evans, heaped like protests upon the Governor.
They were all a trifle short of sight. The union hadn’t won the strike; the troops weren’t going to keep men from work—not for long. Within the week the companies, the citizens, the Mayor, and the Steel Workers Organizing Com- mittee would alter their first reception of the soldiers.
The union asked for it.
Death and violence were in the valley air. Week-end gunfire had killed two Youngstown rioters and wounded more than 25. From Akron rubber §fac- tories and. —Pennsyl- vania coalfields, union motorecades sped _ to help Ohio strikers combat the reopening of the mills. In Cleve- land, three. Federal mediators begged. the companies’ ‘to: . delay. S.W.O.C. leaders tele-
graphed their unsleeping friend at the White House, and the President wired Republic and Sheet & Tube: “in the interest of a reasonable and peaceful settlement which should be expected and can be attained,” they should abandon their plans.
The companies refused: they said thousands of anti-union men demanded work. Frances Perkins, Secretary of
‘The right to work is sacred. The right to strike is equally valid.’
Labor, talked by telephone to her stymied peacemakers and to Governor Davey; all the circumstances indicated that she, the mediation board, and the President guided the Governor’s course.
Habitually a mild man, by nature and background sympathetic to indus- try’s views, the Governor proclaimed: “... I, Martin L. Davey . .. hereby ‘call forth the militia to execute the laws of the State, to suppress insurrec- tion, and repel invasion’. . .”
He quoted the State Constitution, and he also quoted Secretary Perkins: until her mediators succeeded or failed, he would maintain her cherished “status quo.” That meant: Republic and Sheet & Tube mills would remain closed at Youngstown, Campbell, Struthers, Can- ton; Republic’s mills at Warren and Niles would continue the piecemeal operations in effect since the strikes began nearly a month ago. General Light, Adj. Gen. Emil F. Marx, and their 5,000-odd infantrymen, machine gunners, and gas bombers were to pro- tect strikers and nonstrikers alike: “We shall pursue a course of strict neu- trality.”
Generals and privates did their best —but they and the Governor soon learned that the very presence of troops must violate neutrality in the eyes of one side or the other.
At Warren, the S.W.O.C. welcomed the first appearance of the troops; next day Davey ordered the soldiers to en- force a court order forbidding interfer- ence with non-union workers—and the S.W.O.C. called a gen- eral strike. In Youngs- town, too, union jubi- lance died aborning.
Mediation failed; with that hope of peace went the Gov-
ernor’s reason for maintaining status quo; and Davey
amended his orders: “The right to work is sacred. The right to strike is equally valid. Those who want to work shall enjoy that privilege. Those who wish to remain on strike ... are entitled to do so.”
The mills opened. Military pickets be-
ACME
5
,
Ohio: ‘To suppress insurrection and repel invasion . came military strikebreakers. First by the hesitant hundreds, then by the thousands, Republic and Sheet & Tube workers returned to the plants. Baffled and saddened strike leaders reassembled their picket lines as best they could; even the revived cries of “scab!” bore an overtone of defeat across the valley.
In the Federal District Court at Columbus, an S.W.O.C. suit demanded that the Governor, the National Guard, and local authorities be “enjoined from using the troops to break the strike.” From Akron, telegrams went to Secre- tary Perkins and to the President: “United Rubber Workers of America calls upon you to prevent this outrage against labor.”
Union protestants visited Governor Davey’s office; he informed them that Secretary Perkins had urged him to hale the company executives into con- ference and “keep them there until they sign an agreement.”
“In private life,” said Davey, “it would be kidnaping.”
Secretary Perkins: “I never made any such unwarranted and high-handed proposal ...I merely suggested that the State of Ohio had subpoena power to bring all concerned into a joint con- ference .. .”
Davey: “I stand on my original state- ment.”
As for the union’s demand that troops close the plants: “We have no power to keep the plants closed. It would be a moral wrong to use that power even if we did have it.”
INTERNATIONAL
"WE’: Elsewhere on the strike front, a like twist of events snared the hap- less union. At Johnstown, Pa., Gov. George H. Earle imposed “modified martial law” to forestall strife between nonstrikers and invading union miners —a visitation canceled at Earle’s re- quest, after he’d stationed 525 State police in the city. As in Ohio, the S.W.O.C. recalled its pickets from the Bethlehem Steel Corp.’s Pickets at Warren: their substitutes failed them Cambria: plants and piled praise upon
NEWS-WEEK—THE FRONT PAGE July 3, 1937
the troopers; the company, the local citizens’ committee, nonstrikers, and Johnstown authorities denounced the Governor.
There was this difference: Earle made no pretense at preserving the status quo. The strike had crippled but had failed to halt Cambria’s output; the police ignored Bethlehem’s plea for its property rights and closed the plants against all save 800 maintenance men.
Through Johnstown’s pool rooms and cafés, earnest men bore conflicting pe-
titions: “We, the undersigned .. . de- sire to commend your Excellency .. .”; We, the undersigned ... desire to
have the plant operating and demand protection .. .”
Allied with a newborn Steel Workers Committee of Johnstown, the Citizens Committee collected some $60,000 from “interested businessmen” and hired a New York publicity firm to plaster Eastern newspapers with full-page an- nouncements: “WE PROTEST... It is no part of the function of American gov- ernment to force—or to permit anyone else to force—the individual worker into surrendering his constitutional rights... If this can happen in Johns- town, it can happen anywhere else... Write Governor Earle ... Write your Senator or Congressman ... We ap- peal for funds...”
The committees’ treasurer reported “an amazing response.” An employe of the Pittsburgh publicist representing Ernest T. Weir’s National Steel Co.— still on the S.W.O.C.’s future list—ap- peared in Johnstown, and The New York Times thought enough of union suspicions to print a report that Weir was one of the chief contributors.
Johnstown relapsed into guarded calm. Mayor Daniel J. Shields emptied his jails of suspected kidnapers, rioters, and unionists hitherto deemed menaces to the municipal welfare; the State po- lice deprived Shields’ vigilantes of clubs and helmets. At midweek, Governor Earle considered that the crisis had
July 3, 1937 NEWS-WEEK—THE FRONT PAGE
INTERNATIONAL
Johnstown: ‘Modified martial law .. .’
; ; \\ a
i.
RS ena |
ACME
5 ne el ae WIDE WORLD
‘We, the undersigned .. .’
passed: “The choice to be made was lives or dollars. I chose lives... After four days of enforced peace to think it over, I hope the forces of labor and capital in Johnstown will make the same decision.”
They had no choice: nominally at the beck of local authorities, most of the State police remained. Restricted in number and scope, pickets returned to Cambria’s gates; fires rose again in the furnaces; the police reported that be- tween 5,000 and 6,000 of Bethlehem’s 15,300 men were back at work, and the S.W.O.C.’s Johnstown director strove to hold his lines: “Our fight has just begun .. .”
ISSUES: The strikes had begun just 30 days before—first against Republic, Sheet & Tube and the Inland Steel Co.; then, in the second week, at Bethle- hem’s Cambria mills. Against all the companies, the strikers pressed one plaint: refusal to sign union contracts, despite the S.W.O.C.’s agreements with most of the industry—including the United States Steel Corp.
Originally the issue stood: to sign or not to sign; so far as published state- ments indicated, the companies’ execu- tives would deal orally with the union, but they would commit nothing to paper. Last fortnight President Roose- velt publicly attacked that position; last week the companies’ verbal and written expressions reflected a change of front: none would consider agreement, upon any basis, with John Llewellyn Lewis and the Committee “for Industrial Organization. In every instance, the statements referred to the C.I.O. rather than to its steel affiliate, the S.W.O0.C.— and nobody quarreled with that, since the C.I.O. dictates its subsidiaries’ policies.
Republic Steel Corp., in a statement to employes May 26: ‘“‘Republic practices collective bargaining. It pays high wages. Why, then, has Republic op- posed the contract? Because we are convinced this contract would be mere- ly the first step toward a later demand for the closed shop and the checkoff. These are the real issues. . .”
Republic, Sheet & Tube, Bethlehem, Inland, in a joint statement to the President’s mediators, June 24: “It is not our employes who want a change in our relations—it is the C.I.O. that wants a contract. That raises the fundamental issue ... is the C.I.O. qualified to be a party to such a contract? We are
unanimous in our opinion that it is a,
Charles P. Taft, mediation board chairman; Edward F. McGrady, Assist- ant Secretary of Labor; and Lloyd K. Garrison, dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School, explaining their failure to settle the strikes: “The ques- tion ... is whether any agreement at all should be made... We proposed to each company this settlement: the mak- ing and signing of an agreement with the union, to become effective only if the union wins an election; the calling off of the strike and the return of all
WIDE WORLD
Senator Guffey took a hand
the men to work; the holding of a secret ballot election in the company’s plants by the National Labor Relations Board; the agreement to go into effect if the union wins and to be torn up if the union loses. The companies re- jected this proposal. We believe that the union would accept...”
John L. Lewis: “The S.W.O.C. is only asking these four steel companies to do what 158 corporate entities in the steel industry have already done ... There will be no compromise .. .”
Tom M. Girdler, Republic chairman, in testimony before the Senate Commit- tee on Post Offices and Post Roads: “The basic issue of this strike is the right of American citizens to work free from molestation, violence, coercion,
Tom M. Girdler: ‘Senator, Senator .. .’
and intimidation by a labor organiza- tion whose apparent policy is either to rule or to ruin American industry .. .”
‘LIE’: For the profanely outspoken Girdler, that was a temperate state- ment—and it was not all his doing. Through the warm Washington night, his lawyers and publicity men had worked over the draft while he slept at the Carlton Hotel.
In the morning he breakfasted on bacon and eggs, hired a cab, and pro- ceeded blithely to the Senate Office Building. There, in Room 318, the Post Office Committee awaited his account of the strike and of his company’s charges that unionists had interfered with mail consigned to his plants.
Brusquely he denounced Lewis; Philip Murray, chairman of the S.W.O.C. —and the C.I.O.’s Congressional stand- by, Senator Joseph F. Guffey of Pennsylvania.
Senator H. Styles Bridges of New Hampshire had sponsored the com- mittee’s inquiry into mail interference; he tapped Girdler’s temper with a friendly query: “What about state- ments by Murray and Senator Guffey that there was a verbal agreement [be- tween Republic and the union] ?”
“Mr. Murray is a liar and Senator Guffey doesn’t know what he is talking about,” Girdler answered.
No committeeman, but attending by courtesy, Guffey soon had his revenge: wasn’t it commonly bruited about Pitts- burgh clubs that Girdler had _ been kicked out of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. for giving business secrets to Republic?
“If that’s the rumor in Pittsburgh, it’s a lie,” Girdler roared, ‘and who- ever told you that is a liar . .. The chairman reproved me a short time ago, and so I don’t think I am able to answer you just in the way I want to.”
Toward the hearing’s end, Senator Theodore F. Green of Rhode Island reprimanded Girdler for evading a question and “squirming.”
“Senator, Senator, squirming isn’t my habit.”
Afterward a newspaper man asked Girdler what he thought of the com- mittee’s treatment.
“Fine, all except for that damned old fool with the spinach up there.”
Senator Green has a gray mustache.
QUOTE: Next day Girdler invited a few Washington reporters to lunch, and
(
NEWS-WEEK—THE FRONT PAGE July 3, !937
HARRIS & EWING, ACME
everybody understood that the table conversation was not to be quoted. Later, the host invited questions, and the guests quoted printable portions of the replies: he wouldn’t accept Presi- dent Roosevelt as a strike arbiter; Ed- ward F. McGrady was “Perkins’ office poy,” and Charles P. Taft “liked to talk about the things his father did.” (A reference to William Howard Taft, the late president and Chief Justice.) Unaware that his remarks would see print, Girdler took plane for Cleveland; next day he decried unauthorized pub- lication and offered the mediators his apologies: “I merely quoted remarks made to me by a former administration adviser . . . [The board’s] members showed themselves to be fair and courteous in every respect...”
FORD: NLRB Helps a Friend
By the dictates of the NLRA, and by the predilections of its members, the National Labor Relations Board func- tions as a forceful aid to unionism. Hence labor leaders rejoice and em- ployers expect an adverse decision when the board institutes an investigation.
Last week the NLRB invoked its pow- er against the Ford Motor Co.—last major automobile producer to with- stand the onset of the United Automo- bile Workers of America. The board cited Ford for “interfering with, re- straining, and coercing” workers and set a hearing July 6 in Detroit. Among the specific charges: that the formation of the Ford Brotherhood of America, Inc. (now disbanded) and the signing of 60,000 “loyalty pledges” by Ford em- ployes were intended to defeat inde- pendent organization of Henry Ford’s workers.
CANDIDATE: ‘Il am for...’
John L. Lewis is a mighty force in Pennsylvania politics. His labor vote helped Franklin D. Roosevelt carry the State last year; his backing contributed powerfully to Gov. George H. Earle’s election; the secretary-treasurer of his United Mine Workers, Thomas Ken- nedy, is Lieutenant Governor; recently Lewis maneuvered Kennedy into po- sition to run for the Senate next year against the Republican James J. Davis.
Consequently Pennsylvania politicians assume that Lewis has a hand in most of Governor Earle’s important doings at Harrisburg. By the same token, Senator Josiah W. Bailey of North Carolina took an indirect poke at Lewis
gts:
last week with the statement: “The only compensation in this _ [strike] situation is that Governor Earle has
what sort of . His candi-
indicated clearly President he would be. . dacy is practically announced...
At Harrisburg next day, Earle lent Substance to Capitol chatter that Lewis wants Mr. Roosevelt to smile away precedent and run again: “Nearly everything I do,” said the Governor, “is falsely attributed to personal ambition :.. 1 want my position definitely under- stood ...I am for Franklin D. Roose- velt in 1940...”
July 3, 1937 NEWS-WEEK
ROOSEVELT: In the Shade of an Old
Apple Tree, Sour Congressmen Sweeten
WIDE WORLD
Sit-Down on Jefferson Island
Franklin Roosevelt is at his best with a lot of people around him. Even in routine Cabinet meetings his quips of- ten touch off Henry Wallace’s giggle and lighten Henry Morgenthau’s sober face.
Last week the President devoted his acknowledged way with people to the service of his party. Out on Jefferson Island, a wooded dot off the Maryland shore of Chesapeake Bay, he met 340- odd male, Democratic members of Con- gress; he played host at a three-day stag party and frankly tried to put the legislators in a better mood with him- self and his New Deal.
Profound issues and petty irritations divided some of the flock: the Presi- dent’s proposals for judiciary reform alienated a formidable bloc; his cava- lier disregard for Congressional coun- sel rubbed raw many a sore. Mr. Roose- velt knew that some of these differ- ences went too deep for treatment by beer and personality, but the picnic answered one complaint: that the av- erage Congressman sees the President as earthlings see the moon.
SWARM: When Democratic addicts of fishing and duck hunting—the can- vasback frequents Chesapeake Bay— founded the Jefferson Islands Club eight years ago, their prospectus printed the glories of “restful isolation” amid oaks, poplars, green lawns, and “spa- cious white beaches.” Last week the three daily Congressional batches found
the trees, the lawns, the beaches—and a swarm of blood-hungry flies.
But there, under an apple tree, waited Mr. Roosevelt in slacks, a rum- pled shirt open at the neck, and a vast good humor. He sang “Happy Days” and “The G.O.P. She Ain’t What She Used to Be”; he joined the House Dem- agogues Club and thereby took his stand with baby kissers and flag wavers. He endured an unending flow of soggy jokes and contributed his share just to keep things going.
Typical picnic tickler: Chief Dem- agogue Martin Dies of Texas called upon the initiate to “favor all appro- priation bills and oppose all taxation bills,” and Mr. Roosevelt complied: “I learned that from Doc Copeland many years ago.”
Dr. Royal S. Copeland, New York physician and administration foe, was one of 60-odd absentees; he had stayed away with the observation that Con- gress would invite “manslaughter” by working through the Summer “to enact a program of doubtful value.”
Some of the rest were out of town; a few succumbed to the suspicion that the President was treating them like so many children. Senator Edward R. Burke of Nebraska had a more sub- stantial excuse—a prior engagement to speak against the court plan. Senator Rush Dew Holt of West Virginia said he couldn’t swim. Representative Mar- tin Sweeney of Ohio scorned dissimila- tion: “No amount of fishing, eating, or
9
Ss
We Ba WIDE WORLD
Senators Minton and Barkley; James A. Farley and (background) James Roosevelt
drinking, is going to change my views on the President’s court plan...”
A great amount of eating (ham, crab- meat, cheese, apple pie) and drinking (iced tea, beer, liquor) took Democratic minds off the humid heat. Echoes of “My Sweetheart’s a Mule in the Mine” floated out to cruising reporters and Secret Service men. At eventime, navy subchasers and patrol boats returned contingents of wobbly picnickers, and Senator Joseph T. Robinson observed: “The boys drank a little ice water.”
Senatorial strays clustered about the President. Josiah W. Bailey of North Carolina, once a church-paper editor, discussed the Bible and roses; Millard Tydings of Maryland talked lengthily about wheat culture.
Some had weightier objectives in mind. Representative Maury Maverick of Texas (see page 19) hoped to urge a Presidential push for. pending, liberal legislation. But Mr. Roosevelt turned him aside with a good-natured mumble; the President made no direct reference to his Congressional program, and Ma- verick reported: “It didn’t seem just right to ruin a good party by getting serious.”
DIPLOMA: Sunday night Mr. Roose- velt and his immediate party boarded the Presidential yacht Potomac; Rufus Odom, the club’s ebon man of all work, said he was tired; and the administra- tion’s friends and critics assayed the results.
Dead ahead: flies and charm
Court plan foes noted that some of the more pliant waverers had warmed alarmingly in the Roosevelt sun; plain- ly anxious to curry White House favor after a brief and futile revolt in behalf of relief economy, Senator Robinson an- nounced that he would bring up the Judiciary Bill soon after the July 4 holidays.
Gist of the first, inconclusive opinion: the President had bettered his chances to win a court compromise; to gauge the effects of soothed tempers and heightened party morale upon the rest of his program, Mr. Roosevelt and Con- gress must await the end of a long, hot Summer.
FRESHMEN: Senate Class of ‘37
Silence is the rule for Senate fresh- men, and among this session’s fledglings none has followed form more faithfully, than Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.
When he came down from Boston, he brought to the Senate a Hollywood pro- file and three distinctions: at 34, he was youngest of the youngsters;* he was one of five Republicans snatched from the November burning; and he bore the name of his late Senatorial grandfather.
