The Tenth Czar

On the glass-topped desk of Chester C. Davis, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, lay a letter from an old friend in Montana: "Better plan to come out for some good fishing and deer hunting. This might be the summer to do something."

Grey-haired Chester Davis leaned back in his swivel chair, smiled wryly at reporters. This will certainly be the summer for Chester Davis to do something. Before breakfast he had had a call from Economic Stabilizer James F. Byrnes. The President had drafted Chester Davis as the nation's new Food Czar.

Said Chester Davis: "I had been hoping Washington would pass me by and pick someone fresh on the scene. . . . It gives me a hollow feeling."

Black Past. No one begrudged Chester Davis that hollow feeling. Under slow-moving Secretary of Agriculture Claude

Wickard, who has also been Food Administrator since last December, the nation's food distribution had veered from confusion to possible disaster--a fact highlighted by last week's nationwide meat shortage. The farmers had wrought a miracle of production last year, hoped to create another this year. But from Washington they had gotten everything but help.

As Chester Davis moved in to straighten out the mess, his chief worries were: 1) raise the nation's food production 8% over last year's record levels; 2) finesse farm-bloc tricks calculated to wreck the Administration's anti-inflation fight.

Bright Present. In Washington there was general agreement that Chester Davis was an excellent choice for the job. Son of an Iowa tenant farmer, he has been, successively, a farm laborer, farm owner, farm journal editor, state agricultural commissioner (Montana), farm lobbyist, and (from 1933 to 1936) head of the old AAA.

Quiet, unspectacular, he enjoys the confidence of all sides. Until he supported Al Smith in 1928 he was a Republican; now he calls himself an "independent Democrat."

Grey Future. There was no criticism of Chester Davis but plenty of the manner of his appointment. For one thing, there now seemed to be two food czars (the other: Agriculture Secretary Claude Wickard). The President moved to clear this up, with an executive order that emasculated Claude Wickard's wartime powers, left him only routine prewar activities of the Agriculture Department. But Davis would have to get along with Wickard, with all kinds of political jockeying possible, as well as with all the nine other czars* in Washington.

* Czar of Czars Byrnes, Production's Nelson, Manpower's McNutt, Transportations Eastman, Rubber's Jeffers, Prices' Brown, Oil's Ickes, Informations's Davis, Censorship's Price.

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