Tugwell Upped

Tug well Upped

(See front cover) South Carolina's Senator Smith: He is a handsome, splendidly equipped and manicured gentleman. . . . But throw him into the cotton fields and he would starve to death. . . . Before the God that made me I'd do anything for him that did not involve my duty to the farmers. Alabama's Senator Black: This man . . . has brains. He has been charged with it. ... He has dared to raise his voice in favor of old age pensions. . . . Treason! Treason! Let him be taken to the stake! Let the inquisition be turned upon him! Virginia's Senator Byrd: I contend that he has committed illegal acts which he is asking the Congress of the U. S. to ratify. ... It is inconceivable to me that a man can make a speech in which he says certain affirmative things and then say "I did not mean what I said." He has not got the sincerity ... a man should have who holds high public office. West Virginia's Senator Neely: I refuse to vote for another crucifixion. I refuse to participate in compelling one of the President's most useful friends to drink a bowl of hemlock. I refuse to help bind a Columbus of the New Deal with chains. I shall vote against the crucifixion, against the hemlock and the chains. . . . My act in so doing will be to me in future years-- A rainbow to the storms of life: The evening beam that smiles the clouds away, And tints tomorrow with prophetic ray. Thus did the Senate last week debate the fitness of Rexford Guy Tugwell, No. i Braintruster of the Roosevelt Administration, to be Undersecretary of Agriculture. Despite much tall talk of inquisitions, crucifixion and hemlock, little or nothing was said about two practical questions: i) should Dr. Tugwell's salary be boosted from $7,500 as Assistant Secretary of Agriculture to $10,000 as Undersecretary of Agriculture for doing practically the same work as in the past? 2) Should Senator Smith get the patronage he demanded from the White House? After President Roosevelt had failed to appoint one Reuben Gosnell as U. S. Marshal in western South Carolina, Senator Smith developed a violent feeling that Dr. Tugwell, not being a dirt farmer, was unfit to be the first man to fill the brand new office of Undersecretary of Agriculture. Both practical questions were answered in the affirmative. At the last minute, while Dr. Tugwell's fate hung in the balance, Reuben Gosnell's appointment came through to the Capitol. Although Senator Smith had committed himself too far to back down, the Senate by the over whelming majority of 53 to 24 confirmed Dr. Tugwell. Although only six Democrats voted against confirmation, there was many another who at heart distrusted the dapper young professor's theories and would have cast a contrary vote if it would not have been construed as a vote of no-confidence in Dr. Tugwell's patron, Franklin D. Roosevelt. But Senatorial motives mattered little to Rexford Guy Tugwell. In his office after the confirmation, he beamingly received congratulations and that night one of his friends, Novelist Sinclair Lewis, gave a party to celebrate the victory. Then the handsome, happy professor entrained for the West, to attend a farmers' picnic at Brookings, S. Dak., to make a ten-day inspection tour of agricultural experiment stations and grasshopper control projects. But though he gaily turned his back on the brief tempest which had brewed over him at the Capitol, its political importance was neither brief nor passing. Academician. Dr. Tugwell is not the kind of man who ordinarily is an issue in U. S. politics. When he was being questioned by Senators (TIME, June 18), Iowa's Senator Murphy demanded: "Did you ever follow a plow?" "Yes, sir." ''Did you ever have mud on your boots?" "Yes, sir." "Do you know how hard it is to get a dollar out of the soil?" "Yes, sir." All these "correct" answers referred to the time when as a college boy Rex Tugwell used to work during vacations on his father's fruit farm in upper New York State. Since 1915 when he was graduated from Wharton School of Finance & Commerce, he has had a wholly academic career. In fact he is so much an academician that in spite of bad hay fever, he now gets fun out of digging in the fruit and vegetable gardens when he gets back to his father's farm. Those who popped their heads into the Assistant Secretary's office just before he left for his Senatorial inquisition, found Dr. Tugwell having his white doeskin shoes cleaned and whitened. His necktie, shirt and socks always conform to a careful color scheme, and in passing a mirror he is apt, perhaps unconsciously, to give himself a glance. At 42 he is a handsome figure of a man. Besides being a connoisseur of dress, he is also an amateur of wines. Otherwise he leads the life of a professor, dwells in a small house in Glover Park with his wife and two daughters (Tanis, 17, and Marcia, n), is amiable with friends in spite of his intellectual snobbishness, is shy, cynical and inclined to be inarticulate in company. His vocabulary sometimes exceeds his ability to express himself. Senators felt obliged to ask him what he meant by: "Chance has substituted itself for the anthropomorphic interpretation of history as a casual sequence." Columbia & Campaign. Not his personal characteristics but his social ideas were what made Dr. Tugwell an issue with the Senate. All his life he has been a voluble liberal. Senator Dickinson last week quoted to the Senate some Whitmanesque Tugwelliana, written by the young professor when he was 24. It began: I am strong, I am big and well-made, I am muscled and lean and nervous. . . . It ended: I am sick of a nation's stenches I am&ick of propertied Czars. . . . I have dreamed my great dream of their passing, I have gathered my tools and my charts; My plans are fashioned and practical; I shall roll up my sleeves--make America over! In the next 20 years Dr. Tugwell became a professor of economics and settled down to teach at Columbia, but he still saw the world through the same spectacles. To him the trouble with the U.S. economic system was that profits were not spread widely enough. He said so