Any one of these earmarks might have set him a little beyond the herd, but he preferred the prescribed regimen for plebes: regular, self-effacing at- tendance at floor sessions; hard work in his committees (Interoceanic Canals, Executive Expenditures, Territories, Military Affairs, Banking and Curren- cy). His elders approved—they still re- membered the goading antics of Huey Long and discouraged any revival of freshman exuberance. ‘
Last week Lodge closed the first phase of his apprenticeship. From his second- row seat, at the right of the president pro tem’s chair, he made his debut on the floor. His grandfather used to hold the galleries with sonorous eloquence; the grandson’s speech, urging a census of the unemployed, was brief and direct.
Afterward such administration regu- lars as Key Pittman of Nevada and F. Ryan Duffy of Wisconsin deserted the majority; 30 of 78 votes backed Lodge and his proposal to finance a census with $20,000,000 of the $1,500,000,000 relief appropri tion.
Sadly aware that their party needs bright youth, the sprinkling of Repub- lican oldsters favored Lodge with be- nign accolades. To the rest, the result indicated likely passage of a census bill when Hugo Black brings up a measure differing from Lodge’s in one important respect—its sponsor is a Democrat.
CLASS: Last fortnight a Demo- cratic baby, Claude Pepper of Florida, de- livered a maiden exhortation crammed with party loyalty and liberalism— Roosevelt brand. The White House counts upon him to help offset the dis- affection of conservative Democrats and to support the Roosevelt court reforms.
Other freshmen records: H. Styles Bridges, New Hampshire: only first-year Republican besides Lodge;
*Rush D. Holt, West Virginia, is 32; but he served his first term last year.
NEWS-WEEK—THE NATION July. 3, 1937
HARRIS & EWING Lodge: youngest freshman usually silent on the floor; in commit- tees, noisily hostile to John L. Lewis; sponsoring a proposal for 40-hour week and 40-cent minimum wage.
Allen J. Ellender, Louisiana: Antag- onism to sit-down strikes provoked first speech last March; distrusts administra- tion’s C.1.O. ties; for court increase.
Prentiss M. Brown, Michigan: apol- ogized to Senate when he broke silence to eulogize the late Senator Couzens; colleagues think he will become able legislator; for court compromise.
Harry H. Schwartz, Wyoming: They call him “The Sphinx.”
Guy M. Gillette: embarrassed fellow Iowan, Secretary Henry A. Wallace, by disclosing that AAA committeemen were using franked cards to support farm legislation; has proved himself an up-and-coming independent; anti-ad- ministration on court.
James H. Hughes, Delaware: So un- obtrusive that his colleagues haven’t gauged him; for court plan.
Edwin C. Johnson, Colorado: active chiefly in Indian-affairs legislation; quiet; independent; for the court in- crease.
Ernest Lundeen, Minnesota: his ag- gressive, Farmer-Laborite record in House indicates that he’ll make Senate hame for himself—but so far he has postponed the making. For court in- crease.
William H. Smathers, New Jersey: has spent most of his time learning Sen- ate ropes and being quiet about it; for court proposals.
_ Clyde L. Herring, Iowa: impressive in cloakroom maneuvering; silent on floor; yes on court.
Theodore F. Green, Rhode Island:
rich, pro-labor, pro-administration in court dispute; abrupt, somewhat distant in contacts with colleagues. _ Joshua Bryan Lee, Oklahoma: for judiciary change; has done nothing so far to make good his pledge: “A farm for every farmer, a home for every family”; says he’ll talk and act “when the time comes.”
July 3, 1937 NEWS-WEEK—THE NATION
CRIME: Hearst Papers Steal a March on the Nation's News
Ten years ago two Chicago reporters, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, plotted a smash-hit newspaper melo- drama. For prototypes they chose a lurid sheet and one of its lurid editors: Walter Howey, then of the Hearst- owned Chicago Herald and Examiner, became Walter Burns of “The Front Page.” In that profane and speedy play, an escaped murderer stumbled in- to Burns’ grasp; Burns planned to scoop the town. An accident spoiled his scheme—other papers muscled into his story.
Last week no accident marred The Chicago Herald and Examiner’s gift from the tabloid gods. A _ city-desk telephone jangled; the caller identified himself as Robert Irwin, 29-year-old sculptor, missing since early April. He said that he had called the Chicago bureau of New York’s scandal-loving Daily Mirror, got no answer, and no- ticed the office address: The Herald and Examiner building. He wanted to sell a story—how and why he mur- dered Ronnie Gedeon, photographic model; her mother, Mary; and a room-
er, Frank Byrnes, in New York last Easter. Skeptical editors waited until they saw their man. When he appeared, they knew they had a rousing scoop. Irwin dickered with them—he needed money for his family, for new clothing, for lawyers’ fees. Examiner editors met his price and locked themselves up with the garrulous artist; soon their head- lines blazoned his copyrighted confes- sion.
For 24 hours The Examiner held Ir- win incommunicado, at the office and in a hotel. Then the paper surrendered its prize catch to police. The Hearst Mirror chartered a plane. Four Hearst reporters and two detectives flew Irwin back to New York and a tabloid field day.
ATLANTA: ‘I See by The Georgian .. ."
Through steamy canebrakes last week crept Charles Shonesy, fat, Irish, and city editor of Hearst’s Atlanta Georgian. He knew where he would be able to find Sumner Hiram Compton, alias J. D. Lee, convicted mur- derer, fugitive from a Banks County chain gang.
Lee’s attorney, Arthur W. Powell, had tipped Shonesy to a story which would
NEWSPHOTOS
J. D. Lee: ‘Sorta funny .. .’
scoop the rival Atlanta Journal (‘‘Cov- ers Dixie Like the Dew”). In a dank forest, “where not even the high sun of noon can penetrate,” the lawyer and the editor met and talked with the con- vict.
Next afternoon Shonesy broke out a banner head: J. D. LEE SURRENDERS TO THE GEORGIAN. Later the same day, Judge Vivian L. Stanley called police: “I see by The Georgian that Lee has surrendered—but where is he?”
At the moment, police didn’t know. That evening detectives arrested Lee in a downtown hotel. Gleefully The Jour- nal quoted a police lieutenant: “Sorta funny business .. .”
oe
HEADLINER: George H. Earle: A Rich Man's Son Makes Good
Along the Pennsylvania Railroad’s route from Philadelphia to Harrisburg, “Main Liners” live on the right side of the tracks. In half a dozen villages— Merion, Haverford, Rosemont, Wynne- wood, Devon, Paoli—wealthy suburban- ites emulate English county families.
In this Lilliput Vanity Fair, George Howard Earle 3rd stands forth as a po- litical monster. His asssociates in the Racquet Club or the Merion Cricket Club (they really play cricket) tolerate the man for his money and his charm; they despise the politician as a traitor to his class. Last week Earle’s tactics in the steel strike at Johnstown and his statement promoting President Roose- velt for a third term (see page 9), con-
oe
THE FEDERAL WEE K*
The President:
Nominated Hugh R. Wilson, Minister to Switzerland, to be Assistant Secretary of State.
Senate:
Sent to conference Relief Bill appro- priating $1,500,000,000 and an_unobli- gated $223,000,000 balance for 1938 fiscal year.
Confirmed nomination of Louis A. Johnson, West Virginia, as Assistant Sec- retary of War.
House:
Sent to President bill extending for three years Civilian Conservation Corps; the measure exempts future CCC admin- istrative employes from civil service. Sent to Senate Sumners Bill providing an alternative to “cumbersome” Senate impeachment of Federal District judges: if House finds just grounds, the Chief Justice may appoint a trial court of three Circuit judges; any ap eal must be taken to Supreme Court within 30 days.
Departments:
Secretary of Labor Perkins reported May gob placements in private industry by the . S._ Employment Service the highest in its history; of 5,309,541 appli- cants, the service placed 240,703, an al- most 10 per cent increase over April and 80 per cent over May, 1936.
Agencies:
Social Security Board reported a rec- ord April expenditure for public assist- ance to 1,667,031 persons: the aged re- ceived $24,272,824; dependent children, $3,905,163; and the blind, $802,622.
Condition of the Treasury: (Week ended June 24)
BRIO $247,028,419.09 | Pr Sarre $139,190,144.23 NN 1 cis 50 waned ecle ae $2,568,984,922.88 Deficit, fiscal year........ $2,773,318,809.00 ,. _ Sear $36,393,849,647.45
“Official news not reported elsewhere in this issue.
12
firmed Main Liners’ worst fears.
SPORT: That Earle was a mav- erick became clear duririg adolescence. When he was 19 (in 1909) he chose Harvard instead of Princeton, where most good Main Liners’ sons receive their baccalaureate buffing.
Instead of serving the traditional ap- prentice vice presi- dency of his fa- ther’s Pennsylva- nia Sugar Refinery, Earle found a job in Chicago. Social work occupied his leisure hours. One night, according to legend, he saw a hungry man reap- pear 27 times in the same breadline —a circumstance which suggested to Earle not that man or the bread- line were defective,
but that the ma- chine age faced a breakdown.
His burgeoning social consciousness, however, waited upon adventure. In 1916, Earle enlisted for Mexican border service with the Second Pennsylvania Infantry. Mustered out a Second Lieu- tenant, he had no sooner folded his shavetail’s uniform than ‘the United States entered the World War. Earle donated a submarine chaser to the government, enlisted as a sailor, and soon took command of his own vessel. One day, 15 miles off Cape May, flames broke out aboard ship. Side by side with his men, Earle fought fire at sea: “go ahead, sing or whistle if it’ll make you feel better,” he told his sailors. They quenched the blaze and Earle re- ceived the Navy Cross for distinguished service.
Earle devoted fourteen postwar years to sport (chiefly polo) and business (in his fathers’ firm and his own, the Fla- mingo Sugar Mills). Married to Hu- berta Potter of Bowling Green, Ky., he settled in Haverford, sired four sons, and seemed at last whittled down to Main Line dimensions.
ANTE: One day in 1932 he talked with his old friend William Bullitt (now Ambassador to France). Earle had $10,000 to spare; he was looking for a speculative tip. Bullitt suggested the Democratic party—and Earle raised the ante. That year he contributed $35,- 00U. When Franklin D. Roosevelt won the Presidency, he made Earle Minister to Austria.
In 1934, Earle contributed $140,000 to the Democrats—and became the party’s first Pennsylvania Governor in 44 years. Four veterans of Pennsyl- vania’s sly and sanguinary politics
DRAWN FOR NEWS-WEEK BY S. J. WOOLF
Gov. Earle: ‘This damned disease is a nuisance’
managed the neophyte’s campaign: Da- vid Lawrence, chairman of the State Committee; Joseph F. Guffey, now United States Senator; Matt McCloskey, millionaire contractor and Philadelphia Democrat, and Edward N. Jones, press agent, deft political swipe—and later, WPA administrator for Pennsylvania.
Earle stands with political independ- ence on his left and expediency at the right; frequently one hand washes the other. With equal gusto, he says and does the apt or the inept; his publicity is as likely to rasp liberals as Old Guard.
DYNAMO: Friends and foes con- sider Earle’s' galvanic vitality his strongest asset and most serious liabil- ity; his surgent animal spirits engender a talent for trouble. Specimens: an Austrian Nazi once fired a bullet into Earle’s boot heel. In 1936, he cracked up his autogiro—and 48 hours late! flew another to win his pilot’s license. Two years ago his 230 pounds crashed through the floor of a rickety backhouse at his brother’s country estate. During the last Presidential campaign, he limped for a time—26 yellow jackets’ venom crippled him. Last month he jumped into the Susquehanna River to rescue his Manchester terrier Mickey; this Spring he survived an attack ol mumps: “I guess the Republicans are now going to accuse me of being in my second childhood physically as well as mentally. This damned disease is a nuisance...”
Republicans consider him a radical; he says he is a humanitarian liberal: “I’m for the underdog. I’ve always been for the underdog and I intend to be for the underdog.”
NEWS-WEEK—THE NATION July 3, 1937
ai Mee Glin, i le
SPAIN: ‘Avalanche’ Threatens Europe On 18th Anniversary of Versailles Treaty
Take a map of the world and draw two lines—one from London through Canada to Hong Kong, the other from London through the Mediterranean to India and Australasia. These are the empire’s life lines.
How intact they could be maintained in a great war is a matter of vital con- cern to Whitehall these days. Last week, when a great war seemed more than possible (that is, still more so than the week before) all who could crowded into the House of Commons to hear Neville Chamberlain make his first speech on foreign affairs.
The successor of Baldwin, MacDonald, Lloyd George, Bonar Law, and Asquith chose a day pregnant with coincidence and foreboding. To be exact, history had chosen it for him: almost four weeks had gone by since Red Spanish planes had pounced on the German war- ship Deutschland and blasted 31 of its crew into Valhalla. The Nazis had bombarded one town (Almeria) in re- prisal, but now threatened to shell the Red capital, Valencia.
July 27, 1914, Sir Edward Grey warned the House of Commons that Europe was heading for its “greatest catastrophe.” Four weeks before that speech, a Serbian student at Sarajevo had assassinated Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hun- garian throne—and after a month of diplomatic incubation the greatest ca- tastrophe broke over Europe in full fury.
In these days the horse was still a re- spected beast; the airplane, an imprac- tical monstrosity. Dreadnoughts were dreaded. Britain’s ponderous navy more than adequately protected the empire’s life lines. Today the westward route, running alongside a powerful, friendly United States and past a bris- tling, but wary Japan, is comparatively breakproof.
The same cannot be said for the other. There are rumors that Gen. Francisco Franco has allowed his Fas- cist allies secretly to plant at Ceuta huge guns that could offset those of Gibraltar across the Strait. The recent- ly fortified islet of Pantelleria stands as a fencepost in the barbed submarine barrier that Benito Mussolini reputedly has stretched across the narrow water between Sicily and French Africa—and the Duce’s air and sea forces represent a constant threat to Britain’s bases near Suez.
Far more important: Italy, Germany, Turkey, and Russia vie for advantage among British Mohammedans of the Near East (harbors, forts, oilfields) and of India. Foreign and local rivalries have kept these Moslems from rising in a common front against the British, but Nazi-Fascist-Turkish cooperation can bear fruits, as the Ethiopian crisis showed (riots in Egypt and in Palestine, and threats of a revolt in India).
Not for nothing last March did Benito Mussolini—astride a red steed like the
second horseman of the Apocalypse*— wave a mighty Mohammedan broad- sword (made in Florence) over the fezzes of the faithful at Tripoli and pro- claim himself protector of Islam.
HIGH MOUNTAINS: Prime Minister Chamberlain made no mention of the Moslem problem in his maiden foreign- affairs sermon, but he dwelt stoutly on the current peril from conflicting po- litical faiths. The Spanish war, he said, “has one peculiar feature, which makes it specially dangerous—people have come to look upon it as a war between two rival systems.”
He referred to those misty creeds, fascism and communism, and said noth- ing new. But until now had the British Government admitted the war danger in so formal and public a manner.
“The situation is serious but not hope- less ... There is not one country or government that wants to see war in Europe ... Let us try to keep cool heads... neither say nor do anything to precipitate the disaster.”
He addressed Hitler and Mussolini as well as Admiralty bulldogs. The Fascists needed to cool down. After “closing” the Deutschland incident by destroying Almeria, the Reich had found a new, as- tonishing grievance. It complained that June 15 officers on the cruiser Leipzig— then steaming off Oran, French Africa —had heard torpedoes. They heard them by means of an electric ear of a type employed only in the German Navy. This marvelous device indicated that
*(In King James Bible, Book of Revela- tion.) Though the Duce—who will be 54 July 29—began his equestrian career at 40, his peasant thighs took firm hold of the saddle, in which he manages to look profes- sional, though not necessarily elegant (a Paris admirer gave him spurs said to have been worn by Napoleon). Incidentally, of all dictators and monarchs, Adolf Hitler alone never entrusts his sedentary body to the whims of a quadruped.
NEWS-WEEK mar
Naval concentrations: British (black, two funnels), French (black, one funnel), German (shaded), Italian (white). Arrows: last week’s chief Fascist drives.
July 3, 1937 NEWS-WEEK
Near Gibraltar: Adolf Hitler mobilized 60 per cent of Germany’s navy for Spanish service...
the projectiles—three of them—had been aimed at the Leipzig. Three days later, a submerged U-boat actually side- swiped the Leipzig’s prow!
Arguing the submarine must have been Red, Germany in unison with Italy threatened reprisals amounting to open war against Valencia. Chamberlain now busied himself to caress the short hairs on the thick Prussian neck while he wagged his head reprovingly. Al- meria was understandable, if deplora- ble. But the Leipzig case “does not ex- clude the possibility of a mistake .. .” During the war British officers reported sighting torpedo wakes where there could have been none ... and honestly be- lieved they were telling the truth!
After praising Germany’s “restraint” —the patient Nazis hadn’t shelled Va- lencia, after all—the son of Joseph Chamberlain closed with a lofty flight. He invoked the craft of mountain climb- ing—a hobby that Britains refined into the most exacting of all sports during a period in which his empire-making fa- ther was shocking the House of Com- mons with his honesty and courage:
“In high mountains there are some- times conditions ... when an incautious move or even a sudden loud exclama- tion may start an avalanche ... I be- lieve that although the snow may be perilously poised, it has not yet begun to move. If we can all exercise caution, patience, and self-restraint, we may yet
. save the peace of the world.”
To complete the picture of Britain’s policy, Anthony Eden added: “There
14
rests upon the Foreign Secretary and the government an appalling responsi- bility ... Our armaments will never be used in a war of aggression but they might be used in defense of France and Belgium.” And: “The Fascist powers are not the only offenders in Spain. There is no doubt that war materials, airplanes, tanks, and so forth supplied to the government side ... by Russia are very large in quantity.”
After the members had blinked at this gem of juristic opinion, they voted the government confidence 157 to 86.
GUINEA PIGS: They had reason to believe Britain had quietly warned the Fascists that any violence against Va- lencia would mean a general war. They knew that Britain had summarily ig- nored Germany’s perplexing demands for “Leipzig outrage” redress.
Joachim von Ribbentrop-—visibly suf- fering from nervous indigestion—put the Fuehrer’s embryo ultimatum before the four-power committee to keep the Spanish war in Spain.
(1) Any further “Red outrages” must be punished with military reprisal by Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, jointly. (2) These nations must stage immediately a naval demonstration off the Red capital. (3) They must con- fiscate Valencia’s fourteen submarines (Ribbentrop later modified this to read: the Reds must promise their submarines will not submerge).
