Undersecretary No. 3

Until last week there were, under the two "Generals" and eight Secretaries of the Cabinet, only two Undersecretaries who outranked the 21 assistant secretaries of the sub-Cabinet. One was William Phillips at the State department; the other was Thomas Jefferson Coolidge at the Treasury (see above). Last week President Roosevelt sent to the Senate the nomination for a third Undersecretary--this time of Agriculture. Named for the job was young, handsome, curly-headed Rexford Guy Tugwell, topman of the Brain Trust.

One good reason for the appointment was the President's desire to increase the compensation of Dr. Tugwell who had given up a better paying job as professor of Economics at Columbia to join the New Deal. As Assistant Secretary of Agriculture he has been drawing $7,500 per year (less 10% Federal pay cut); as Undersecretary he will be paid $10,000 (less 10%). Another reason was the President's obvious intention to retort to the clamorous criticism of this Brain Truster by some special mark of public preference for him and his services.

Immediately one voice was raised in opposition to Dr. Tugwell's nomination. Good Senator Ellison D. Smith of South Carolina. Chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, was distressed: 1) because the job of Undersecretary had been created without his knowing it, had, in fact, been slipped into the Agriculture Department Appropriation bill when only about five Senators were on the Senate floor; 2) because he felt the Undersecretary should be "one familiar with the lowly and despised occupation of farming." Said he: "What is needed for that job is a farmer who knows what overalls are for, not a man who knows only how to wield a pointer in front of a blackboard."

The fact that Dr. Tugwell was not a dirt farmer in overalls excited few persons in or out of the Senate except Senator Smith. What did excite them was the widespread suspicion that the new Undersecretary was a dangerous radical bent on "regimenting" industry, overthrowing the profit system and generally shaking the foundations of the Republic. Conservative Republican Senators itched to get Dr. Tugwell before them in committee and catechize him on his economic and political doctrines, thereby reviving the titillating issue of a Red conspiracy within the New Deal.

They were well equipped with quotations from his books and speeches. Recently Senator Dickinson of Iowa gave his colleagues this sample of Tugwelliana: "There can be no secure peace in the world so long as its people are engaged in industry and organized in independent units. . . . It ought to be a source of wonder that a society could operate at all when profits are allowed to be earned and disposed of as we do it. . . . It is necessary to realize quite finally that everything will be changed if the linking of industry can finally be brought to completion in a plan. . . . Once the first step has been taken, which we seem about to take, that road will begin to suggest itself as the way to a civilized industry. . . . We shall all of us be made unhappy in one way or another, for the things we love, as well as things that are only privileges, will have to go. The first changes will have to do with statutes, with constitution, with government. We shall be changing once for all and it will require the laying of rough unholy hands on many a precedent. . . . The future is becoming visible in Russia. . . . There is no private business exempt from compulsion to serve a planned public interest. The essence of business in its free venture for profits is unregulated economy. Planning implies guidance to all business. To take away from business its freedom of venture and expansion, and to limit the profits it may make, is to destroy it as business and to make it something else."

As concrete evidence that Dr. Tugwell meant what he said, his critics point to the start which has been made in regimenting agriculture under AAA, to the strict codes which have been forced on agricultural industries, and to the Tugwell bill to make the Pure Food & Drug Act much more drastic and comprehensive, apply it to advertising as well as labeling. To prove that the present Food & Drug Act is already drastic enough to penalize honest men for mistakes. Dr. Tugwell's opponents unearthed a list of judgments obtained under that act and published by the Department of Agriculture last January. On the list, between one order approving the destruction of 99 boxes of wormy dressed herring and another assessing a $25 fine for shipping canned razor clams in too much brine, was a third order signed by R. G. Tugwell, Acting Secretary of Agriculture. This case concerned a shipment of "canned grapefruit juice and canned orange juice, sample cans of which were found to contain less than the declared volume." Following a plea of "guilty," the Tugwell order approved a $50 court fine upon the shippers. Tugwell & Wiseman of Florida Inc. President of Tugwell & Wiseman Inc. is Charles Henry Tugwell, father of the new Undersecretary who is himself a stockholder in the juice-canning firm.

By last week the Tugwellian words and ideas seemed to have undergone a marked public change. On the day President Roosevelt sent his nomination to the Senate Dr. Tugwell was just between two speeches. Three days before he addressed the American Society of Newspaper Editors, praising a free press" and saying reassuringly:

"We will not do what we do not want to do and coercion cannot make us. . . . No one with the slightest sense of history would try to fit such people into a regimented scheme, would try to think for them instead of getting them to think for themselves. . . . In this respect I unhesitatingly avow myself a thorough conservative."

Two days after he was in New Hampshire, addressing Dartmouth students in a speech dedicated to the late Robert Henry Michelet, permanent president of the senior class (TIME, April 30). There Dr. Tugwell declared:

"It is not to be supposed that a generation which made so colossal a failure of social management will succeed much better in reconstruction. It is true that government affairs are now intrusted to others who always had misgivings concerning the old acquisitive ideas. But where there is everything to be learned about so complicated a business, and where new attitudes are not shared by a powerful minority, it is doubtful whether the gains will be very rapid or very complete. It is not true that we shall be able to offer your generation of university men a wholly new deal when you emerge as graduates. You will confront the same old system with some few changes."

In neither speech did Dr. Tugwell backtrack from his theories, but he couched them in more conservative terms, gave them a new aspect to refute the charge of radicalism.

To some this looked like shrewd political opportunism. To others it represented the natural effort of a man, whose ideals have been reviled, to win them a new esteem.

*Said Correspondent Frank R. Kent: "He buttered the editors until they glistened like greased poles in the sunshine."

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