Merry-Go-Round

Few & far between are the books on U. S. politics which really sell and make money. Most publishers suppose the public is not deeply interested in its national scene. The House of Putnam considers its Mirrors of Washington by Clinton Wallace Gilbert highly successful because 62,891 copies have been sold in ten years. When in 1926 Samuel Hopkins Adams cast the scandals of the Harding era into fiction, his Revelry found 96,000 buyers. Frank Richardson Kent's tart, authoritative The Great Game of Politics has sold but 8,660 copies in four years.

Last week, however. Publisher Horace Liveright concluded that he had what promised to be a political best-seller in his anonymous Washington Merry-Go-Round. In six weeks it had sold 36,000 copies. The Mirrors of 1932, put out a few days earlier by Brewer. Warren & Putnam (TIME. July 20), had accounted for less than half as many sales. Merry-Go-Round was even making legitimate news squibs: President Hoover was trying to identify its authors; Senator Borah headed the Library of Congress list of those waiting for a copy.

Not only for Mr. Liveright but also for a small group of Washington correspondents who composed it was Merry-Go-Round making money. Briskly and irreverently, they had set forth the gossipy details of Washington social and political life in a manner new and interesting to those not intimately familiar with the capital. While their characterization of individuals was a matter of opinion, the basic facts of which they wrote were passing into national history.

Merry-Go-Round was born among a coterie of newsmen known as the Georgetown Group who gather periodically at each other's homes to discuss the state of public affairs. Liberals at heart, they are dissatisfied with the political times and Merry-Go-Round is the expression of their dissatisfaction. Those who either wrote chapters of the book or materially contributed ideas and information are supposed to include (though each diplomatically denies it) Farmer Murphy and Drew Pearson of the Baltimore Sun, Robert S. Allen of the Christian Science Monitor, George Abell of the Washington Daily News, Charles Ross and Paul Y. Anderson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Ray Tucker of the New York World-Telegram and Ruby Black, freelance.

Washington society is dissected under a chapter entitled "Boiled Bosoms" with the Gann-Longworth and McLean-de Ligne feuds recounted (TIME, Dec. 15 et ante, May 13, 1929). Tittle-tattle: Bachelor Senator Tydings of Maryland playing "footie" with sedate ladies; Mrs. Trubee Davison, wife of the Assistant Secretary of War, smoking a pipe; Daisy Harriman trimming Senator Walsh's walrus-like mustache.

President Hoover is flayed as an executive who failed to come up to expectations in a national emergency (TIME,

March 2). He is accused of "incompetence, do-nothingness and reactionary stultification." Four reasons for this result are advanced: 1) The Hoover myth of a superman, built on propaganda; 2)

autocracy learned "among the coolies of China and the wage-slaves of the Far East"; 3) political ineptitude; 4) fear, vacillation and a petty personal temper. Apparently the author of this Merry-Go- Round chapter was in close cooperation with the writer of the Mirrors of 1932 be cause in almost identical words they both declare that Engineer Hoover received $5,000 per year as a "mining expert," $95,000 as a "financial expert." Of the White House Secretariat (called "The Vestal Virgins") only "Larry" Richey ("the closest man to the President in or out of Washington") gets a word of praise. Vice President Curtis ("Egg Charley") is roundly ridiculed for his presidential ambitions, for his ornate office ("a cross between a tribal wickiup and a Sultan's seraglio"), for his official and unwonted toploftiness. Henry Lewis Stimson, as Secretary of State, is depicted as a vic tim of his aristocratic lineage and poor nervous resistance. He is dubbed "Wrong Horse Harry" because he failed to guess the winner of last year's Brazilian revolt (TIME, Sept. 22 et seq.}. Secretary of the Treasury Mellon ("the man who stayed too long") is set forth as a fiscal monarch whom Depression has toppled from his throne. Recounted in cruel detail are the unhappy incidents of his divorce from beauteous Nora McMullen Mellon. Says Merry-Go-Round of the Senate Insurgents: "The strongest and weakest element in national affairs. . . . Individually they fight gallant battles in the public interest. Collectively they have floundered about hopelessly, without program, unity or leadership. ..." The House of Representatives ("the Monkey House") : "The greatest organ ized inferiority complex in the world. . . . The 435 members, with a few exceptions, are the lowest common denominator of the ignorance, prejudices and inhibitions of their districts. . . . Assembled, it looks and acts like a section of the bleachers in a bush league town. . . . [Leader Tilson] has the agility of a flat bottomed mud scow. ... He conducts a floor fight like a religious revival."

Unspared in the general criticism is the Press. This chapter is widely attributed to short, red-headed "Bob" Allen of the Christian Science Monitor of whose Washington bureau the chapter says: "It is manned by competent and conscientious reporters who are held down by the conservative views and many prohibitions of their organization. Robert S. Allen, head of the staff, is the youngest large bureau chief in the capital."

The United Press is rated above the Associated Press in "capacity and character." Richard V. Oulahan of the New York Times ("one of the few really distinguished looking men in Washington") is described as supplying his paper with "front" for $25,000 per year. The New York Herald Tribune's Washington news "is inclined to be sensational and trivial." Mark Sullivan has sunk into "a Republican propaganda medium." Clinton Wallace Gilbert "is one of the few nationally known Washington correspondents who has not compromised his personal or professional integrity, never fawned or groveled." The few other reporters who received praise--Messrs. Ross, Anderson, Pearson, Murphy et al.--are, by no great coincidence, members of the Georgetown Group.

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