For four days and nights he sat in a star chamber with Eden, whose shiny
black hair is fast turning gray—he was 40 June 12; with Dino Grandi of Italy, whose Mephistopheles beard turned gray during the Ethiopian crisis; and with Charles Corbin of France, whose tooth-brush mustache has been gray for some time.
On the last night, Eden sent out for a bottle of whisky. When the party broke up, so had the four-power com- mittee.
“What! Doubt the word of German officers?” shouted Adolf Hitler in Ber- lin. His press took the cue: Red “target practice” against Nazi ships must cease! The Fuehrer’s own paper, Voelkischer Beobachter, amplified: “German sailors are too good to play the part of guinea pigs amid British diplomats’ ignorance of the true nature of bolshevism!”’
(In Valencia, Foreign Minister del Vayo complained: “We feel like rabbits in a laboratory ... Apparently Ger- many and Italy have succeeded in ter- rorizing Britain and France... Inevi- tably the United States must sooner or later be called upon to play a decisive role.’’)
Hitler mobilized 60 per cent of the fleet for Spanish service, using the Portuguese harbor of Lagos as a base. Here two of the Reich’s three 10,000- ton pocket battleships joined four of its five 6,000-ton cruisers and a score of other craft—after which one squadron steamed excitingly and mysteriously past Gibraltar into the Mediterranean.
France created a mild sensation by shooting two heavy cruisers, four de-
N EWS-WEEK—ABROAD July 3, 1937
ee
J
stroyers, and five submarines from the Toulon base to Bona, Algeria—an ideal outpost for convoying African troops to Marseille.
Italy countered with a decree adding Tripoli to its strategic combination of naval bases, kept its main forces on the alert at La Spezia and Gaeta, and or- dered ships off Spain to keep close to the 3-mile limit “for protection of Italian shipping” (and the better to signal Red movements to insurgent war- craft).
Britain simply announced that its Mediterranean forces would remain stationed at Gibraltar and Malta. They include the Hood, world’s biggest war- ship; six cruisers; thirteen destroyers; and a motor torpedo (mosquito) boat squadron.
victory will be hers. Madrid will fall, as Bilbao fell. Spain will be the tomb of bolshevism, not of fascism.”
Sunday Hitler went Mussolini one better. Addressing a Nazi meeting in Bavaria, he not only insisted Franco must win, but brazenly told why: Ger- many wants a monopoly of Basque ore —which British arms makers eagerly covet. Implicit alternative: return of the Reich’s prewar colonies, wiping out one of Versailles’ most humiliating clauses.
At dawn the next day, eighteenth anniversary of the peace treaty’s sig- nature, four warships for nearly an hour strafed Sagunto—the Saguntum where in 219 B.C. Roman _ legions held out against Hannibal for eight months, giving to Spanish history the
U.S.S.R.: Even Reporters Jitter at Alice-in- Wonderland Purges
One afternoon last week a _ twelve- cylinder Packard purred into Moscow’s airport. Green-tinted, bulletproof glass concealed the occupants. Then the door swung open, and Joseph Stalin stepped out for ceremonies welcoming the re- turn of Prof. Otto Schmidt and his North Pole air-line squatters. For more than an hour the mustached Dictator chatted merrily, picked up children, and posed for movie camera men. He might have been running for election.
With this show of joviality, Stalin sought to offset a Moscow atmosphere so charged with intrigue, oppression, and violence that even veteran diplo-
~~ tie,
NEWS-WEEK FROM GLOBE
+ « « and after a rendezvous at Lagos, one Nazi squadron steamed into the Mediterranean
PROMISE: Benito Mussolini has done a considerable amount of boast- ing. He has yet to éat his words— though he came close to it when the army he sent to invade Madrid took a historic trouncing at Guadalajara (the Duce had planned to announce final victory the same day he flourished the Sword of Islam at Tripoli).
Last week he made the boast of the decade. It amounted to serving notice on the world that either Franco wins his war or Italy’s “forest of 8,000,000 bayonets” will know the reason why. With typical candor he published in his newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia:
“Italy has not been neutral in. this conflict, but has fought; therefore the
July 3, 1937 NEWS-WEEK—ABROAD
first of its many stupendous sieges.
At Valencia, 20 miles north, the gov- ernment accused Germany of the shell- ing, then retracted. The government had its hands full with a new anarch- ist outbreak in Catalonia, a smashing Franco tank drive to cut off Madrid, and defense of Santander against Mussolini’s Black Arrow division and 50,000 other conquerors of Bilbao.
But a meeting called for Tuesday in London overshadowed these _ events. The four diplomats—Eden, Ribbentrop, Grandi, and Corbin—would sit down once more to talk about terms. If they failed, the Four Horsemen of the Apoc- alypse might well ride out again over Europe.
mats and correspondents reeled. In a series of uncensored dispatches, Harold Denny, cautious New York Times cor- respondent, cabled: “The tension is so great that even passing tourists feel it . . . Day after day the Soviet press... describes conditions worse than any for- eigner dreamed existed.”
Denny regarded the situation as one of the most explosive since Lenin abandoned pure communism for planned capitalism in 1923: “Russia is passing through a crisis which is shaking it to its bases... The atmosphere must be like that of Salem in the days of the witch hunts... It is difficult to believe Communists in Italy, Germany .. . face any greater hazards than they face here.
15
ACME
The Terror engulfed Joseph Umschlicht (left) and threatened Klementi Voroshiloff
Here they have been shooting them.”
The wholesale slaughter’s cause be- wildered Denny: “Either the govern- ment has staged a frame-up on a gi- gantic scale or there exists a situation of unrest, discontent, and active dis- loyalty amounting ... to a counter- revolution.”
Last week Stalin’s Reign of Terror swept along with undiminished blood- lust. Secret police, prying into every office of the vast Russian bureaucracy, made one more big catch: Joseph Stan- islavovich Umschlicht, Polish-born Sec- retary of the Soviet Executive Com- mittee—a post equivalent to Speaker of the House—and former Assistant War Commissar.
Correspondents also thought police held two other prominent victims. Gen. Yakoff I. Alknis, commander of Russia’s 4,000-plane air fleet, and Sigismund Le- vanevsky—ace Arctic flyer who two years ago received the official title, Hero of the Soviet—had strangely failed to appear at the North Pole expedition’s welcome.
Hundreds of smaller fry joined the thousands already in Russian political prisons or graves. Unique case: Anna Ziumbilova, a Crimea Commissar, ar- rested on the grounds that she embezzled 400,000 rubles, bought a divorce, and then bribed her lover to marry her.
Other odd arrests: V. Skvortzoff, Aerial Defense Commissar in the Black Sea area, for felling workers and do- mestic animals with a gas-mask acid; Vice President Daniloff of the Osoviak- him, 6,000,000-man army reserve, for using State funds to maintain a luxuri- ous villa and a private orchestra; Pre- mier Faizoulla Khodjaieff of the Uzbek Soviet Republic (Central Asia) for plan- ning to sabotage cotton crops; Assistant Director Prokhoroff of a Crimean fac- tory, for shaving the heads of 60 work- ers who refused to cut their hair.
This mass jailing seemed the Alice- in-Wonderland prelude to another spec- tacular trial of Red leaders. Last week Andrei Vyshinsky, the Soviet’s crack
16
prosecutor of so-called Trotskyists, an- nounced: “The trial of Tukhachevsky revealed a number of new facts.”
Correspondents thought.this heralded the early arrest of Defense Minister Klementi Voroshiloff, Stalin’s close friend but also Tukhachevsky’s defend- er. Such a trial might air for the first time the real issue behind the purges: the struggle for power between Czar Stalin and the Red Army Marshals. Chief reasons for this split were the growing conservatism of the German- trained professional soldiers and Tuk- hachevsky’s plan to lure any attacking army to certain defeat in Russia’s vast marshes. (As happened to Napoleon. Stalin insisted the Red Army would have to carry the war into the enemy’s territory if necessary; he claimed Tuk- hachevsky plotted to let Germany gobble up the Ukraine.)
WIDE WORLD
Léon Blum: still on the job
YES-MAN: Main prop of Stalin’s power is the all-pervading OGPU (se- cret police). Last year the Dictator charged Henry C. Yagoda with Trotsky- ism, and two months ago the OGPU chief’s own men locked him in a prison to which he had sent thousands. Here Yagoda, a noted alcoholic, refused to “confess,” despite frequent injections of stupefying drugs.
To his post—Russia’s second most im- portant—Stalin appointed a little-known but powerful and ruthless bureaucrat —42-year-old Nikolai Ivanovich Yez- hoff. Gossip attributed to him responsi- bility for Stalin’s savage execution three years ago of 117 following the assassi- nation of the Dictator’s closest friend, Sergei Kiroff. Since Yezhoff didn’t join the Communists until 1917, he couldn’t qualify as an Old Bolshevik and pre- sumably encouraged the purges of his rivals.
A masterly schemer and fervent yes- man enjoying the Dictator’s unbounded confidence, Yezhoff was reputedly given the crack 300,000-man secret police force to curb army “Bonapartism”—a tendency to absorb political power as France’s army did under Napoleon.
ss
FRANCE: New Premier Takes Up Old Game of Who's Got the Gold
Léon Blum was Premier 382 days—a respectable tenure in the Third Repub- lic, which has changed governments 104 times since its birth in 1871. The genius of French Socialism came in on a wave of proletarian awakening, a few weeks before the outbreak of the Spanish civil war. When Rightists forced him out last week, the proletarian cause had temporarily weakened.
But Blum was by no means through. After taking Right and Left blows on his intellectual chin for twelve months, he had merely stepped back out of range in the specially created post of Vice Premier. In fact, Camille Chau- temps* (pronounced Ka-mil Sho-tun with the n nasal and virtually silent, if you can do it) was able to form a sec- ond Popular Front government only after Blum had consented to stand by.
Only. significant Cabinet change: re- placement of Finance Minister Vincent Auriol by Georges Bonnet, Ambassado! to Washington—a banker trusted by the balky Right wing of the Radical Social- ist party.
Bonnet inherited a financial impasse remarkable even for France. He must somehow conjure up $900,000,000 to meet this year’s deficit plus an indefinite sum to operate the nearly empty stabili- zation fund, which started nine months ago with $450,000,000.
The only possibilities: new taxes or a loan. To borrow in the jittery Paris market Bonnet would need dictatorial powers—demand for which had forced out’Blum. And prospects of new taxes on food, tobacco, and gasoline raised new, ferocious Communist threats to quit the Popular Front.
*A political stooge, known chiefly as the Premier who resigned at the outbreak O/ the Stavisky scandal, 1934.
NEWS-WEEK—ABROAD July 3, 1937
GER P
It est d tiviti ago t 130,0 Oly inate rostr song: Balil Dr. I micr
Ba Prop overs ders Adol polic dism twel' educ
Na the 1 ister State day Aper calle card. sider latio 1933
De brea Pace men! coun
ers surp: 2.000 agail Seve Sync
ler’s gest didn thin mar
FAR
GERMANY: ‘Happy’ Nazis Sadden Pontiff and a Submarine Pastor
It was the Summer solstice, the long- est day in the year. To celebrate fes- tivities inaugurated thousands of years ago by their pagan Teutonic forefathers, 130,000 Berliners crowded into the huge Olympic Stadium. Two bonfires illum- inated the Swastika-decked speaker’s rostrum. After mass singing of folk songs and a military march by visiting Balilla—young Italian Black Shirts— Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels limped to the microphone: “All Germany is happy...”
Bavarian Catholics considered the Propaganda Minister’s remark a slight overstatement. The day before, on or- ders from Bavarian Interior Minister Adolf Bayr Wagner, Gestapo agents and police had closed 966 parochial schools, dismissed 670 teachers—and ended twelve centuries of Catholic-dominated education in Bavaria.
Nazi officials justified their action by the recent school elections, which reg- istered a 97 per cent vote in favor of State-controlled education. The same day at Castel Gandolfo, his imposing Apennine Summer retreat, Pius XI called an emergency conference of cardinals. The aged, ailing Pontiff con- sidered: should the Vatican sever re- lations with Berlin and thus scrap the 1933 Concordat?
Despite barefaced German treaty- breaking, Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli—a 61-year-old Cardinal often mentioned as the Pope’s successor— counseled moderation.
U-PASTOR: While Nazi church-bait- ers promised an “immorality” purge surpassing last Spring’s roundup of 2,000 priests and monks, the Gestapo again attacked on the Protestant front. Seven more pastors of the Confessional Synod—religious body opposed to the National, or Nazified, Protestant Church —joined 43 already abgesperrt—locked up. They had “taken up collections out- side church hours.”
Next day Berlin was shocked to learn that for the first time police had dared to hold and question the Rev. Martin Niemoeller. The Confessional Synod head, a wartime U-boat commander who described his experiences in “From Submarine to Pulpit,” has long waged the Protestant fight against Adolf Hit- ler’s State church. Nazi pagans sug- gested that if the 45-year-old pastor didn’t mend his ways he might soon be thinking up a new book: “From Sub- marine to Pulpit to Jail.”
—
FAR EAST: Japanese Premier Finds He Is No ‘Genius-Type’
It seems that Japan’s vital new Pre- mier, Prince Fumimaro Konoe, has O- type blood. Such a revelation would leave most biologists stone cold—but not Dr. Tsunemasa Niigaki, the Japanese Foreign Office’s health adviser. Last
week he became highly excited about it, or else some mischievous interpreter misinformed the press.
july 3, 1937 NEWS-WEEK—ABROAD
NEWSPHOTOS
BRITAIN: As the Royal Horse Guards (the Blues) marched into Windsor Castle Yard for the first convocation of the Order of the Garter in 23 years, this mighty trooper went sprawling on wet, slippery cobbles—dreaded by all Guardsmen. Despite his 12-pound medieval cuirass and heavy steel helmet, George VI’s most embarrassed subject quickly scrambled back into line (and later prob-
ably got 28 days in barracks).
The seven Guards regiments boast of their
crack discipline: since 1660, when Charles II formed most of them, it has been their special duty to protect the King.
a
“Only superior, full-blooded persons” with O-blood, asserted the Gaimusho’s medico, should be allowed to hold gov- ernment posts: “We no longer want pale, anemic, genius-type fellows .. .” These would be A, B, or AB-blooded fellows.*
But perhaps Dr. Niigaki had merely meant to imitate the joke-loving Pre- mier and perpetrated a highly odorifer- ous pun. In Japan O is affixed (and san suffixed) to the name of any respected person. (Thus, if a man named Harris finally repaid that $2 touch, you would draw in your breath and say, Thanks O Harrison, or words to that effect.
*Heresy. In 1930 the Nobel committee awarded its prize in medicine to Dr. Karl Landsteiner of the Rockefeller Institute ed his discovery that many transfusions ad failed because the wrong type of blood had been sluiced into the moribund. By classifying blood into four main categories —according to their misceability, or degree in which one type can safely be mixed with another—he saved thousands of lives. But there is not the slightest proven relation between the type of blood and its posses- sor’s physical and mental characteristics.
Be that as it may, O-Konoe-san last week continued to enjoy the nation’s esteem without the help of the medical profession. Having assured his liberal admirers he would uphold the demo- cratic principles he had advocated dur- ing his term in the House of Peers, he also ingratiated himself with the army. He allowed the war lords to present a bill for $3,833,000,000—to be raised from the democrats and spent by the Gen- erals in a six-year armament program.
Then the Prince sent Ambassador Shigeru Kawagoe to Nanking with an offer designed to end six years of ill- feeling between China and Japan.
NATIONAL TRAITOR: Yin Ju-keng was born 45 years ago in a town near Fenghua, birthplace of Dictator Chiang Kai-shek. In early youth he went to Japan, studied at Waseda University, and learned to uncover his buck teeth and suck in his mouth in a typically Japanese smile.
Still, Yin gave good account of him-
17
self in Chiang Kai-shek’s revolutionary campaign (1926-8). But when the Jap- anese invested Shanghai (1932) he de- parted for the Tokyo-controlled north with his wife, sister of Japanese General. - In 1935 Tokyo installed him as Gov- ernor of East Hopei Province’s 7,000,- 000 Chinese—from whom he culled for- midable crews for smuggling an annual $120,000,000 of Japanese drugs, clothing, and household wares into China. In Nanking, he became abhorred as The National Traitor.
Last week Ambassador Kawagoe in- formed Chiang Kai-shek that Tokyo was ready to fire Yin and graciously re- turn East Hopei to Nanking. The only price: recognition of the Mikado’s sov- ereignty over Manchukuo.
The Chinese Dictator reputedly bought himself out of Sian last Decem- ber by promising his Red captors full support in their campaign against To- kyo encroachment. Their motto is “Drive the Japanese from the mainland!” Fur- thermore last week he smelled a new Anglo-Japanese plot for checking Chi- nese nationalism to the advantage of imperial trade—and held his peace.
@® In Chinese Turkestan, vaster than France and bordering Russia and In- dia, Gen. Ma Ho-shan launched a Mos- lem revolt against the Moscow-main- tained regime. Striking by surprise,
he besieged Kashgan—a capital fabled in the travels of Marco Polo.
PILSUDSKI:
Archbishop Stirs Crisis by Moving Hero's Body
Like all dictators, the late Marshal Joseph Pilsudski—founder of modern Poland—was a strong-willed man. So is Prince Sapieha, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Cracow. Two years ago, when the Marshal died of cancer, the prelate grudgingly bowed to popular demand that Pilsudski’s body be placed in St. Leonard’s crypt—the “Tomb of Kings”—in Wawel Cathedral at Cra- cow.
Last week the Archbishop had the irksome coffin removed from the crypt to the adjoining Silver Bell Tower. Poland immediately seethed with fren- zy: newspapers talked of the prelate’s “inconceivable effrontery”; 40,000 ex- service men marched in protest, and the Polish Cabinet sent its resignation en masse to President Ignace Moscicki. The President refused to accept it.
The Archbishop first claimed he ordered the body removed because of the crypt’s dampness. Later he ex- plained that he couldn’t' stomach the sight of non-Catholics swarming through the consecrated edifice to visit the Dictator’s tomb. He maintained they “frequently disturbed the peace
NEWSPHOTOS
MEXICO: During a period of exile in Hollywood, Aurelio Manrique eked out his living with movie-extra jobs—his great black beard (above) made him valuable. In Mexico’s central province of San Luis Potosi—his home—it set him apart as the most picturesque politician. Now the Liberal leader is running for Congress. As he made a speech at San Luis last week, a squad of toughs plunged through the audience, slugged and kidnaped him, clipped his beard and eyebrows, then turned him loose. Bloody but unbowed (left, greet- ing his wife), Manrique charged his assailants belonged to Mexico’s last private army, 32,000 strong, controlled by Secretary of Agriculture Saturnino Cedillo, maker and breaker of Mexi- can Presidents.
which the holiness of such a place de. mands.”
