Morgan Out, Morgan In

One afternoon last week a spare, bronzed man, clad in faded blouse and overalls, was trudging along a dirt road two miles outside Yellow Springs, Ohio, when a reporter pulled up in a car alongside.

"It's 2:30," the reporter grinned. "Want a lift?"

"No, thanks." grinned back TVA Chairman Arthur Ernest Morgan. "I'm just exercising."

In Washington, an hour and a half after Chairman Morgan thus defied the third and final dead line set by the President for withdrawing or supporting his public charges against his fellow directors, Harcourt Morgan and David Eli Lilienthal (TIME, March 28), a band of interested reporters crowded noisily into the President's circular office for their regular White House press conference. When they had lined up around his desk, Franklin Roosevelt began to read a letter he had just dispatched to Chairman Morgan:

"As a result of the hearings held before me on March 11, 18, and 21, 1938, I regret to inform you that I feel obliged to remove, and do hereby remove you as member and chairman of the board of the Tennessee Valley Authority. This removal is to become effective as and from March 23, 1938. ..."

The President thereupon went on to announce 1) that the new TVA chairman would be Vice Chairman Harcourt A. Morgan, and 2) that he was sending Congress, to do with as that body wished, the 110-page transcript of his hearings of the three TVA directors. Moreover, said the President to the assembled press, the President was tired of reading that the White House had been bringing pressure to bear against a Congressional investigation of TVA. So incensed was he, in fact, by this charge that he wanted the reporters to put on the record his statement that any special writer or columnist who had suggested it had "made it up out of whole cloth."

Surprise. In Congress, where Senate Majority Leader Barkley and Speaker Bankhead had been working like beavers to dam up their colleagues' enthusiasm for investigating TVA, this announcement that they had been working independently of White House orders was regarded as news indeed. Even more surprising did it seem when Leader Barkley, setting to work just as efficiently in the opposite direction, promptly produced his own resolution for investigating TVA, rushed it through the Senate. To pacify the House, Leader Barkley compromised on a joint investigating committee of five Representatives and five Senators, to be provided with full authority and a $50,000 expense budget. Rabidly pro-TVA blocs in both Houses were pleased that the committee was directed to investigate not only the administration of TVA but also activities of hostile power companies.

Myers or Humphrey? In 1926 the Supreme Court upheld the right of Woodrow Wilson to remove a Portland, Ore. postmaster named F. S. Myers on the ground that the President's power to remove his appointee is implied in his Constitutional grant of executive authority. And in 1935 the Supreme Court unanimously held that the estate of the late Republican Federal Trade Commissioner William E. Humphrey, removed by Franklin Roosevelt in favor of a commissioner whose mind would "go along" with his mind, was entitled to some $4,500 in salary because the President's power to remove did not extend to heads of quasi-judicial or quasi-legislative bodies. So last week the President's summary removal of Arthur Morgan raised the question: Was he a Myers or a Humphrey? To Congress the President sent a memorandum from his faithful Acting Attorney General Robert Jackson arguing that Commissioner Morgan was a Myers who enjoyed neither quasi-judicial nor quasi-legislative powers. The Senate's great constitutionalist, William Edgar Borah, insisted that in his opinion the chairman of far-flung TVA was another Humphrey and that the President had exceeded his authority in removing him. And Arthur Morgan, after being photographed chopping trees outside his house at Yellow Springs, significantly went to Chicago to see a lawyer.

Back Home. With TVA certain to be examined by Congress and likely to land in the courts as well, the House last week rebelliously threw out a $2,613,000 appropriation for TVA's $112,000,000 superdam at Gilbertsville. Ky., which the Senate had inserted in the Independent Offices Appropriations Bill, sent the bill back to the Senate, which promptly restored the appropriation to be fought out in conference. Meantime, plain, 71-year-old Harcourt Morgan went back to his home near Knoxville. Said TVA's new chairman with high optimism: "It's just business as usual."

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