$15,000 Soap Wrappers

When news got out eight weeks ago that the Democratic National Committee had sold souvenir campaign books--bound in leather and autographed by the President --for $250 each, and that some of the $700,000 worth of books had been bought by corporations, which are not allowed to contribute to campaign funds, Republican Representative Bertrand H. Snell naturally demanded an investigation (TIME, June 21). Last week, while Representative Snell's resolution remained securely pigeonholed by the House Rules Committee, the subject of the campaign books cropped up again, this time in the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce investigation of the Van Sweringen railway system. By the time the railroad investigation got back on the track, the campaign books had taken up the better part of three days' hearings, made most of their headlines, been threshed out almost as thoroughly as they would have been in an investigation of their own.

Star witness when the Committee resumed hearings last week after a month's interval, during which its chairman, Montana's Burton K. Wheeler, was busy with the Court fight, was Broker Robert R. Young of Manhattan. Most sensational development of the week was that 40 year-old Broker Young, who with his partners Kirby and Kolbe acquired control of the huge Van Sweringen railroad empire by buying a majority in Alleghany Corp. for a mere $6,000,000, had less shrewdly spent $15,000 for 60 campaign books which he had then "scattered all over Texas and Oklahoma among my friends and relatives." Said unhappy Broker Young, whose presence in Washington had forced his wife to curtail plans for a huge dinner dance in their Newport, R. I. country house: "I would have taken soap wrappers if they had been offered to me."

The solicitors from whom Broker Young would gladly have purchased $15,000 worth of soap wrappers were a group of pressure salesmen who got a 50% commission on campaign book sales. Senator Wheeler read a letter from Manhattan Lawyer Watson Washburn who said he had been notified that one of the salesmen who had approached Broker Young was one N. M. Lichtblau. Wrote Lawyer Washburn:

"On behalf of an aged and indignant client, Mrs. Eva J. Hurst, we have been searching unsuccessfully for two years to find one Nat Lichtblau who it appears was one of a gang of high-pressure salesmen who secured by misrepresentation our client's last $12,000 worth of securities." Senator Wheeler suggested that Lawyer Washburn ask the Democratic National Committee about Lichtblau's "whereabouts and antecedents."

Although Senator Wheeler grumbled because Broker Young had not ousted leftovers from the Van Sweringen regime and complained that U. S. railroads are controlled by men who lack practical experience, the net summation of a week's rail-road investigation was the chairman's sharp comment on the campaign books. Said he: ". . . I resent the Democratic Committee going to people just prior to their coming here, and soliciting funds. . . . It might give the impression that people had to give money to get proper treatment. . . ."

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