Prince Sapieha’s critics, aware that only 25 per cent of Poles are non. Catholics, sneered at this explanation. They suggested another: the prelate did it to avoid welcoming to the ¢a- thedral the head of the Rumanian Or- thodox Church—King Carol—who ap- nounced he would visit Pilsudski’s tomb this week.
The Polish Cabinet begged the Vati- can to rescind the Archbishop’s order: patriots urged Parliament to take the cathedral away from the church and put it under government control.
Meanwhile, the Vatican’s only word reached the fifth International Con- gress of Christ the King, assembled at Poznan. To seven cardinals, 80 prelates, and hundreds of other delegates, Pius XI wrote urging war against “the im- pious doctrines of communism.”
ae
SUIT: Jury Decides Sea Burial Doesn't Deserve $100,000 Balm
In Danvers, near Boston, the late Elizabeth Ann Ahearn taught school, directed the town’s welfare board, and acquired a reputation as a zealous Ro- man Catholic. Six times she crossed the Atlantic to kneel before the Holy Father and receive his apostolic blessing.
Two years ago the 68-year-old spin- ster, the benediction of Pius XI stil! ringing in her ears, embarked for New York on the French Liner Ile de France. One morning off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, Miss Ahearn’s steward got no answer to his knocks on her cabin door. At noon, however, when his knocks still brought no reply from the voyager, he reported the matter to the captain, who ordered the locked door broken down. They found Miss Ahearn’s body in the bathtub. She had died of a heart attack while bathing the night before. On the captain’s or- ders the body was sewed in canvas, weighted at the feet, and lowered into the sea while the liner ran at reduced speed 650 miles from New York.
Last week four cousins of the teacher lost a $100,000 suit brought against the French Line in a New York court. The plaintiffs claimed the line should have brought the body to port. Because it was buried at sea instead of in a con- secrated Catholic cemetery, they de- manded the money to ease their “mental anguish.”
Of the hundreds of thousands of peo- ple who embark on a voyage each year only a few die at sea. The Cunard White Star Line had only two deaths last year. Thirty years ago anyone who died on the ocean found his ultimate resting place in the water. Today liners are larger, carry a few caskets, have a refrigerated vault, and their doctors can embalm bodies. The North German Lloyd and the Hamburg-American Line always bring bodies to port; other lines either bring them to shore or bury them at sea according to instructions cabled by the deceased’s family. Only on a small freighter need a passenger worry about ending in a watery grave.
NEWS-WEEK July 3, 1937
LAWMAKERS: A Texas Maverick Admires an Old Nebraska Seer
While 400 Democratic Congressmen picnicked with the President (see page 9), book publishers brought out the life stories of two legislators who kick over the traces and won’t stand hitched. For more than a generation Senator George Norris of Nebraska has been an insurgent; now he is the subject of a salaaming biography. The other book is an autobiography. Representative Maury Maverick, as unbranded as one of his grandfather’s Texas steers, writes his story at the top of his lungs.
NORRIS: The occupant of desk 27, just off the Senate’s aisle, spent last week end in a Naval Hospital bed. Just below the hospital is the white marble memorial to a man to whom Norris’ bi- ographers see resemblance. But the nearest recorded acknowledgment by Norris to such flattery was answer to a question what Lincoln would do if alive today: “Lincoln would be just like me. He wouldn’t know what the hell to do!”
The gray little old Nebraskan, who has the saddest face in the Senate, has suffered from abuse. Now he suffers from adulation in Integrity: The Life of George W. Norris (By Richard L. Neu- berger and Stephen Kahn. 383 pages, 113,000 words. Vanguard, New York. $3).
The progressive who broke Speaker Cannon’s Czardom, one of the “little group of willful men” who opposed American entry into the World War, the Al Smith dry Republican, the Franklin Roosevelt Republican, the fa- ther of TVA, and the godfather of Ne- braska’s one-@hamber Legislature— Norris has lived a full life. About him is one subject upon which the Commu- nist Daily Worker and the archconserv- ative New York Herald Tribune can agree: his honesty.
MAVERICK: To Norris, Maury Mav- erick looks up for guidance. About the
July 3, 1937 NEWS-WEEK
Texas Congressman is a mass of roar- ing contradictions. Even in his given names. Maury is the name of the Vir- ginia oceanographer whose charts are navigators’ bibles; Maverick is an un- branded steer. Last week he came out with a rough-and-tumble autobiogra- phy, A Maverick American (362 pages, 116,000 words. Covici Friede, New York. $3). It reads as though it had been shouted through a Dictaphone and rushed uncorrected to the printer.
Maverick is proud, humble, idealistic, and hard-boiled. In school and in the army (wounded .and twice decorated) he delighted to plague stuffed shirts. He had a lot of fun getting into trouble —and in getting out of it. In the pre- relief days of the depression, Tax Col- lector Maverick hoboed through the Southwest in old clothes to find out how bad things really were. Afterward he founded a Utopian tramp colony which worked at first but broke up into an- archy when some colonists became “cap- italists.”
“Demagoging is nothing new... Out in Texas I used to be rated as a pretty good stump speaker. But I was no rose bud. I always ascribed evil motives to my opponents, and I could see a politi- cal sin ten miles off without field glasses. I would call an opponent a rascal and a thief ... Word would get around that Maury was going to skin somebody alive. In fact, I would see that word got around. The crowds would gather. I would take the hide off... I don’t do that any more. And yet, I get elected.”
The most frequent name that Mave- rick is called is “Bolshevik,” because he is ardently in favor of economic plan- ning. He still thinks highly of the Re- settlement Administration; the thing wrong with it was Secretary Tugwell’s use of long words. He quotes a conver- sation he had with Tugwell when they were touring Mexico together:
“Then, to prove his point, he [Tug- well] said: ‘And the workers and farm- ers, combining their genius and (an- other word I couldn’t make out), and they shall form a nodule .. .’
“I blew up completely.
“T said: ‘Rex, I am sore and insulted,
Maury Maverick: ‘I give George W. Norris place as the greatest living American’
and do not want to hear any more.’
“*Why?’ he asked.
“*What in God’s name is a nodule?’ I said.
““A nodule is—’ began Rex.
“Stop! Stop!’ I shouted. ‘Don’t tell me. Whenever you use a word that I don’t understand, it makes me mad. The word nodule is not understood by the American people, nor is it understood by me, which makes it worse—and I don’t want to know what it means . . . Besides, it sounds like sex perver-
,”
sion’.
i.
HISTORY: An Englishman Says A Good Word for a Dead Scot
“A monstrous beast, of all men that now exist or ever will, the most wick- ed.” History says that of the lower- ing Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell and third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Seven years ago Robert Gore-Brown, English scholar and playwright, decided that Bothwell probably wasn’t such an all-time villain, that he was a savagely loyal man of action when that was a good thing to be. In Lord Bothwell and Mary Queen of Scots (447 pages, 160,000 words. Bibliography, index. Doubleday, Doran, New York. $4), Gore-Brown seems to prove his point.
Crossing from France to rule the Scots, the girl-Queen Mary found a kingdom rent with highland vendettas. Across the border in England, the jeal- ous Virgin Queen kept open house for spies she sent to the Scottish court. In this set-up, his fierce love for Scotland and her Queen goaded Bothwell—who had no wit for intrigue—into ruthless action. He had few friends, and his enemies, who included the two coun- tries’ most powerful nobles, supervised the writing of his history.
Gore-Brown rewrites the story of Bothwell’s defeat in a matter-of-fact manner, consistently playing down the dramatic. Though his well-documented argument is convincing, readers who like history colorful may find it on the dry side.
NEWSPHOTOS, HARRIS & EWING
19
ENTERTAINMENT
SCREEN: Gamut of Russia's Revolution
Romance Runs_ the
Many weeks after production began on Alexander Korda’s Knight Without Armor, cast and crew alike referred to it as “Knight Without Asthma.” The pun was an affectionate expression of the studio’s relief at Robert Donat’s recovery from a long siege of asthma.
Donat (pronounced Doan-at) had been a victim of asthma for almost a year. His illness cost him a small fortune in lost screen work, but he had conva- lesced sufficiently to win the coveted as- signment of playing opposite Marlene Dietrich in the Korda film. Neverthe- less, on the day that Dietrich reported to begin work on her first English-made movie, she learned that her costar had suffered a relapse and would not be able to work for several weeks.
Immediately thousands of British movie fans wrote Korda begging him to wait production for Donat’s recov- ery. The producer didn’t feel that he could afford an unpredictable delay. He considered rewriting the script so that Dietrich could be starred alone. Die- trich, in common with what appeared to be the rest of England, rooted for Donat. She countered with the sugges- tion that they “shoot around” him. Korda agreed. For four weeks the Ger- man-born daughter of the Prussian of- ficer Edouard von Losch worked on the scenes in which her costar did not ap- pear.
Meanwhile, the English actor (his parents are naturalized American citi- zens living in Bethel, Conn.), popular star of “The 39 Steps” and “The Ghost Goes West,” was not doing as well as could be expected. For three weeks he struggled painfully for breath; then, for a period of four days, his doctors had to keep him in an oxygen tank.
At the studio Dietrich finished her solo sequences. Production halted. In desperation, Korda—faced with paying his imported star’s heavy salary while she remained idle—decided that another actor had to be substituted for Donat. This time Dietrich offered to take a payless vacation. Her magnanimous of- fer, coupled with a new English cure for asthma, resolved the problem. Sev- eral weeks later Robert Donat reported on the set for work. His excellent per- formance in “Knight Without Armor” conclusively proves that he was well worth waiting for.
Whether or not the story that tore Dietrich from Hollywood and Donat from a sickbed was worth all the trou- ble is debatable. Adapted by Frances Marion from James Hilton’s novel “Without Armor” the script needs all of Korda’s fine production and Jacques Feyder’s (“Carnival in Flanders’) ex- pert direction to create even a sem- blance of credibility.
A young Englishman (Donat) living in prewar St. Petersburg joins the Eng- lish secret service. For no reason that ever becomes apparent during the
20
story’s development, his superiors ask him to join the underground Bolshevik movement. Comes the war—but a stern Czarist government has sent the Brit- ish agent to Siberia. A grateful peo- ple’s government brings him_ back. Then, in the thick of the ensuing guer- rilla warfare between Whites and Reds, the Countess Alexandra (Dietrich) be- comes his prisoner.
From then on the narrative becomes a brittle alloy of dulcet romance and grim realism, which allows Marlene Dietrich to be alluring and imperturb- able in court gown and peasant dress, to expose shoulders and knees in a wood- land stream and in the sudsy setting of an old-fashioned bathtub. Everything considered, although “Knight Without Armor” is not the Art that might have been expected from Alexander Korda, it is superior entertainment.
GREEK LUNTS: Last week the New York Theatre Guild treated stage-lov- ing San Franciscans to a gala premiére of Jean Giraudoux’s Amphitryon 38 (the numeral indicates the 38th ver- sion of the ancient Greek legend). Golden Gate celebrities and Guild of- ficials made up a fancy first-night au- dience. Critics bubbled over S. N. Behrman’s American adaptation that spins a tale of Jupiter (Alfred Lunt) assuming a man’s streamlined mus- tache and corkscrew-curled beard to woo and win Alkmena (Lynn Fon- tanne, looking quite like the Duchess of Windsor) while her husband, Am- phitryon, is off to wars.
After taking 21 curtain calls, Lunt thanked the Native Sons and Daugh- ters for their reception, relaxed in a
STAGE: Left-Wing Labor Farce Belabors the Rich, Slightly
Three weeks ago, groups of Left- wing labor sympathizers muttered around the entrance of the Maxine Elliott Theatre, New York. They had just heard an announcement that all new Federal Theatre Project produc- tions were suspended until the new fis- cal year, July 1. This meant no pre- view of The Cradle Will Rock, a musical play intended to advocate unionism in steel towns.
Inside the theatre, John Houseman, producer, and Orson Welles, director, coped with a fuming cast. Ted Thomas (real name Thomashefsky), associate producer, suggested they get a theatre and put the show on themselves, with Marc Blitzstein, author-composer,
dressing room with Miss Fontanne (Mrs. Lunt), and then leaned on Lee Simonson, set designer, while two other Guild officials, Theresa Helburn and Lawrence Langner, opined Jupi- ter’s Olympian pleasures with Alk- mena would tickle Broadway’s risibili- ties next Fall. Directly opposite these lines anybody can see Alkmena likes the Greek God’s blandishments.
The Lunts are especially happy about the play’s promise because they own about 25 per cent of the produc- tion, with their friend Noel Coward coming in for a little slice (Coward and the Lunts have an agreement whereby they share in each other’s plays). Another pleased participant: Samuel L. M. Barlow, composer of incidental music for the legend, cele- brating his return to the American theatre after several years in France where he wrote an opera, ‘Pierrot,’ with Sacha Guitry, one of the head men on the French stage.
Critics’ word-waving: Fred John- son, Call-Bulletin: ‘The ultimate in smart metropolitan entertainment.’ Claude La Belle, The News’ Roly- Poly stage and the city’s fiercest critic: ‘A vehicle the Lunts would naturally delight in.’
NEWS-WEEK July 3, 1937
July
thumping out the chords and cues. Blitzstein’s landlady provided the piano, and Joseph Laurens lent them his Ven- ice Theatre. They gave a performance, after a fashion, with some of the actors emoting from the stage and others from the audience seats. Archi- bald MacLeish, class-conscious poet and magazine writer, made a speech, and spectators cheered the proceedings.
Next day, Welles, big, brilliant, and belligerent, accompanied the serious MacLeish to Washington for a con- ference with Mrs. Ellen Woodward, chief of the Women’s and Professional Projects under the WPA. They wanted to see Harry Hopkins, WPA adminis- trator, but he was too busy. Mrs. Woodward pointed out the administra- tion ruling could not be lifted in their particular case. This didn’t satisfy the musical-comedy crusaders.
They returned to New York, where rumors spluttered about company head- quarters: some thought the govern-
ment planned to stop the production be- cause it dealt with steel-town troubles at a time when the C.I1.O. had steel- production centers in uproars; others insisted officials wouldn’t permit the presentation because of its Leftist labor propaganda.
During the last season the Federal Theatre Project has sponsored Leftist labor propaganda in plays’ without whimpering: “Injunction Granted” and “Power” of the Living Newspaper Unit, and “Revolt of the Beavers,” a lecture for children on unionism against “op- pressors.” The government also pro- duced Sinclair Lewis’ violent anti- Fascist screed “It Can’t Happen Here.”
Nevertheless, Houseman wasn’t tak- ing any chances. Seeking an independ- ent production, he phoned _ several active liberals for help. In one day he raised $2,500. Among the contributors: Arthur Garfield Hayes, lawyer; Lincoln Kirstein, writer on ballet dancing; Gif- ford Cochran, wealthy dabbler in the
NEWS-WEEK FROM WESTFOTO
July 3, 1937 NEWS-WEEK—ENTERTAINMENT
theatre; and Fred Stettenheim, who has money and a weakness for musical shows. Helen Deutsch, ubiquitous New York Theatre Guild publicist, became titular producer. The new organiza- tion obtained leaves of absence from the Federal Theatre Project for the actors, and on went the play in a bar- rage of news-column publicity.
Labor organizations and the usual quota of curious filled the Venice Thea- tre last week and saw a swinging, slap- stick musical melodrama full, of deep- voweled diatribes against employers and lyrical promises of mighty delights in unionism. They also saw a novelty: nothing on the stage but a bluebird-blue backdrop, Blitzstein and his piano (he played all of the score and some of the parts), with an occasional appearance by tall and bulky Welles, who told a rambling tale of how the show came into being; the actors bobbed up from down-front orchestra and box seats to sing and speak their pieces. Welles called the theatrical hybrid a concert.
The story dates back to the days of “The Black Crook” or almost any old- time farcical triumph of right over evil. Its adolescent seriousness almost submerged the propaganda in ridicu- lous fun.
The whole thing is a case history of that old octopus Mr. Mister (played with gloating superciliousness by Will Geer) who owns Steeltown—the plant, the newspaper, the preacher, the judge, the doctor, the police, the college, and anything else handy. He crushes the poor working folks viciously to provide luxuries such as musicians and artists for his social-climbing wife, loafing boredom for his blasé son and daughter, and power for himself.
Very sad scenes reveal his brutal villainy. Nobody escapes; not even a sincere little streetwalker can make a living without paying her price to Mr. Mister’s subsidized cops. She sings a doleful ditty about “fa nickel under her foot,” which didn’t turn out to be a nickel, and she couldn’t eat that night. Others adequately toss off loud ballads that reek with sarcasm against the press, art, and effeminate college pro- fessors.
Black-out follows black-out in amus- ing confusion as the ogre’s iron claw clutches the squirming masses. Then along comes the hero, a union organizer brandishing verbal sledge hammers to smash the thing of evil. Blitzstein painstakingly makes him a 100 per cent American (shouted effectively, though somewhat toothily, by Howard Da Silva, an alumnus of the Eva Le Gallienne theatrical enterprises).
In due time, the hero frightens the villain out of his wits with dire threats of mass power surging over the trade- union horizon, and the hapless fellow cringes away to the bellowing of the theme song, “The Cradle Will Rock.” The song pictures vampiric rich cradled in the soft shade of tree boughs while just above them roar thunder and lightning and a storm (symbolizing organized labor) that will rip off the boughs and send the cradles tumbling down.
21
ROWING: Seattle,
Washington; The Oar Capital of the Nation
As a producer of victories and coaches, Washington University in Seattle occu- pies the same position that Notre Dame does in football. On two lakes flanking the shores of their campus, Washington Huskies usually row every month ex- cept in cold December.
When Hiram Conibear, the Knute Rockne of rowing, arrived at Washing- ton in 1906, his mouth spouted tobacco juice and profanity but few wise words about oar pulling. For he had been trainer of the baseball Chicago White Sox and had never rowed.
After experimenting on a rowing seat set up in his home, Conibear adopted a “comfortable” stroke—breaking away from the long-pull style of the pioneer crew college, Cornell. He taught his oarsmen to sing while rowing, to snap at the start and finish of each stroke.
In 1917, when Conibear fell out of a tree, landed on his head, and died, the Conibear stroke lived on. One of his disciples, Al Ulbrickson, last week coached three Washington boats to tri- umphs at Poughkeepsie, N.Y., for the second year in succession. Despite the weather, rain and choppy waters, the varsity set a record for the 4-mile course—18:33 3/5.
