"Super-Magruder"

When he said: "I wish that there was a Magruder in every Department of the Government" (TIME, Oct. 3), Senator William Edgar Borah may have had Aladdin's lamp in his ample lap. A moon had not passed when, last week at San Diego, Calif., there rose up another "Magruder," this time in the Department of War.

The Navy Department's "Magruder" was plain-spoken Rear Admiral Thomas Pickett Magruder who commands only the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The War Department's "Magruder" was really a "Super-Magruder" because he was Major General Charles Pelot Summerall, Chief of Staff, and topmost soldier of them all. Touring the West to inspect Army stations, General Summerall last week stood up before the San Diego (Calif.) Chamber of Commerce and said: "The housing situation of the Army is a disgrace! Men are living in quarters at Camp Hearn like workers in a logging camp. The same condition prevails at other places. They are living in tumbledown shacks on the scale of the immigrant class. If you want an army to honor and carry on with dignity and the respect of the nation, it is time that the people of America waked up and did something. It is up to them!

"The question is one of money, and until the United States--is able to support an army of sufficient size, until the Administration is aroused to the real need, nothing can be done and we shall in the meantime continue to perish by degrees." When these words reached Washington, D. C., it happened that Secretary of War Dwight Filley Davis was away and also Assistant Secretary of War Hanford MacNider. The Acting Secretary of War was, for the moment, Brigadier General Briant Harris Wells, Deputy Chief of Staff. Perhaps it was to save General Wells the embarrassment of giving an order to General Summerall, his superior in rank, that President Coolidge, who suddenly felt and announced a desire to see General Summerall, sent personally for General Summerall, with a directness that seemed almost peremptory. The General cut short his inspection tour and started for Washington. At the White House, no direct evidence could be discovered that the President was conscious of what the General had said about Army housing. It was explained, simply, that the President wanted to talk with his Chief of Staff about Army appropriations in the 1928 budget, now being formulated. Without any reference to General Summerall's remarks about "a disgrace," the President reminded the country that since March 4, 1925, Congress has authorized or appropriated some 20 millions for construction of new Army buildings. He estimated that another 14 millions would be provided in the new budget and in the deficiency bill. "But what about General Summerall?" asked the Washington Sic 'Em Boys.* " Will he be rebuked? Will he be disciplined?"

The White House made no answer. Nor did General Summerall permit himself to be "sicked" into a defiant frame of mind as he journeyed eastward. "A good soldier," he said, "does as he is told." Perhaps penitently, perhaps humorously, he added that a good soldier "never talks."

*Newspapermen who would cultivate a Coolidge-Summerall dispute in order to print sensational "frontpage news."