in books and speeches. The public paid no more attention to him than to any other professor. In 1932 Governor Roosevelt told his lawyer friends Samuel Rosenman and Basil O'Connor to go out and bring him specialists to help formulate some good answers to national questions. They selected Raymond Moley to corral the specialists. On his second visit, Dr. Moley brought his next door neighbor, Dr. Tugwell. To Governor Roosevelt, Dr. Tugwell stated his prime belief that private greed under the profits system had caused the Depression. At once Mr. Roosevelt and the professor were on speaking terms; the professor quickly made explicit the Roosevelt idea that what the U. S. needs is a "more equitable distribution of wealth." Never so personally intimate with Franklin Roosevelt as Dr. Moley, Rex Tugwell nonetheless became No. 2 Braintruster after March 4, 1933. During the campaign and afterward, the U. S. was largely content to take the Roosevelt phrases about redistribution of wealth as a pious figure of political speech. It might have continued taking Dr. Tugwell's statements in the same vein, if he had not shown that he meant, in practice, to redistribute wealth by drastically cutting down private profits. Belatedly businessmen realized that in the Tugwellian eyes the New Deal was a grindstone to rub "rugged individualism" down to a social if not a socialistic polish. He drafted a Pure Food & Drug bill to enforce honesty in advertising, a bill so drastic that it made not only intrenched patent medicine makers shake in their boots but frightened even honest advertisers. He helped devise a "national plan" for sugar. So arbitrary was he in setting sugar quotas that Hawaiian sugar planters charged privately that he did so because he felt that they were well-to-do citizens and therefore did not deserve an even break. As overseer of AAA, he consistently advocated the idea that the use of all land should be controlled by the Government in the "social interest." Not until last April when the President sent his nomination as Undersecretary to the Senate, did Dr. Tugwell begin to picture himself as a conservative. Shortly after the nomination he delivered a relatively conservative speech at Dartmouth. (Excerpt: ''It is not true that we shall be able to offer your generation of university men a wholly new deal. . . . You will confront the same old system with some few changes.") He appreciated the humor of the situation. On his desk he has a picture of himself taken at Dartmouth standing beside a traffic sign plainly marked: "Safety First--Keep to the Right." His friends approved the maxim. Before he was quizzed by the Senate Committee, they took him for a week-end in the country and prepared him for his ordeal by putting him through a mock investigation. They asked him: "Who are you, anyhow?" "What sort of a guy are you?" "Are you a Communist?" "Did you ever spread manure?" Dr. Tugwell blinked and thought. Next day when the Senators asked similar questions he did not blink. He answered with ready good nature: He was a conservative. He believed in U. S. institutions and thought all necessary reforms could be made without overstepping the Constitution. He did not believe in Soviet ideas, did not even believe in "national planning" except the kind of plans President Roosevelt proposed. Some months ago Alice Longworth asked Dr. Tugwell to a luncheon. When she offered to introduce him to her friend and guest of honor, Frank R. Kent, famed political columnist of the Baltimore Sun, Dr. Tugwell demanded: "Kent? Kent? Who is Mr. Kent, anyway?" Last week, Pundit Kent had his revenge. He wrote a column on Dr. Tugwell from which Senator Dickinson quoted to the Senate: "Of course, Tugwell is a conservative. The enthusiasm with which those famous Conservatives, Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska and Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, clasped him to their reactionary bosoms and defended him against attack by that wild-eyed radical of Virginia, Senator Harry F. Byrd, proves that. "Clearly the Professor is not only a conservative--he is a Tory. Instead of standing up for his quite well known, openly and often expressed convictions he tried to convey the idea that they were not his convictions at all. . . . Instead of flying his own colors, he ran up another flag. Instead of exhibiting the independence and firmness one expects from the truly deep thinker, the Professor sidestepped with the agility of a matador, sought refuge behind the Roosevelt skirts, knowing very well the Senatorial bulls would not pursue him there." Significance-- President Roosevelt holds Dr. Tugwell dear, consults him perhaps once a week on agricultural questions, hears him whenever a new scheme springs up in the fertile Tugwell mind. When Secretary Wallace called at the White House, the President asked him to congratulate the doctor on his testimony before the Senate committee and added in his usual jocular vein: "I hope that Rex has enough 'dirt' on him by this time." From a political standpoint the Tugwell affair did not close with confirmation. The only earnest advocates of Dr. Tugwell's confirmation in the Senate were the progressives of both parties, but on the issue of supporting the President a majority of Senate Democrats was forced to line up with the progressives. Although regular republicans in the Senate said little, the Republican Party, with its eye on the next election, was preparing an issue. Oldtime Political Pundit Mark Sullivan, Herbert Hoover's good friend, wrote that the Tugwell confirmation was a turning point in U. S. History, a time when one great party flatly declared in favor of national planning and collectivism. Democrats scoffed such an interpretation but the 32 Republicans who will run for the Senate in November and 435 Republicans aiming at the House, were prepared to do their best to scare the country into believing it. Henceforth New Dealers, whether they like Dr. Tugwell or not, will have to wear him on their bosoms as Crusaders wore the Cross.

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