Four days later on the Thames River in New London, Conn., a Harvard shell, coached by Tom Bolles (Washington ’26) won a 4-mile race from Yale, coached by Ed Leader (Washington ’16) —both boats lowering the upstream rec- ord. Harvard’s time: 20:02; Yale’s, 20:06 2/5.
At New London, Conn., sunshine brought
22
NEWS-WEBK BY Pat TERRY Rain ruined the Poughkeepsie Regatta for all but the most weather-brave spectators
BOXING: Louis Whips Braddock; Scorned by Johnson and Europe
Jack Johnson, who 27 years ago was the first Negro to win the world’s heavy- weight title, is now 59; so down and out that he exhibits himself as a sideshow attraction at Coney Island, N.Y. When he heard the news last week that Joe Louis had knocked out James J. Brad- dock and become the second Negro champion, Johnson flashed his gold teeth in a sneer:
“Right now I am a much better boxer than Joe, and give me three months to train and I’ll lick him.”
No one took Johnson’s comeback plans seriously. Having repeatedly failed to horn in as one of Louis’ managers, he welcomes every opportunity to pan the Brown Bomber. Others of Louis’ race hailed his victory with jungle jubilation.
On their home grounds—Chicago’s South Side, where the fight was held they disconnected trolleys, lit bonfires in the streets, demanded and received free rides in taxis. In New York and Detroit Negro hotbeds, they rang cow- bells, danced arm-in-arm, and shouted: “How do you like that, white man?”
From the opening gong, 32-year-old Braddock took brutal punishment, but toward the close of the first round wad- ed in and floored Louis with a right up- percut. Red rivulets soon began to flow from Braddock’s eyes and mouth; from Louis’ nostrils. By the eighth round, Braddock was missing his shots by a yard and was nearly unconscious on his feet. Louis, after feinting a left, swung a right haymaker and smashed his foe to the canvas.
There lay Braddock for several min- utes, his head in a red pool that became a foot in diameter. Finally his seconds carried him to a corner where an auto-
NEWS-WEEK July 3, 1937
INTERNATIONAL
out a Park Avenue of yachts, through which Harvard pulled faster than Yale
grap sign tors face Li char diffe his i dead tim iSsV1l that WU fath TI rope Loui man 1936 his s ing drav com
July
Round 1: Braddock pitching, Louis catching
graph seeker vainly shook him for a signature. In the dressing room, doc- tors took ten stitches on Braddock’s face.
Louis, at 23 the youngest heavyweight champion in history, faced troubles of a different sort. The newspapers dug up his father, Monroe Barrow—supposedly dead for years. They found him a vic- tim of dementia praecox in an Alabama isylum. Relief authorities suggested that Louis, who has earned more than
00,000, fork up $30 a month for his father’s keep.
The International Boxing Union, Eu- ropean ring czars, refused to recognize Louis and named Max Schmeling, only man who ever whipped him (June 19, 1936), as world’s champion. To clean his slate, Louis must avenge the Schmel- ing defeat and, though the fight would draw a million dollars, it may never come off. Both will demand 50 per
cent of the receipts—the champion’s customary purse—leaving nothing for promoters.
—s
SPORT SCHEMES
® Pole vaulting is a paradoxical sport. The higher an athlete soars in the air, the greater risk he runs of breaking his neck on the drop to earth. Last week Ben Ogden, track coach of Temple University, to a trapeze performer’s net.
® Borrowing the idea from Dick Mer- rill and Harry Richman, transatlantic flyers, Sir Malcolm Campbell last week stowed 34,500 table-tennis balls in his new speedboat at Glasgow. Reason: the balls insure buoyancy and they can be autographed and sold if Campbell lowers Gar Wood’s water records.
INTERNATIONAL
Round 8; the battery reversed
July 3, 1937 NEWS-WEEK
offered a solution—similar
: . ais ie 2 $ 5 or ee ee a
LIBRARIANS: Recalling 1877,
They Approve a New Invention
In 1877 the year-old American Li- brary Association held its first con- vention in New York. To the 66 dele- gates—six of them women—representing the country’s 300 libraries, President Winsor said the Boston library had in- stalled telephones which he suspected would prove useful. Of the then recent- ly invented typewriter he was not so hopeful.
Last week the same organization again convened in New York. Of about 13,000 members, 5,251 came to the ses- sions—an all-time high. The passing of 60 years showed itself in other ways: the ratio of men and women was com- pletely reversed, and discussion of a new invention produced not skepticism but commendation. The process—micro- photography—commoner in European libraries than in this country’s, makes photographic copies of rare books and manuscripts readily available to schol- ars.
As at all conventions, last week’s speakers doled out both warnings and laudations. Philip N. Youtz of Brooklyn, N.Y. cautioned fellow delegates against “libraryitis,” a sort of “intellectual con- stipation,” acquired by spending too much time on books and not enough on people. Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia of New York, declaring that most of his speeches were made at political meet- ings, professed amazement at the news that he was addressing persons all of whom could read and write.
Praise, too, was ladled out freely. Librarians heard they possessed “sub- lime common sense” and that the en- lightening of adults rested on their shoulders. A description of the acme of the wonder-working powers that lie be- tween the covers of a book came from F. J. Rowan of the Pennsylvania Indus- trial School. To his astonished listeners the prison executive related how a boy suffering with dementia praecox had been declared cured after he had com- pleted a good stiff course of reading, starting off with Keats’ ode “On a Gre- cian Urn.”
Stock-taking also had its place. Rue- fully the librarians compared the coun- try’s annual expenditures of $46,000,000 on libraries to $1,000,000,000 on movies and $111,000,000 on soft drinks. But some good news that the future might tell a different story came from Michi- gan last week: the State Legislature passed a $500,000 appropriation bill for libraries, the largest sum yet given by any State. Runners-up this year: Ohio, $150,000; Arkansas, $100,000.
Pooled statistics from nationwide li- braries showed what readers want. Less fiction, and a tremendous demand for proletarian literature and drama, some- thing unheard of five years ago. Books on fascism and communism are reach- ing the demand group, though borrow- ers are choosy on these topics: they want “a fair approach.”
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_ TRANSITION
NAME REVEALED: Of the son born to Col. and Mrs. Charles A. Lindbergh in a London nursing home Coronation Day (May 12): Land Morrow Lind- bergh. Land is the maiden name of the baby’s paternal grandmother.
BIRTHDAY: Edward, Duke of Wind- sor, 43, June 23. Presents: ties, etch- ings, a dressing gown, a camera, a platinum watch, and a noiseless type- writer, from his bride. From Queen Mary: a gold and enamel table clock. In other years, British newspapers used his birthday to remind the Prince of Wales he ought to marry. This year London papers marked the anniversary with a one-line statement buried in their social columns.
..- Daniel Carter (Uncle Dan) Beard, vice president and national scout com- missioner of the Boy Scouts of Amer- ica, author and illustrator, 87, June 21.
RECONCILED: John (Caliban) Bar- rymore, 55, actor, and Elaine (Ariel) Barrie Barrymore, 21, actress. Mrs. Barrymore, who made her cinema de- but in an attraction labeled “How to Undress in Front of Your Husband,” announced she would drop divorce pro- ceedings against the screen’s great lov- er. “I love only John,” she declared, and they kissed effusively—for news cameras.
MARRIED: Louise Converse Mor- gan, granddaughter of J. P. Morgan, New York financier, and Raymond Skinner Clark, Harvard’s 1936 crew captain, at St. John’s of Lattingtown, Locust Valley, Long Island. The bride’s maternal grandfather, Frederick Con- verse, composer of the first American . Opera ever presented at the Metropoli- tan (“The Pipe of Destiny”), wrote special music for the ceremony.
«+. Constance Cutter Morrow, young- est sister of Mrs. Charles Lindbergh and daughter of the late New Jersey Senator, Dwight Morrow, and Aubrey Neil Morgan, her brother-in-law, at the Morrow’s North Haven, Maine, Summer home. His first wife, the former Eliza- beth Morrow, died three years ago.
- -Mary Pickford (Gladys Smith Moore Fairbanks), 43, screen actress- producer, and Charles (Buddy) Rogers, 34, juvenile actor and dance-orchestra leader. After the outdoor ceremony on a friend’s Bel-Air (Los Angeles suburb) estate, they left for a Hawaiian honey- moon.
..»Hiram Bingham, 61, ex-Senator from Connecticut, and Suzanne Carroll Hill of Baltimore, at the Broadalbin, N.Y., home of Mrs. Robert W. Cham- bers, widow of the author.
.-- Evelyn Wagner, niece of United States Senator Robert Wagner of New York, and Kenneth Steinreich, wealthy New York radio executive, at the Long
24
WIDE WORLD
At long last: Mr. and Mrs. Buddy Rogers
Island home of the best man: former New York Mayor James J. Walker.
ARRIVED: Edna May Oliver (Edna May Nutter), 51, screen comedienne, and Boston-born descendant of Presi- dent John Adams, in New York, from Naples—with a case of hives from eat- ing too much caviar on the voyage: “I scratched my way across the At- lantic,” boomed Miss Oliver. “I felt like a monkey.”
DEPARTED: Georges Bonnet, 47, French Ambassador to the United States, from Washington, for Paris, to take over duties as Finance Minister in Premier Camille Chautemps’ Cabinet. Bonnet hasn’t resigned as Ambassador: Mme. Bonnet and their adopted son, Alain, remained in Washington.
..- Pierre S. du Pont, head of the Del- aware family, and Mrs. du Pont, from New York, for a European vacation— a week before the marriage of their
niece Ethel du Pont to Franklin Roose. velt Jr. “I... don’t want our absence to be misunderstood,” he asserted.
APPOINTED: As National Broaq- casting Co. “Educational counselor” beginning in September, Dr. James Rowland Angell, 68, retiring Yale Uni- versity president.
SICK LIST: Andrew Mellon, 82, for- mer Secretary of the Treasury (bron- chitis): “up and about” in his Wash- ington apartment.
.-. Gov. Harry W. Nice of Maryland, 49, (removal of right eye, injured dur- ing a fall in his 1934 campaign): in “very satisfactory” condition at Wilmer Clinic, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Balti- more.
DIED: Colin Clive, 37, actor—crea- tor of the role of Captain Stanhope in “Journey’s End” on stage and screen— of pulmonary and intestinal tubercu- losis, in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, Hollywood.
.-. Hugh Lincoln Cooper, 72, builder of Wilson Dam at Muscle Shoals, Keo- kuk Dam across the Mississippi, and the $110,000,000 Dnieprostroy project in Russia; of arteriosclerosis at his Stam- ford, Conn., estate.
... Sir Eric Geddes, 61, First Lord of the Admiralty 1917-18, chairman of Im- perial Airways, Ltd., and Dunlop Tire & Rubber Co., at his Sussex, England, home.
LEFT: By the late George Fisher Baker, former First National Bank of New York chairman who died in Hono- lulu May 30, $15,000,000 “for religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educa- tional purposes, including the encour- agement of art and the prevention of cruelty to children or animals...” The rest of his estate, variously estimated from $50,000,000 to half a billion dol- lars, goes to his widow, Mrs. Edith Kane Baker.
Ambassador Bonnet left Mme. Bonnet and Alain for French finance
NEWS-WEEK July 3, 1937
GIFT: $10,000,000 Fund Makes Yale Cancer-Research Center
In New Haven, Conn., last week, Yale alumni back for annual class reunions jammed into Woolsey Hall, university dining room and scene of the annual junior prom, for the alumni luncheon. Those near by Dr. James Rowland An- gell, retiring president, noted lines of emotion traced on his face and detected emotion in his voice as he spoke.
“It is my privilege,” he said, “to an- nounce the greatest gift yet made to Yale [for scientific research] ...I only wish I could put into adequate words our feeling of appreciation on receiving this gift, which represents the greatest opportunity of its kind ever given any university .. .”
A lesser president of a lesser college might then have announced that a rich alumnus had presented a new dormi- tory, stadium, or portfolio of endowing bonds. It was no such small fry as this that stirred Dr. Angell. To listeners he announced the greatest gift ever made to fight mankind’s’ second-greatest plague: cancer. The fund—$10,000,000 —should be used to seek the cause of cancer; should not be used to buy ra- dium, X-ray bombardment apparatus, and surgical tools which would merely ease the grief of isolated individuals and their families. The grant almost exact- ly triples funds available for basic in- vestigations into the disease which ranks below only heart ailments as a killer of human beings.
Donors of the fund were Starling W. Childs, New York financier, and his sis- ter-in-law, Alice S. Coffin, whose father founded General Electric in 1892. Each supplied half the huge Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund, which is fig- ured to yield about $400,000 a year for cancer work.
Since last Oct. 21, when his wife, Jane, died of an inoperable cancer, Childs has besought ways and means of combatting the disease. Because three generations of Childs had attend- ed Yale, he could think of no better place to go than his alma mater. Be- fore Dr. Stanhope Bayne-Jones, jovial, red-faced dean of the medical school, he laid his problem.
The Yale bacteriologist proposed two boards, one which would look after management, another which would at- tend to scientific details. For his man- agement board Childs selected his close friend Frederic C. Walcott, Connecticut Welfare Commissioner; George Parmly Day, Yale treasurer and a brother of the late writer, Clarence Day; Christie O. Hamilton, former General Electric associate of. Childs’ father-in-law, Charles A. Coffin; Albert H. Barclay, with the donor a member of the Yale class of 1891; and the Childs sons, Starling W. Jr., Edward C. and Richard.
Dean Bayne-Jones recruited most of his staff at. Yale: his predecessor as dean and his former teacher at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Milton C. Winternitz, not-
July 3, 1937 NEWS-WEEK
NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE
PREPARED PARENTS: Since 1918 New York’s Maternity Center Association has taught prospective mothers what to do when the baby comes and has re- cently added a course to cover the same ground for prospective fathers. Center officials hope paternal care will squelch the age-old child’s attitude toward father, ably expressed by the one-line joke: ‘That man’s here again.’ Fathers- to-be learn how to fold diapers for boy babies and for girl babies, how to keep accurate inventories of safety pins, and how to jounce gas off a newly filled stomach. Above: two clients learning to feed and bathe oncoming heirs.
a
ed pathologist; Dr. Rudolph John An- derson, Swedish-born biochemist; Dr. Ross Granville Harrison, biologist. Each of these men, world-recognized in his field, needed a coordinating influence, a man who had spent most of his life on specific cancer research. With little hesitation, Dr. Bayne-Jones selected the best-known cancer man at the Rocke- feller Institute, Dr. Peyton Rous.
Together this group will start work on what probably will become the greatest assault yet made on cancer. At first, researchers will be housed within the Yale Medical School, but may later get a special building. When and if the doctors solve this biggest of all medical enigmas, funds allocated to cancer may be shifted to study of another disease. But until that bright day arrives, funds may be used only on that grim chase— finding the cause of cancer.
>
MEETING: Speeches at Denver Include Plague, Stratosphere
Within the broad boundaries of the American Association for the Advance- ment of Science nearly anyone inter- ested in systematized knowledge about mind or matter can find a comfortable spot. Its various divisions hold places for surgeons and astronomers, astro- physicists and entomologists.
The society meets twice a year: at Christmastime, when college professors can leave classrooms, and in the early Summer, when graduations are over. For the annual midyear meeting—the 100th held by the A.A.A.S.—2,000 scien- tists assembled in Denver last week. Psychologists confined séssions to Den- ver University buildings; medical men gathered at Colorado General Hospital; others spread through downtown hotels
and office buildings. From the resultant outpouring of fact, figure, and fancy emerged some findings likely to influ- ence lives of citizens:
PLAGUE: The United States Public Health Service, one of the world’s truly great research organizations, has spe- cialists for nearly every epidemic dis- ease: Armstrong for parrot fever, Par- ran for syphilis, Dyer for Occidental ty- phus. When bubonic plague, usually associated with the dark ports of the Orient, began to crop up in the United S.ates, Senior Surgeon C. R. Eskey drew the assignment of studying it.
Apparently the plague was fetched to this country by a rat passenger aboard a Chinese freighter. Somehow the rat got ashore at San Francisco, and the bubonic-infested fleas he car- ried hopped aboard a squirrel. For years the disease existed only on the westward slopes of the Rockies; then somehow it managed to leap the Utah desert.
Dr. Eskey has discovered the sickness in ground and tree squirrels, field mice and wood rats. He has also recorded 39 human cases, most recent of them a sentimental camper who caught the disease last Summer after he had buried an infected chipmunk.
About the black death—so-called be- cause subcutaneous hemorrhages black- en the bodies of sufferers—Dr. Eskey professed a great fear: that the dogs belonging to motor tourists and camp- ers may pick up infested fleas from rodents and spread them among human beings.
OBESITY: Why some persons should pile on layer after layer of fat while others remain paper-thin has always puzzled the medical profession. That this is not due only to diet—but in-
25
~~
volves delicate body mechanisms—has been demonstrated.
Stimulating the flabby, reddish thy- roid gland in the neck has made people literally melt fat away. The thyroid governs conversion of food and fat into energy. Hence increasing its activity starts people stewing off excess fat.
In 1925 Viennese clinicians discovered how to add weight. An hour before mealtime they administered patients with ten-unit doses of diabetes-prevent- ing insulin. Driving blood sugar con- tent downward, the drug created an artificial sense of hunger. To satisfy this hunger, scrawny women patients wolfed enormous meals and put on 5 pounds of weight a week.
Interesting and practical, these pieces of work still missed the root of the problem—what causes obesity. One reason why investigators couldn’t reach explanations was because they had no research animal to work on. Rats, cats, and dogs got fat only up to a certain point; they refused to reach a state comparable to that of a 250-pound hu- man being.
Last week Drs. Eaton M. McKay and Richard H. Barnes—workers in the La Jolla, Calif., Metabolic Institute found- ed by the late Edward Scripps—told how they had solved the problem of fattening animals. They utilized slow- working protamine insulin, discovered in Denmark three years ago by Prof. H. C. Hagedorn. This substance, a mix- ture of ordinary insulin and a trout sperm, is effective four to twelve times longer than older insulin.
Rats injected with this new hormone got enormous appetites and puffed up like volley balls. Stomachs dragged the ground when they walked and, when placed on their backs, they had diffi- culty regaining their feet. Like human beings, female rats grew more obese than males.
That the researchers have created a race of monstrous rats isn’t in itself important. But that they have learned how to produce experimental obesity in animals may well be vastly important as a new jumping-off place for further researches.
SKY HIGH: In 1932 Auguste Pic- card, Swiss professor who looks some- what like a straight-eyed version of the movie comic Ben Turpin, made flying history when he went ballooning 53,000 feet into the stratosphere. Last month fire destroyed his craft when Piccard tried to inflate the $35,000 bag with hot air.
