Fixer and Feud

BOARDS & BUREAUS

Few Government employes occupy a more ticklish position than the seven members of the Federal Communications Commission, whose weightiest duty is to assign air channels and regulate their use by U. S. broadcasters. Last week President Roosevelt did to the Commission just twice as much as he had just done to the Supreme Court. He took advantage of two vacancies to appoint two new members who will bring it more into line with his own ideas.

Upped to the membership vacated by the retirement of Republican Irvin Stewart for a full seven-year term was Commander Tunis Augustus MacDonough Craven, a 44-year-old Annapolis graduate who has been the Commission's Chief Engineer for two years. To replace Chairman Anning S. Prall, who died last July, the President temporarily transferred Frank Ramsay McNinch from the chairmanship of the Federal Power Commission. Able, sharp-faced Mr. McNinch, 64, twice mayor of Charlotte, N. C., is a close adviser of the President on power questions. He promptly announced that he knew nothing about the F. C. C. except what he reads in the papers. Last week Mr. McNinch had the opportunity to read plenty.

Boiling up menacingly was the year-old feud between one of the Commission's three Republican members, New York's George Henry Payne, and Cincinnati Radioman Powel Crosley Jr. over the 500,000-watt experimental permit granted three and a half years ago by the Commission to Crosley-operated WLW. Last year Commissioner Payne, although he is technically assigned to the Commissioner's telegraph division, wrote Mr. Crosley asking whether WLW was not taking advantage of its "experimental" status as the most powerful broadcaster in the U. S. to reap unusual commercial profits, and demanding a balance sheet. This request Crosley ignored.

One day last month two things happened at once. The F. C. C. extended WLW's experimental strength for another six months and Powel Crosley announced the appointment of a new $10,400-a-year publicity adviser. He was Charles Michelson, still working for the Democratic National Committee at $25,000 a year.

Just before the new appointments were announced last week, Commissioner Payne gave newspapers a sizzling letter he had just dispatched to Powel Crosley. Excerpts:

"On June 30th I received from you an invitation to a baseball game and to a 'small informal lunch.' As I had never met you, the invitation and the proffered 'good fellowship' seemed unusual. When I recalled, however, that an official letter that I had addressed to you had remained unanswered for over six months, the problem became not one of gaucherie but of defiance of the law. . . .

"On July 19, Congressman W. D. McFarlane, in a speech replete with facts . . . said that upon receiving your experimental license . . . you immediately raised the price of your radio advertising time some 50% and continued to collect handsome commercial profits on the basis of experimentation for these 39 months, a practice which you know is definitely prohibited by the rules of the Commission."

Commissioner Payne concluded by demanding, before Sept. 13, a full WLW balance sheet, profit and loss statement, dividend statement, figures on broadcasting rates.

When good-looking Mr. Crosley handed the press copies of his reply, it was full of bone-crushing sarcasm like that which made Charlie Michelson's reputation:

"In response to the further request . . . that I furnish you with answers to certain questions, I must respectfully decline. . . . "There are numerous experimental permits ... on which commercial business is being done, and I assume being reported in the course of routine to the Commission. ... If Congressman McFarlane stated as quoted by you that we had increased our advertising rate 50%, he was misinformed. The actual increase in rate was 20% although the increase in power was 1,000%."

While the F.C.C. greeted all this with pained official silence, new Commissioner McNinch significantly observed: "The President just told me to take the job and get things in good order. . . ."

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