"Old Ironpcmts"

It was near midnight. The President was leaving for Hyde Park. A hulking, bottle-nosed figure dashed up, shouted exultantly: "Three more major codes signed! That's a day's work!" It was August, 1933. Days later the automobile industry had signed-all except Henry Ford. The man with the bottle nose went to a hospital with boils, got up again, flew to the President in Manhattan with 17 more industrial codes completed. At year's end, in Georgia, he thundered:

"Away, slight men. . . . It is not safe to stand obstructing the front of this great army. You might be trampled underfoot . . . because of your small stature and the uplifted eyes of a people whose 'eyes have seen the glory' and whose purpose is intent on the inspired leadership of your neighbor and my friend Franklin Roosevelt."

The man with the bottle nose was modest: the eyes of the people in that winter of 1933-34 were on him-General Hugh S. Johnson, commander in chief of NRA. The glory, was 400 codes signed, 20,000.000 of the country's workers covered, child labor on the way out, 2,785,000 people back at work and $3,000,000,000 added to the nation's payroll (he claimed), torchlight parades, blaring radios, speeches in the streets, everybody promising: "We Do Our Part." The U.S. had broken out of its long depression paralysis.

The General worked 15-20 hours a day, had no time to change his clothes, blinked his bloodshot eyes, barked at businessmen: "I've been listening to that line of bunk from you fellows long enough," inveighed against "witch doctors," "chiselers," "croakers." But he himself had predicted the day when "dead cats" would fly at him. Suddenly the glory dimmed, the Blue Eagle wavered into a tail spin, and the sorrowing man with the bottle nose resigned. The Supreme Court ended it for good & all. The General became a Scripps-Howard columnist-by turns for seven years morose, exultant, vitriolic, sentimental, wrathful, lachrymose. Old Army man, he scolded upstart militarists, nagged the new New Deal ("economic pansies"), yearned for the old New Deal of NRA. He lambasted "my friend Franklin Roosevelt." From time to time he saw things with an amazingly discerning eye. From time to time he lost himself in strange clouds, wandered, a bitter wraith, among his own uncertainties. He was "Old Ironpants." He had a spell of isolationism. In April 1941, when the President declined to renew his commission as an Army reserve officer, he wrote back lugubriously: "I am sure you don't like me any more."

Last week, aged 59, he wrote his last column. There was no sense of imminence in it, for there was no sense of imminence in the General that day. He was ill in bed with pneumonia, but he had been ill for several months. His column was on taxes and prices. It began: "There appears to be no end to the lack of frankness and coordination among high government officials. ..." A few hours later, Death, as it must to all men, came to Old Ironpants. A caisson carried General Johnson to Arlington cemetery, where he was buried with full military honors. The newspapers did not say so, but he was buried with full civilian honors too. For, above all things, all Hugh Johnson ever asked of his country was a chance to serve it.

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