Undismayed by this event, twin-broth- er Jean, veteran of a 1934 stratosphere flight from Detroit, announced to the Denver convention plans for a new trip skyward. Instead of using a conven- tional bag with open bottom—which allows expanding gases to escape and prevents bursting-—-he will use 2,000 small, tightly sealed balloons. These smaller globules are 4 feet in diameter and will each hoist a half-pound piece of weather-observing apparatus 20 miles in the air. At this high altitude reduced air pressure makes their elastic sides swell until the balloon. is 15 feet in diameter.
26
Two thousand of these bubbles, tied together like a gigantic bunch of grapes, should lift a 1,000-pound load to a new stratosphere high. At the peak of the rise they will start bursting—not, Pro- fessor Piccard -hopes, simultaneously. With a few out of commission and a few others punctured purposely, the bal- loon should then start earthward.
To test his idea Professor Piccard— now an American citizen on the aero- nautics staff of the University of Min- nesota—will make a trial flight at Rochester, N.Y., next week.
NEWSPHOTOS
Lawrence Tibbett sang .. .
NEWS-WEEK BY PAT TERRY what Eugene Goossens wrote
OPERA: Goossens Gives Tibbet} An Ideal Role For His Talents
For twelve years Tibbett has held a high place among American singers, As a troublemaking Rigoletto, mis- shapen Tonio, and vicious Scarpia he achieved the reputation of a spanking good villain.
This Spring he made his first opera appearance abroad in London’s impor- tant Covent Garden season. His new audience lauded his powerful: voice and mildly condemned melodramatic ten- dencies. But last week he won all hearts in the Covent Garden’s premiére of Eu- gene Goossens’ new opera, “Don Juan of Manara,” with a libretto by the late Arnold Bennett.
Tibbett stepped out high, wide, and handsome as the murdering, seducing, miracle-instigating Don who eventually turned penitent friar. It was impossible to overact such a fantastic personality. Besides his stage strutting, Tibbett had to do some vocal gymnastics among Goossens’ chromatic pitfalls and ever- changing rhythms.
Forestalling criticism several months ago, the composer announced that his latest opera was “not just a bunch of tunes for the singer.” In many instances he employed the human voice almost as if it were one of the orchestral in- struments.
COMPOSER: The premiére took on the aspects of a Goossens family gath- ering. In the audience along with seven other relatives sat the musician’s 70- year-old father, an excellent conducto: in his own name (which is algo Eugene) ; the orchestra pit boasted one of the fin- est living oboeists (Goossens’ brother Leon) and an outstanding harpist—his sister Marie of the Royal Philharmonic. With the heavy-set, poker-faced com- poser conducting in the pit, the picture was complete—his four daughters weren’t sufficiently grown up to con- tribute.
Goossens represents the third genera- tion of successful musicians by his name. His standing in England remains un- questioned. Since 1923 he has spread his influence in the United States. In that year the modern-minded Berkshire Festival authorities commissioned him to compose a string sextet and the East- man School of Music called on him to build up the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, now winning radio and con- cert notice under the baton of José Iturbi. Seven years ago he accepted the post of director of the Cincinnati Sym- phony Orchestra.
His status as a composer remains par- adoxical. With more than 70 published works to his credit, he is best known for his opera “Judith,” also librettoed by Arnold Bennett. Critics, baffled by his great musical knowledge, inventive musical wit, and sound good taste, still find some missing spark. One stymied columnist wailed: “Goossens is too adroit to become really great.”
NEWS-WEEK July 3, 1937
TAXES: Inquiry Discloses ‘Phony’ Firm And List of ‘Incorporated Pocketbooks’
INTERNATIONAL
Tax drama: scene from Act II
“Two New York insurance agents have caused the organization of insur- ance companies in the Bahamas with a view to enabling taxpayers to secure spurious deductions [on their income- tax returns] . By this means five prominent Americans sought to evade nearly $550,000 in income taxes in the years 1932 to 1936.”
When President Roosevelt, quoting from a letter of Secretary of the Treas- ury Morgenthau, let drop this crumb of information in his message to Congress June 1, he started a national guessing game as to the identity of the “five prominent Americans.”
To learn the correct answers, curious folk last week trouped into the high- ceilinged Ways and Means committee room of Washington’s Old House Of- fice Building. There, beneath a massive crystal chandelier, the joint Congres- sional committee investigating tax- avoidance methods pulled the curtain on the second act of its hearings.*
Mason B. Leming, assistant to the gen- eral counsel of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, described how the insurance- company technique works: a person purchases a policy from a fake foreign insurance company. He hands over the entire premium in a single payment which is promptly returned to him as a policy loan. Then he deducts from his income-tax return the “interest” al- legedly paid on the loan.
Leming named the five men who, the Treasury charges, used this device. They weren’t so prominent, but “there may be many more.”
Richard E. Dwight, former law part- ner of Charles E. Hughes Jr., son of the
"For Act I, see NEWS-WEEK, June 26, 1937, page 32
July 3, 1937 NEWS-WEEK
Chief Justice of the United States; Henry W. Lowe, of Johnson & Higgins, New York insurance brokerage firm; Lawrence Marx, president of the Cohn, Hall & Marx Co., New York cotton brokers; Jacob Schwab, treasurer of Marx’s firm; and George Thoms, a law- yer, also of New York. A sixth partic- ipant, Dr. Winfield Ayres, prominent New York surgeon, died last April.
According to Leming, the men bought $15,375,000 worth of “policies” from the Standard Life Insurance Co., Ltd., of the Bahamas, formed in 1931 by Walter C. Baber and William Baylis, partners in Baylis, Baber & Co., “brokers and tax consultants.” In the five years 1932-36 the group was said to have deducted a total of $1,482,427.52 for interest osten- sibly paid on policy loans, reducing their aggregate tax liability from $561,- 058.69 to $11,556.72.
“It was all pure fiction,” Leming pointed out. “It was only a matching of checks; there wasn’t any loan, the insurance company had no assets.”
Treasury aides told the committee that the Bureau of Internal Revenue disallowed the interest deductions from the start, but failed to investigate until last February. At that time the bureau learned from a tax lawyer that Charles E. Hughes Jr. was threatening to dis- solve his law firm unless his partner, Dwight, settled with the government.* Only then did the Treasury send an agent to the Bahamas to check up on the “insurance company.”
“Then we can thank Mr. Hughes for disclosing this scheme rather than the
*June 10, the 60-year-old firm of Hughes, Schurman & Dwight split. Hughes formed a new partnership, Hughes, Richards, Hub- bard & Ewing, while Dwight carried on un- der the firm name of Dwight, Harris, Koe- gel & Caskey.
revenue bureau,” snapped Senator La Follette. “Three or four years go by before it was discovered that this com- pany was a phony.”
“I entirely agree that the procedure could be much better,” admitted Under- Secretary of the Treasury Roswell Ma- gill. “However, we are doing the best we can with our staff.”
BIG SHOTS: From. insurance pol- icies, the testimony switched to personal holding companies as a _ tax-reducing device. Guy T. Helvering, Commission- er of Internal Revenue, pointed out that the income of such firms is subject to a lower surtax than the rate applicable to individuals’ incomes.* Furthermore, “overgenerous deduction provisions in the statute” enable many personal hold- ing companies to avoid paying any sur- tax.
Then he named 67 “large wealthy taxpayers who paid lower taxes by tak- ing assets out of their personal boxes and transferring them to incorporated pocketbooks.”
Some of the better-known names: Andrew W. Mellon, former Secretary of the Treasury, and his daughter, Mrs. David K. Bruce; Thomas W. Lamont, partner in J. P. Morgan & Co.; John J. Raskob, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee; Pierre S. du Pont, board chairman of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co.; Alfred P. Sloan Jr., chairman of General Motors, and Mrs. Sloan; Jacob Ruppert, brewer and owner of the New York Yankees; Robert P. Scripps and Roy W. Howard, publishers of the Scripps-Howard chain of newspapers, and Mrs. Howard; Wil- liam S. Paley, president of the Colum- bia Broadcasting System.
In releasing the list, Helvering em- phasized that “there was nothing il- legal” in the use of holding companies. He also declared that the 67 names had been chosen “at random.”
“You selected some pretty prominent names—at random,” commented Repre- sentative Frank Crowther of New York.
REBUTTAL: The Treasury disclo- sures didn’t go unanswered. Defending his use of the insurance company de- vice, Richard Dwight issued a state- ment that “he had attached to his 1932 income-tax return, in which he claimed the interest deduction, a disclosure of the important elements of the transac- tion.”
Three others among those named also stated their side of the case. The Treas- ury had included on its list of personal holding companies Consolidated Pub- lishers, Inc., owned by Paul Block, and The New York Sun, Inc., of Mr. and Mrs. William T. Dewart.
Through his attorney, Mark Eisner, Block pointed out that Consolidated Publishers was formed to facilitate the purchase of some newspaper properties. “There was not the remotest connec- tion or thought of tax saving.”
The Dewarts issued their reply in the form of a front-page editorial in The Sun. After reviewing in detail how The
*Surtax on individuals, 4 to 75 per cent; on personal holding companies, 8 to 48 per cent.
27
FAMILY: Ninety years ago John Humphrey Noyes, a red-headed Yankee preach- er, founded Oneida Com- munity, 100 miles _ north- west of Albany, N.Y. He and his fellow Perfection- ists tilled the soil and con- ducted ‘stirpicultural’ (eu- genic) experiments.
Wiser than most communal utopians, they knew that agri- culture alone would not sustain their finances; the Perfectionists turned to manufacturing. In their earlier years they made wild- Subsequently, they concentrated on Community
animal traps.
New York Sun, Inc., was formed to give employes a share in the paper’s owner- ship, not to evade taxes, the article con- cluded: “The facts are repeated here so simply that anybody with a greater in- tellectual capacity than a Mongolian idiot can understand them. Even a Treasury expert should grasp. the truth.” This week more names.
ss
OLD GOLD: 40,000 _ Entrants In Contest Tie for First Place
Last February the P. Lorillard Co., makers of Old Gold cigarettes, an- nounced a first prize of $100,000 and 999 other prizes totaling $100,000 for cor- rect solutions of 90 picture puzzles. In case of ties, contestants would have a second set to solve, then possibly a third set plus an essay on “The Increased Popularity of Old Gold Cigarettes in My Community as a Result of the Old Gold Contest.”
Some 2,000,000 Americans seized their chance to make a fortune. For fifteen weeks they thumbed dictionaries and lexicons, bothered librarians, traded answers—and bought $13,500,000 worth of Old Golds, raising Lorillard’s share of the total cigarette sales from 5 per cent to 10 per cent. As the deadline ap- proached, lists of “correct solutions’— from 10 cents to $2—plagued Lorillard efforts to-keep the contest fair.*
Last week, Lorillard’s newspaper ad- vertisements carried the official answers to the 90 puzzles and advised contest- ants that “more than 1,000” had tied for
See NEWS-WEEK, May 8, 1937, page 30.
28
COMMUNITY PLATE
a re
first prize. According to Lennen & Mitchell, Lorillard’s advertising agency, puzzle No. 82 mowed down most of the losing entrants; correct answer: Jenny Lind, derived from the phrase “Wide awake hats” in the cartoon.
Although the actual number of win- ners was not published, the American Newspaper Publishers Association learned from Philip Lennen that about 40,000 had qualified for first place. Two weeks ago these survivors received by registered mail a set of 90 tie-breaking puzzles to be solved in ten days—before Monday midnight this week.
F. Gregory Hartswick—word expert who approved the puzzles for Old Gold after seventeen college girls had checked them five times to make sure only one answer applied—admitted the _ tie- breakers were the hardest he had ever worked on. Nevertheless Educational Research Institute of Boston—one of the original “puzzle experts” which had sold 50,000 “expert solutions” for 50 cents—had answers ready in four days. Price: $5.
>
CORN: Refining Firm Squeezes Dividends From Fallen Profits
In 1901 the late Edward T. Bedford, a leading executive of the Standard Oil Co., thought the oil business had reached its best days. For his son Frederick, who refused to follow in his steps, the elder Bedford agreed to help finance a new company in the young and blossoming corn-products industry.
The New York Glucose Co. began with young Bedford as treasurer and Bed- ford senior as president without pay.
Plate silverware. Their hard- headed idealism has paid consistent dividends. Members of the: Noyes family still operate Oneida, Ltd., world’s second largest silver-plate makers, and em- ploy first, second and third generation colonists. Last week John Humphrey’s son,
NEWSPHOTOS
Holton V. Noyes, manager of the community’s 1,200-acre farm, entered politics; Gov. Herbert H. Lehman appointed him State Commissioner of Agriculture. Noyes’ biggest problem: the State’s $2,000,000,000 dairy industry.
When a big merger of starch and glu- cose firms took place the following year, President Bedford kept control of 51 per cent of his company’s stock and remained a partial competitor of the consolidated Corn Products Co.
By 1906 Corn Products Co., largely because the management had continued to pay out unearned dividends, had fal- len into financial straits. The elder Bedford, now thoroughly engrossed in the corn-products business, resigned from Standard Oil, merged his company and Corn Products Co. into Corn Prod- ucts Refining Co., and devoted the last 25 of his 82 years to building the world’s largest corn-processing com- pany. Hisson went out for himself in 1913 and as President of Penick & Ford became one of his father’s biggest competitors.
Since 1929 Corn Products Refining has paid its preferred and regular com- mon dividends without an omission or a reduction. The depression cut its in- come from $15,765,000 in 1929 to $8,347,- 000 in 1935 when a corn shortage se- verely reduced operations. The firm’s 1936 earnings rose to $11,490,000, the best report in three years.
Last week, the directors met and ap- proved the regular quarterly dividends —$1.75 on the preferred, 75 cents on the common stock, despite less profita- ble conditions in the corn-processing in- dustry. The price of corn, which ac- counts for roughly 60 per cent of a corn processor’s costs, had shot to a seventeen-year high of $1.40 a bushel on May 26, and imports of duty-free, low-grade starches, selling for about one-half the domestic cornstarch price, had increased tremendously since the beginning of the year.
When stiff competition among the
NEWS-WEEK—BUSINESS July 3, 1937
Jul
Ray Noyes, office manager; P. B. Noyes, president
July 3, 1937 NEWS-WEEK—BUSINESS
eleven major producers kept them from advancing prices on their products as corn prices soared, profit margins shrank. Corn Products’ report for the first three months of this year showed a drop in income of more than $1,000,- 000 from last year’s figure.
SUGAR: “Wherever you may be, you may touch any article you wish and it can be truthfully said that one or more of the products from corn do or may enter into the manufacture of same.”
To confirm this statement from the printed lectures which Corn Products furnishes to colleges, the company lists some 175 processes and corn by-prod- ucts ranging from soap, galvanizing, and fireworks to pie fillers, brewing, and fertilizers. But most people know the firm through its Karo syrup, Argo cornstarch, Linit bath starch, and Ma- zola salad oil.
With the exception of Mazola, these products come from the same part of the corn kernel—the starch contained in the pulpy endosperm; the rest of the endosperm, called gluten, is processed and mixed with crushed corn hulls into gluten feed for cattle. Mazola evolves from the oil squeezed from the kernel’s germ.
Practically two-thirds of the corn ground and processed by the industry, however, ends up as corn syrup or corn sugar, which comes from starch treat- ed with hydrochloric acid, soda ash, and steam. In 1884 the government ap- proved the use of this commercial glu- cose as a food ingredient and thereby started a boom for the corn processors; in 1930 the government again helped the industry by announcing that the use of dextrose—refined corn sugar need no longer be announced on labels of prepared foods.
Refined corn sugar—a more recent development—goes into candy, ginger ale, ice cream, and pastries. Experts think the annual volume may eventual- ly swell to 500,000,000 pounds—more than one-third of the industry’s pres- ent output of all corn derivatives. If it does, Corn Products Refining Co. will benefit most, since the firm controls patents on the process and collects roy- alties from competitors who use it.
CO-OPS: Farmers’ Agencies Size Up Mammoth Marketing Job
By June-end, a pleasant drowsiness usually pervades the 2,000-acre, tree- studded grounds of the State College of Agriculture at Ames, Iowa. Only a few Summer students, the swans gliding on Lake La Verne—filanking the campus’ parklike central plaza—and chimes from the towering 36-bell campanile re- mind 10,000 Ames residents of custom- ary collegiate bustle.
But last week, despite a heat wave, the institution snapped out of its Sum- mer snooze. From 34 States, more than 1,000 keen-eyed, fast-talking officials— including a few women and many horny-handed ex-farmers—invaded the little agricultural community in the center of the Hawkeye State. Com- mandeering campus dormitories (and overflowing into hotels), they staged a five-day oratorical and debating jambo- ree in the big, white college buildings.
The occasion: the annual _ session (staged at some leading university each year) of the American Institute of Co- operation—an educational body devoted to the interests of agricultural co-ops.
This year, delegates represented man- agements of 10,500 farmers’ marketing and purchasing associations, whose 3,- 660,000 members and patrons. put through 1935-36 business of $1,840,000,- 000 (up 17 per cent).
POOLS: Most people probably think of a co-op as a fraternal kind of store operating on a profit-sharing basis. This is the “consumers’ cooperative” origi- nated in 1844 by 28 weavers of Toad Lane, Rochdale, England.
Farmers’ co-ops differ essentially from consumers’: through collective ac- tion in processing and marketing, 75 per cent are primarily concerned with making the best possible deal for pro- ducers.
Among the pioneers were American dairymen—in 1810, the first recorded cooperative cheese factories began op- erations at Goshen, Conn., and South Trenton, N.Y. By the 1850s, the co-op movement had spread to grain: to cut out middlemen’s profits, growers set up cooperative elevators, returning sav-
NEWSPHOTOS
Mrs. Julia Burnham, third-generation Noyes
29
" ee 0 om -_
ings to members as “patronage divi- dends.”
When the century turned, Midwest- ern States had hundreds of producer- owned grain elevators. Statewide co-
‘ ordinating associations sprang up, and
during the World War growers pushed marketing frontiers into the great wheat markets, where they established cooperative selling-agencies.
This led up to the postwar era of pools—farmers’ groups that sought to exert a steadying influence on prices by regulating the flow of supplies ac- cording to demand. Between 1921 and 1930, ten grain pools handled more than 187,000,000 bushels. Similarly, in 1921 cotton groups in Southern States launched an extensive pool-marketing system.
GROUPS: Fourteen years ago, Con- gress stepped in to aid the agricultural co-op; it set up twelve Intermediate Credit Banks to extend loans to farmer- financing institutions. Later, the ill-fat- ed Hoover Federal Farm Board and the New Deal Farm Credit Administration provided help.
Today, the FCA’s thirteen Banks for Cooperatives (which lent farmers’ groups $81,294,000 in 1936) play an im- portant part in financing co-ops in the most important fields.
Grain: Three thousand marketing groups—chiefly local elevator co-ops— with 600,000 members today handle about one-third of all grain marketed (in 1935-36 this represented a $360,- 000,000 turnover). Centered largely in Illinois, North Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas, they mostly pay farmers full competitive prices for grain de- livered at the elevator; any handling “profits” flow back as patronage divi- dends. Many co-ops are affiliated with large State and regional sales agencies, of which 23 belong to the Farmers Na- tional Grain Corp.—supervisory organi- zation which sold $80,000,000 of grain
' in 1935-36.
Cotton: About 15 per cent of the an- nual cotton crop is handled by 310 co- ops with an average membership of 1,000; for 1935-36, the cooperative turn- over of 1,500,000 bales grossed $110,000,- 000. In recent years, most groups have operated on the “immediate fixation” pool plan—they pay members prevail- ing prices on delivery, immediately hedging the transaction with a futures sale; earnings are turned back as pa- tronage dividends. The national organi- zation—American Cotton Cooperative Association—includes fourteen large regional groups and sold cotton worth $86,000,000 last season.
Dairy Products: Oldest in the busi- ness, dairy co-ops handle butter, cheese, milk, eggs, and poultry, and boast the biggest turnover—$520,000,000 in 1935- 36; 70 per cent of the 2,270 groups (720,- 000 members) are in Wisconsin, Minne- sota, and Iowa. Land O’ Lakes Cream- eries, Inc., of Minneapolis, embraces 400 smaller groups, carries on an extensive advertising campaign, and in 1935-36 sold about 80,000,000 pounds of butter and 23,000,000 pounds of cheese.
Livestock: During 1935-36, 1,040 live- stock co-ops with 600,000 members did
30
a $250,000,000 business (up $75,000,000 on 1934-35). The larger groups main- tain excellent selling agencies in the big markets, equipped with cattle, hog, and sheep yards. Biggest organization: the National Live Stock Marketing As- sociation; embracing 23 State and re- gional co-ops, it reported 1935-36 turn- over at $160,800,000.
Fruit: Of the 1,000-odd fruit and veg- etable co-ops (1935-36 turnover, $212,- 000,000), California accounts for 30 per cent and does 50 per cent of total busi- ness. The largest operator—California Fruit Growers Exchange—sold $84,000,- 000 of produce last season for 13,000 individual growers; this year it is spending about $2,000,000 advertising Sunkist oranges and other products.
GASOLINE: Though still a subsidi- ary activity, farmers’ cooperative pur- chasing is today the movement’s fast- est-growing phase. Of the 10,500 co-ops, more than 2,000 are chiefly occupied in
HARRIS & EWING Senator La Follette wanted higher taxes
buying feed, seed, fertilizer, petroleum products, and groceries.
Since the adoption of tractors, gaso- line and oil costs are among the farm- er’s major problems. Today, he has cut costs to a minimum through co-op fill- ing stations and bulk-delivery depots; beginning with a single Minnesota sta- tion opened in 1921, cooperatives now operate more than 2,000 scattered be- tween Pennsylvania and the Pacific Coast.
Last year, of total co-op purchasing approximating $315,000,000 (up 25 per cent), petroleum accounted for $48,- 006,000 (up 20 per cent).
DISCORD: At Ames last week, dele- gates debated current problems in an atmosphere of enthusiasm and general harmony. But they couldn’t steer clear of one controversial subject—relation- ship between farmers’ co-ops and non- agricultural consumers’ cooperatives.
R. W. Bowen, Secretary of the Co- operative League of America (a con- sumers’ organization which embraces a number of agricultural purchasing
agencies), urged farmers to deal direct with consumers—this, he asserteg would tend to eliminate the whole ap- paratus of the profit system.
Rebutting this view, C. V. Gregory, §
veteran Chicago editor of The Prairie
Farmer, surprised delegates with blunt 7 “The farmers’ principal |
comments: quarrel with the capitalist system is
that it has not permitted him to be. | come more of a capitalist . . . He dogs | not want to do away with private |
profit; he wants more of it for himself” a
WEEK IN BUSINESS
® Congress passed and sent to the
White House a measure continuing for two years the so-called nuisance taxes— levies on gasoline, electricity, telephone messages, automobiles, and a number of other items, as well as the 3-cent post- age rate. During the Senate’s considera- tion of the bill, members approved an amendment offered by Senator La Fol- lette to increase income-surtax rates, But Senator Truman brought a motion to reconsider and on a second vote the amendment was defeated.
© Exempt from old-age provisions of the Social Security Act, the nation’s 1,200,000 railroad employes will enjoy a pension plan of their own under the Wagner-Crosser Act, passed by Con- gress and signed by the President last week. Under its terms, retired workers receive payments up to $120 monthly. The railroads have agreed not to attack the measure’s constitutionality. Labor officials therefore feel it stands a better chance of survival than the two previous laws on the subject, both invalidated by the Federal courts.
@ The boxers and their managers weren’t the only ones who benefited from the Louis-Braddock fight (see page 22). While the match was in progress, consumption of electricity in Chicago increased by 65,000 kilowatt hours or about 9 per cent above normal, accord- ing to the Commonwealth Edison Co.— result of more radios and electric lights turned on. In New York the effect was even more marked. The Consolidated Edison Co. there reported a gain of 171,000 kilowatt hours at 11:15 P.M., or 20 per cent over the same time the night before.
© “To satisfy creditors,” the furnishings of Samuel Insull’s former penthouse apartment atop the Chicago Civic Opera Building went on the auction block. Although 300 persons paid $1 apiece to attend the sale, the apartment’s con- tents, valued at $100,000 brought less than $26,000. Typical realized prices: Mrs. Insull’s $2,000 bed, $250; a $3,500 Persian rug, $325; three garbage cans, $1.50.
® Diners-out prefer Scotch and soda to a Manhattan cocktail and Manhattans to Martinis, according to a survey of drink preferences in Childs restaurants in sixteen cities. Next in the order are Old-Fashioned, Bacardi, Orange Blos-
_som, Tom Collins, and Side Car.
NEWS-WEEK—BUSINESS July 3, 1937
Whi ficially and L their } leadin Fourt! ning :
Par from ing name South ama crosseé
Th count in th dor’s
Morg
-
While the season for Panama hats of- ficially opens May 15 north of the Mason and Dixon Line, retail sales don’t reach their peak until around July 1. This week leading hat stores reported a rush of Fourth of July business, with volume run- ning 25 per cent above last year’s sales.
Panamas come not from Panama but froom Colombia, Ecuador, and neighbor- ing South American countries. Their name derives from the days when the South Americans sent the hats up to Pan- ama for sale to the Forty-Niners who crossed the Isthmus to and from California.
The finest hats—those selling in this country at $50 to $500 apiece—are made in the village of Monte Cristi, on Ecua- dor’s mountainous Pacific Coast. J. P. Morgan, Herbert Hoover, and the Duke
of Windsor are among those owning $500 Panamas. Natives use the silklike fiber obtained from the broad leaves of the Jip pijoppa palm—pronounced hippihoppa. (Ecuadorians, and also Britishers, call the hats Jippijoppas.)
It takes only a dollar’s worth of fiber to make a £100 hat; 99 per cent of the value depends on the skill of the weaver. The finest craftsmen weave so closely and form such accurate geometric designs that the finished product looks like damask. Contrary to popular opinion, the number of rings in the crown is not an infallible index of quality, nor are the hats woven under water. The weavers, work only in the damp mornings and evenings. It often takes eight to ten months to finish a single
Acres of Panamas dry and whiten in the hazy light. Monte Cristi’s almost constant fog, caused by the Central American current, keeps the sun from shining too brightly
July 3, 1937 NEWS-WEEK—BUSINESS
Co-workers call this Monte Cristi girl ‘the finest hat weaver in the world’
Flattening the fibers makes a cheap hat look closer woven
] :
parwernetes BY WILLIAM Lavenae Worth more than their weight in gold: fine Jippijoppas packed for shipment
31
_ KIDNAPING:
Ironic Conviction Stirs Dregs in Lindbergh Case
Mar. 1, 1932, Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. was kidnaped from his Hopewell, N.J., crib. Last week a New Jersey court ended another chapter in America’s most fantastic criminal case.
Synopsis of intervening chapters: (1) During the search for the baby a Morrow servant committed suicide; (2) Gaston B. Means—a former Justice Department agent now serving a fif- teen-year prison sentence, swindled Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean, Washing- ton society matron, out of $104,000, for which he said he could ransom the child. (3) Colonel Lindbergh identified as his son the body of a baby found in woods near Hopewell. (4) Two years later, President Roosevelt’s recall of gold notes trapped Bruno Richard Hauptmann, whose Flemington, N.J., trial became a fourth-estate fiesta. (5) Gov. Harold Hoffman of New Jersey then jeopardized his political future by attempting to forestall the execution of the German carpenter-convict. (6) Colonel Lindbergh and his family fled the country to live in England. (7) New Jersey electrocuted Hauptmann, who died asserting his innocence. (8) Shofrt- ly after the trial Edward J. Reilly, Hauptmanwn’s chief lawyer, went insane.
Last week a Federal District court jury in Newark, N.J., achieved the ultimate in irony: it convicted a de- tective trying to solve the Lindbergh case of violating the law which makes it a Federal crime to carry a kidnap
victim across State.lines. Four years ago, Congress passed this “Lindbergh Law” in answer to popular indignation over the New Jersey kidnaping.
In eight weeks of criminal proceed- ings—longest in New Jersey history— 211 witnesses convinced a jury that El- lis Parker, 65, salty-tongued county de- tective, and his 26-year-old son, Ellis Jr., kidnaped Paul H. Wendel, Trenton ex-lawyer, whom they took to New York and tortured until they extorted a false confession of the Lindbergh kidnaping.
Parker produced the fantastic ‘“‘con- fession”—which his son dictated to Wendel in the tense, hysterical days preceding Hauptmann’s execution. Au- thorities promptly branded it a hoax; Wendel repudiated the story; and the elderly detective’s attempted independ- ent solution of the crime—which might have made him rich and world-famous —resulted in his disgrace.
When the Parkers’ trial opened, three accomplices admitted the conspiracy to kidnap Wendel. Two turned State’s evidence and testified that the de- tective—whose crime-detection record covered 44 years—engineered the plot which ended in stretching Wendel on the rack in a Brooklyn “torture chamber.”
For the Parkers the jury recom- mended mercy; they may be sentenced to life terms or may merely be placed under probation.
Curious sidelights on the Lindbergh case bobbed up in the sea of testimony: Parker refused to testify at Haupt- mann’s trial because he “knew nothing about the case,” but he paid secret night visits to Hauptmann in the Tren- ton death house. Parker still thinks Wendel is guilty: “No man living could ever make a confession like he did... unless he is guilty.”
ACME
Hearsts: William R. Jr., New York Journal publisher; William R. Sr.; John R., Journal President; George, San Francisco Examiner publisher
32
FOURTH ESTATE
HEARST: His Beloved New Yor; American Adopts a I-Day Wee,
For years insiders called William Randolph Hearst’s New York morning newspaper the Vanishing American, Though the California publisher stuffeg its pages with high-priced columnists, cartoonists, and features, New Yorkers gradually turned elsewhere for news The American’s daily circulation felj toward 300,000—lowest in the morning field, and microscopic compared to The News’ 1,700,000. In 1936 the paper lost $1,000,000.
Last week The American vanished— almost. Wednesday its front page an- nounced it would “consolidate” with the Hearst-owned tabloid morning Mirror and The Evening Journal: “The prac- tical disadvantages of maintaining three competing newspapers in one com- munity make a combination of this kind desirable.” (Thus Hearst, never anxious to publicize all his press hold- ings, admitted for the first time that he owned the Mirror.)
Thursday The American published its last daily edition. Hearst continues the profitable Sunday American (circula- tion, 1,036,000). William Randolph Hearst Jr., publisher of The American, shifted to a similar post with The Journal. American’s features were di- vided between The Mirror and Journal.
Few New York readers missed The American, but the merger had reper- cussions. Hearst promised jobs for 63 to 70 per cent of the 2,800 American staff members; to the rest he offered six months’ preference in hiring for his other publications. That didn’t satisfy the American Newspaper Guild, the C.I.O. editorial union. Three local Hearst units met and demanded that no one be fired.
Other New York sheets pounced on the corpse. In the first scramble they ignored The American’s lean circula- tion; what they wanted most was the fat classified advertising. Full-page ads screamed: “Now it’s The Journal for want ad results”; “Use classified adver- tising that brings results ... The Times”; “A hit . .. World-Telegram want ads.”
City-room gossips found varied expla- nations for the surrender of Hearst's favorite newspaper—the daily he had entrusted to his 30-year-old second son, who is more like his father than any of his four brothers. The most prevalent stories: Hearst, 74 and failing in health, was liquidating his holdings in prepara- tion for death; the death last year of his chief lieutenant, Arthur Brisbane, killed Hearst’s enthusiasm; higher taxes and labor costs made The American too expensive; The American was caught in a profitless void between the more sedate Times and Herald Tribune and the more sensational News and Mirror.
Hearst first hit New York with a bag of money and a head full of ideas. In 1887 he had wheedled his mine-rich
NEWS-WEEK July 3, 1937
fathe The vigor series amin moth othe! East Jose] New yello He pare proc a re Wor his s pseu In t tion
father, George Hearst, into giving him The San Francisco Examiner. When vigorous advertising methods and a series of “exposés” had put The Ex- aminer on its feet, he persuaded his mother to give him $7,500,000 for an- other venture. Thus armed, he headed East in 1895 to invade the domain of Joseph Pulitzer, who had cornered the New York market with his sensational yellow World.
” Hearst, then 32, bought the thread- bare Morning Journal for $180,000. He proceeded to show Pulitzer how to run a real yellow newspaper. He hired The World’s editors and reporters over to his side. He went in for sex, crime, and pseudo-science, graphically illustrated. In three months The Journal’s circula- tion jumped from 20,000 to 150,000.
Still the pace didn’t suit Hearst, so he developed a sudden sympathy for Cuba. The Spanish-American War gave The Journal 1,000,000 readers.
Then Hearst ran into trouble. Be- cause his readers included thousands of Irish and German immigrants, he turned against the pro-British McKin- ley administration. On McKinley’s sec- ond election in 1900, The Journal edi- torialized: “If bad men cannot be got rid of except by killing, then the kill- ing must be done.”
In 1901, Governor Goebel of Ken- tucky was assassinated. For The Journal Ambrose Bierce wrote a quatrain:
The bullet that pierced Goebel’s
breast
Can not be found in all the West;
Good reason, it is speeding here
To stretch McKinley on his bier.
Later, an anarchist shot President McKinley. The subsequent anti-Hearst furor forced him to change the: name of The Journal—which now had an eve- ning edition—to The American and Journal. In 1904 the morning and evening editions took separate names.
The World War started the Hearst newspapers’ influence on the down- grade. Still anti-British and pro-Ger- man, he bitterly opposed American intervention. The American’s circula- tion dwindled, and other Hearst papers slipped with it. Hearst found his publi- cations short of cash. In 1924 he sold preferred stock in his publications for the first time. The confusing maze of Hearst corporations and holding com- panies made more and more bank loans.
Last March Hearst Publications, Inc., asked the SEC’s permission to issue $22,500,000 worth of securities; Hearst Magazines, Inc., sought approval of a $13,000,000 issue. Left-wing organiza- tions grabbed the chance to pick on their enemy. They complained to the commission that little of the money would go to the subsidiaries. Instead, they said, it would be diverted to parent companies about whose assets little is known, and eventually would reach Hearst’s hands; part of the proceeds would be used to retire loans guaran- teed by Hearst personally. Last week
the SEC hadn’t yet approved the issues.
The worst sufferers in Hearst’s 22- paper chain have been the morning editions. Most hit new lows during the depression and have since failed to re- bound properly. Gossip has others ready for the ax.
July 3, 1937 NEWS-WEEK
SHAKESPEARE: CBS Stars Come Out to Rival Barrymore
Shakespearean rivalries will streak through Summer skies as Columbia Broadcasting System hurls a phalanx of high-priced voices against the Lone Knight of the National Broadcasting Company, John Barrymore. Immediate- ly after the great actor magically streamlined “Hamlet” last week as the first of his starring series, Columbia officials hurriedly assembled for pub- lication a glittering list of vowel wizards who will vie for the ears of Monday- night radio listeners.
Although CBS first announced the Summer Shakespeare season five weeks ago, NBC program experts beat them to the start with Barrymore and all the publicity frills his name evokes (NEws-WEEK, June 26).
Then came the Columbia counter- barrage: a series of eight condensed plays to begin July 12, from 9 to 10, Eastern Daylight Time, Monday nights (Barrymore’s time is 9:30 to 10:15), and an imposing list of stars. The plays: “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” “King Lear,” “Twelfth Night,” “As You Like It,” “The Taming of the Shrew,” “Henry IV,” and “Much Ado About Nothing.” Order of presentation was not announced.
Burgess Meredith, a successful stage portrayer of whimsical youth will have a try as Hamlet. Two Thespians whose Broadway Shakespearean attempts met with critical disappointment last season will essay other roles: an erstwhile Hamlet, Leslie Howard becomes Bene- dick in “Much Ado About Nothing”; Walter Huston seeks the success as Henry IV that eluded him as Othello.
The “Hamlet” program promises in- teresting interpretations: William A. Brady, 74-year-old Broadway producer, as the Ghost; his wife, Grace George, as the Queen; Walter Abel as Horatio, and Montagu Love as the King. Edward G. Robinson will play Petruchio in “The Taming of the Shrew.” “Twelfth Night” has Tallulah Bankhead as Viola; Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Malvolio; Estelle Winwood—whose fluttery West Coast portrayal of Portia in “The Merchant of Venice” last season was at least novel—-as Maria; and Orson Welles, the Federal Theatre Project’s magnificent Dr. Faustus, as the Duke.
In “Henry IV,” Brian Aherne, hand- some British stage and screen star of creamy accent, will play Prince Hal, with able Walter Connolly as Falstaff.
The list of players—none known for the characterizations they will attempt —indicates Brewster Morgan, director, may get what he claims was the pur- pose of the casting: fresh and striking interpretations of the roles on the air.
Morgan should know his Shakespeare. A Kansas City, Kan., boy, he went from the University of Kansas to attract Brit- ish notice as the first American Rhodes scholar to direct Shakespearean plays at the Oxford University Theatre. Aft- er postgraduate work on Broadway, he entered radio in 1934.
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Authentic Pointers on Today's News; Advance Notice of Tomorrow's—From the Reports of Field Correspondents
COURT FIREWORKS: Revival of the Su- preme Court issue on the Senate floor next week is apt to start a long series of oratorical explosions. Chances are considered about 50-50 that some sort of compromise—pos- sibly calling for one new Justice this year and one next—will pass before the end of this session. The admini- stration believes that it can count on at least 50 votes (only 48 are neces- sary) for such a plan, but it faces an almost certain filibuster in the Senate and a tendency to stall in the House.
TAX-EVASION FIZZLE: By all fair stand- ards, the early part of the adminis- tration’s big publicity stunt—the tax- avoidance inquiry—was a flop. At- tendance, except for the first few days, has been mediocre; the revela- tions fell short of advance billing; and most newspapers played the story down in favor of the labor war.
What's more, the opening shots back- fired. Note that the early hearings proved little except that the Treasury itself was to blame for one big “‘loop- hole” (the low withholding tax on aliens) and has been amazingly re- miss in clamping down on the trick Bahaman insurance-company scheme. One of the big results of the inquiry will probably be a shake-up of the Internal Revenue Bureau—the last thing in Morgenthau’s mind when he induced F.D.R. to recommend the investigation.
HONEST ROCKEFELLER: The Congres- sional tax-investigating committee originally planned in its initial hear- ings to cite John D. Rockefeller Jr. as one of the few ultra-rich who honestly paid the government every cent he owed without resorting to any legal loopholes. For some un- known reason, the plan was quietly scrapped.
LABOR FOR FARMERS: When and if a reasonably popular farm bill (Some- thing far narrower than the present omnibus bill) gets before Congress, watch John L. Lewis and his C.I.O. go to bat for it. Realizing that farm- ers are reacting against the current C.I.0. disturbances, Lewis is looking for ways of winning their support.
CONSERVATIVE SETBACK: Major devel- opments in the Democratic party may be foreshadowed by last week’s Senate vote on the Robinson-Byrnes amendments to the Relief Bill. It showed for the first time that the administration-progressive group can
win even over the opposition of the “old reliable’ Democratic hierarchy (Robinson, Byrnes, Harrison, Pitt- man, etc.). Thus, the undercover drive of semiconservative Southern- ers (including Garner) to wrest 1940 party control away from Roosevelt may prove a boomerang, resulting in the fall of the old-line Senate leader- ship itself.
LEFTIST BLOC: Keep an eye on the
progressive group in the House (with a nucleus of about 50) which Maverick of Texas is welding into a fairly workable unit. But note that the members are determined not to tie themselves and their principles up with the 1940 renomination of Roosevelt. They’ve reached an in- formal agreement to stop dramatiz- ing F.D.R. and to make a point of criticizing him from time to time.
VAN NUYS DOOMED: There are grow-
ing indications that Senator Frede- rick Van Nuys, Indiana Democrat who bitterly opposed the court plan, is headed for the scrap heap. Not politically strong anyway, he’s losing Federal patronage by the handful to his colleague, Senator Minton. All signs point to a working agreement between Postmaster Farley and Gov- ernor Townsend to back a strong candidate against Van Nuys next year.
LA FOLLETTE ‘SENSATIONS’: Senator La
Follette’s subcommittee, returning to headlines this week with hearings on the Republic Steel riots on Me- morial Day, is prepared to fire a long series of other shots at industry as soon as more money (about $100,- 000) is appropriated for expenses. Major subjects on which the com- mittee has quietly piled up evidence: Weirton Steel, the Black Legion (al- legedly financed by Michigan in- dustrialists), Ford Motor Co.
FORD FIGHT: The big rumpus between
the C.I.O. and Ford isn’t likely for several months—at the earliest. Union organizers find the going sur- prisingly slow—partly because many Ford workers undoubtedly distrust the C.1LO., partly because many others are scared stiff of being identified as union members. Some of the U.A.W. meetings in fhe De- troit area are still held in pitch dark- ness to avoid recognition of Ford men.
LABOR NIGHT CLUB: Believe it or not,
James Dewey, top-rank Federal la- bor conciliator, hopes shortly ' to
turn night-club impresario. He and I. M. Ornburn, treasurer of the A.F. of L. union-label department, are dickering for a Washington dine. and-dance spot, which they hope to establish as a meeting place for labor chiefs, conciliators, and _ jp. dustrial labor-relations managers,
TRIVIA: Federal agents are again ip.
vestigating Dr. Townsend’s income taxes... John L. Lewis Jr. plans to enter Princeton this Fall .. . Inci- dentally, Lewis Sr. is showing his recent strain, snapping at newspaper men ... Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau has finally discovered the “leak” through which reporters got the names of his secret callers: it’s a glass transom opening into the approach to the Secretary’s private elevator; frosted glass has now been installed.
UNFINISHED U.S. EXHIBIT: In spite of
previous postponements of its dedi- cation, the American building at the Paris Exposition won’t even be com- pleted in time for its official “open- ing” July 4. Walls and roof will be up, and the New Deal exhibits will be on hand, but the interior wil! be a mess. Delay is due mainly to France’s labor scarcity, the U.S. hav- ing refused to follow Germany and Italy in bringing in its own laborers.
BOLIVIAN HERRING: Always looking for
“international incidents” to strength- en itself at home, Bolivia’s shaky military dictatorship last week made a diplomatic issue of “‘clashes” along the Bolivia-Peru border—producing big South American news stories, some of which even dribbled into U.S. papers. Actually, the “clashes” were just tiffs between smugglers and Peruvian police such as occur almost weekly and receive publicity only when one of the two countries feels the need of creating a scare.
MEXICAN LABOR WAR: Expect serious
interunion troubles in Mexico be- fore long. Armed clashes between the big C.R.O.M. union and _ such extremist groups as the Communist- controlled C.T.M. are likely, in spite of President Cardenas’ quiet but frantic efforts at settlement.
CUBAN NEW DEAL: Dictator Batista is
boasting to acquaintances that his Cuban “New Deal” will far outstrip Roosevelt’s in its socialization of business, distribution of land to thousands, and elaborate social-se- curity laws. He’s speeding up his program mainly to steal thunder from the growing Leftist opposition.
ABOUT-FACE IN TOKYO: Despite super-
ficial signs to the contrary, wun- censored advices are that Japan is again progressing toward a “totali- tarian” State. The liberals in Parlia- ment who forced the fall of the “pro- Fascist” Hayashi Cabinet have be- gun voting with the similar new Cabinet, because (1) most of them
st > : No PART OF THIS OR THE NEXT PAGE MAY BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT; WRITTEN PERMISSION)
34
NEWS-WEEK July 3, 1937
RUSSIAN DETERMINATION: There’s a
July 3, 1937 NEWS-WEEK
are coming to view the Rightist trend as inevitable, (2). many are yielding to wholesale patronage from the new government, (3) still others are willing to vote for any- thing in order to forestall the threat- ened dissolution of Parliament.
GOD & ADOLF: Hitler deification has
attained legal status. In a little- publicized decision upholding a phase of the Nazis’ anti-Catholic drive, the Brunswick Court of Appeals held: “The Fuehrer is an envoy whom God has charged with a great mission for his people and for the world. It is therefore the duty of the church not to oppose, but to obey the will of God of which the Fuehrer is the ex- pression.”
FOREIGN NOTES: Renewed agitation for
tearing down the Eiffel Tower, built as a temporary feature for the 1889 Exposition, has shocked Parisians in- to forming a society of “Friends of the Eiffel Tower” ... Britain’s new- est anti-tank gun will puncture any known tank armor at more than a mile ... The Spanish loyalist capital of Valencia has four strip-tease shows; on the curtain of one is the notice: “Comrades, show your de- votion to the republic, your discipline, by not interfering with the artists’ work.”
DYED AUTOS: Industrialists are enthu-
siastic over the new direct process perfected by Prof. Colin Fink of Columbia for coating steel and iron with aluminum. They’re particularly interested because another recent de- velopment makes it possible to im- pregnate color into aluminum. The combination points toward auto- mobiles which won’t be painted but will be plated with tinted aluminum, said to be nonfading and almost in- destructible.
TRAILING TRAILERS: Note how the
trailer industry, though progressing moderately well, has fallen far short of the boom generally predicted for it. Main reasons: (1) Most of the manufacturers are financially weak, can’t afford big advertising, and have totally inadequate distributing fa- cilities. (2) States and cities are passing an increasing number of anti-trailer ordinances.
LEAD BATHROOMS: A new technique in
bathroom construction may soon come into widespread use. In place of tile walls, the method calls for spraying molten lead on a thick, woolly wallboard. Result: a pleasant silver-gray color, smooth, water- proof, rustless, and soundproof—at about half the cost of.tile.
weird story behind all the confused reporting of the Russian transpolar flight last fortnight. Soviet suppres- sion of early. news was so rigid that the press obtained no word of the take-off and only badly conflicting stories of the later stages of the flight. An explanation of the cen-
Incidentally,
sorship—unbelievable if it hadn't come via a most responsible Moscow- to-Washington route—is this: the Soviet, determined not to repeat the failure of the much publicized 1935 flight, had a second identical plane ready to take off if the first were lost, leaving the original failure to go unknown and unwept.
State Department geo- graphers ridicule the claim that the transpolar route is the shortest for the talked-of Moscow-to-San Fran- cisco airline. They say it’s at least 1,800 miles shorter to cross Lapland, nick the Arctic Circle between the 20th and 60th meridians, then to cut down southward across Prince Patrick Island.
PUZZLE OFFICE: A New York broker,
determined to win the Old Gold puzzle contest (see page 28), last week rented a special office, equipped it with abundant reference books, advertised for puzzle-solvers, hired ten of the 200 applicants, and put them to work on the “run-off” se- ries of 90 pictures. He supervises the work, keeping his mind clear to select the best of the answers, which he sent in.
PRESS NOTES: The La Follette subcom-
mittee sent a special representative to New York to persuade newspapers and magazines to give maximum publicity to its rumpus this week over the suppressed newsreel of the
Chicago labor battle . . . Newspaper
publishers are establishing a $250,- 000 war chest to fight radio as an ad- vertising medium .. . Rival press services are chuckling over the way The Associated Press predicted a Hitler coup in Danzig on June 19 and later explained the incorrect forecast by reporting that its own publicity caused the Fuehrer to change his mind.
DIESEL PHONIES: The boom in Diesel
MISSING PERSONS:
engines has produced a bumper crop of bogus “Diesel correspondence schools,” including one in Denver which mulcted students of $31,000 before it was exposed. As opposed to the schools’ high-powered ads, Diesel experts assert that nearly all the correspondence courses are phony and that the value of any of them is “highly dubious.”
Upton Sinclair, whose EPIC campaign for Governor set California on its ear in 1934, lives in Pasadena, is writing a new book; says he’s through with politics ... Gilbert Romagnano, right-hand man of Alexandre Stavisky, the swindler whose murder wrecked a French Cabinet, now operates a fashionable Paris bar just off the Champs-Ely- sées . . . Nila Cram Cook, once fa- mous as Gandhi’s disciple, lives in Provincetown, Mass.; does “research work in the dance”; is bringing out an autobiographical book; recently won a Provincetown pie-eating con- test.
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TODAY IN
AMERICA
By Raymond Moley
The Case For Optimism
S WE turn the half year, our fac- tories are making goods at a rate just below that of the boom levels of 1929. Industrial employment and pay rolls are correspondingly high. The index of money pay rolls has at last crept up to join the index of employment, refiect- ing wage rises during the past year which have increased the purchasing power of an important proportion of consumers. Industry is working on a sizable backlog of accumulated orders. Carloadings run 15 per cent ahead of last year. Retail sales are rising. Farm income runs from a fifth to a quarter higher than it was last year at this season, and the outlook for the farmer is excellent. We shall harvest the largest wheat crop in many years, barring unforeseen disaster in the spring-wheat area. The world needs wheat, and the crop will bring good prices. Cotton prospects are good, too.
+.
HESE are the fundamentals of na-
tional prosperity. They are all en- couraging. Yet Wall Street is pessi- mistic. The bond and stock markets are weak and dull. Judged by corpor- ate earnings for the first six months of this year, stocks are a great bargain. Why aren’t they being snapped up by ’ eager investors?
There is the dangerous situation in France, of course. A good many ob- servers felt that France had not de- valued the franc sufficiently when she made her great decision last September. The flight of capital, inspired in part by distrust of the stability of the franc and in part by fear of a capital levy by the Popular Front, has brought France to a credit crisis. But even as- suming a French debacle, it could not permanently interrupt our own eco- nomic progress.
Rumors of a possible change in the price of gold from $35 to $32 have dis- turbed the markets, particularly in Lyndon. But no well-informed econo- mist here has put any credence in the reports. For one thing, commodity prices are still 15 per cent below the 1926 level, which, by common agree- ment, has been accepted as the goal of recovery. It is hard, indeed, to imagine the Administration’s deliberately re- treating from the $35-an-ounce gold price, thus engineering the deflation of agricultural prices which would in- evitably follow. Furthermore, so long
36
as the United States is the principal buyer of gold, a reduction in price from $35 to $32 would not stem the flood of gold into the Treasury.
As for Great Britain, any cut in the price sHe pays for gold would be a slap in the face of Canada, Australia and India and would deliver a knockout blow to South Africa. Canada and Australia are both gold producers and are both dependent on agricultural ex- ports; India is a great hoarder; South Africa is the world’s biggest gold pro- ducer. No matter if France is obliged to let the franc slide off, Great Britain must cooperate in maintaining the present gold price and the present dol- lar-pound rate.
The factor that is causing Wall Street to view the prospects for the rest of this calendar year with mis- givings is the disturbed labor situation which is currently curtailing the out- put of steel and is harassing other industries, including the automobile in- dustry which thought it had made its peace with the C.I.O. The fear that the government may be unwilling to inter- vene in these disputes in an impartial manner has, in turn, produced a dead- lock in the investment market.
Virtually no long-term borrowing has been done since the slump in bond prices in March. It is significant that many new issues for which the SEC has granted approval never have been launched, but have been shelved for several months. Trading in seasoned issues is so small that quotations are hardly better than nominal. Private investors have largely withdrawn from the market, and institutional. buyers are reluctant to reenter it until trends of interest rates become clearer.
—
HE importance of all this is that
there can be no continuing high level of business for the heavy industries without long-term borrowing. It is through bonds that business finances the building of new plants and the modernization or expansion of old ones. The economists who believe the present deadlock in the long-term investment market will not soon be broken there- fore expect a business recession to set in this summer or early fall, slowing down the heavy industries and possibly spreading until it affects the industries that make consumers’ goods.
In support of this view of the pessi- mists, it must be pointed out that the Federal government is no longer pump- ing money into the country’s total
supply. The budget for the fiscal year 1938, upon which we are just entering, will show an accountant’s deficit, after prayer, of, say, $400,000,000, but the Treasury will collect about a billion dollars in social-security and unemploy- ment-insurance taxes, so that it wij have an actual cash surplus and need do no borrowing. Therefore, any ex- pansion in business must come from new public investment. Unless the in- vestment market thaws, there is, then, good reason to expect a recession in the heavy industries at least.
It must be pointed out also that the forward buying which built up in- dustry’s backlog of orders has slowed down. The alarm over the swift rise of commodity prices which was im- pelling businessmen to increase in- ventories has subsided since the bubble of commodity speculation burst in London.
—
UT the great basic tides of oncoming crops and the hunger of consumers for goods still work for prosperity. Profitable crops benefit not only the farmer, but also the railroads, the agri- cultural-implement industries, the mail- order houses, the automobile industry —in fact, every line of business. A great wheat crop with the world’s storehouses bare and poor crops abroad more than once has heralded a strong advance in American prosperity.
Another thing—gold continues to pour in here at the rate of $140,000,000 a month, much of it representing the 35 per cent increase in world gold pro- duction since 1933, part of it gold com- ing out of hoarding in response to rumors that its price may soon be cut. It is all very well to talk of “steriliz- ing” the incoming supply. But, despite that and all other manipulations the government can contrive, the mere fact that the total supply of gold is increasing is a powerful force driving prices upward.
That businessmen do not share the pessimism of the financiers may be read from an unmistakable sign—the rapid expansion of commercial loans. The spring expansion in business bor- rowing from banks has amounted to $493,000,000, putting the total a billion dollars above the level of last year at this time. Businessmen borrow money because they intend to use it in their business; there is no surer index of their judgment of the immediate future.
Under pressure of better consumer incomes, both. rural and urban, indus- tries will demand funds to launch new enterprises and expand old ones. With the undivided-profits tax, they cannot do this out of earnings. The demand
of American industry for funds with which to go forward cannot be denied indefinitely. Nor can American industry long be denied a safe place in which to live and work.
NEWS-WEEK July 3, 1937
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an E don’t say that you have to tf. be an independent distilling company like Frankfort in order to produce good whis-
key. But we do believe that being independent helps.
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For a family concern like ours, one that’s been operated and controlled by the same family since its founding in 1865— such a company isn’t beholden to outside financial interests. It has no fixed dividend requirement to meet. It can concentrate on the one business of making good whiskey.
As our great-grandfather, the founder of Frankfort, said: “Let somebody else make the most whiskey—we want to make the best whiskey.”
To make the best whiskey takes patience. It also takes the willingness to spend more money to produce better whiskey. But that’s the way we operate.
We buy only choice grain, seasoned to a flinty hardness. (Because such grain makes the finest whiskey.) We cling to the old- fashioned sour-mash method of distilling— which takes one-third longer, and produces less whiskey per batch of grain. (Because that, we believe, is the only way to make a truly great whiskey.)
Nor do we stop there. We try to make sure that our whiskey is sold as honestly— yes, and as honorably—as it is made.
We try to see to it that Frankfort whis- kies are sold through the most reputable outlets. And we believe you'll find that the places that display Frankfort goods are the best in yourcity.
Moreover, it is our hope that those who buy our whiskies are people who respect them as we do...who treat their whiskey moderately...who share Abraham Lin- coln’s attitude toward liquor—that “the
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difficulty lies not in the use of a bad thing, but in the abuse of a very good thing.”
“ 4 “ To obtain a free reproduction of the above natu: color photograph suitable for framing, write Frankfort Distilleries,Inc., Dept.D,Louisville,!
FRANKFORT DISTILLERIES, INCORPORATED
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