The Last New Dealer

Said one Washington wag: "They have just buried the last New Dealer."

Some of the New Deal's best friends began to wonder last week. Henry Agard Wallace, the man Franklin Roosevelt raised to the Vice-Presidency because he was most nearly the ideal 100% New Dealer--had been dumped by his boss.

Why had he been dumped? Because he had been caught appeasing the conservatives or exchanging winks & nods with capitalism? Or--and this was the possibility that hurt New Dealers most--had Mr. Wallace been publicly whacked by Franklin Roosevelt because he had insisted on being a New Dealer? Ably and well he had fought against the dollars-as-usual policies of the most conservative man in the Administration, Banker Jesse Jones. Henry Wallace had sinned only in one detail, but that one was vastly important: he had felt so keenly about winning the war that he had violated the President's rule that all-talking-must-be-done-under-the-covers.

Conservative Bosses. Is it by accident or design that many of the men bossing the home front now are Southerners, of semi-conservative stripe, while no rarin', tearin' New Dealer has a top job? Where are all the Brain-Trusters now? These were the questions that made many a heretofore 100% Roosevelt-man wince last week. Because, after those rhetorical questions had been asked, there was only one more to ask: Is Franklin Roosevelt still one of us?

Henry Wallace, fired from his job as head of the Board of Economic Warfare, appeared to be through for all time as a political power.

Jesse Jones's RFC had lost a few branches which deal in foreign purchases. Along with the remnants of BEW, these now become the new Office of Economic Warfare, headed by the Administration's oldtime trouble shooter, able Leo T. Crowley. But Jesse Jones will control the purse strings. And Leo Crowley, 53, is a friend who keeps an autographed photo of Jesse Jones behind his desk.

Trouble in the Ranks. New York's violently pro-Administration PM reported: "The most ardent New Dealers were openly discussing with one another whether they ought to support President Roosevelt for renomination."

The New York Post, also 100% New Deal, editorialized: "The evidence is too strong to be dismissed that the liberal, internationalist Mr. Wallace is being jettisoned in favor of a conservative Democrat with more partisan political appeal in preparation for the 1944 campaign. . . ."

There was ample reason to worry New Dealers, besides the North African "expediency" that had outraged them already. Out with Wallace went his executive director Milo Perkins, an Administration stalwart, inventor of the famed New Deal food-stamp plan. If Perkins' firing had not been a certainty before, it became definite last week when he made a pep talk to 1,700 BEW employes and one uninvited reporter (Virginia Pasley, of the Washington Times-Herald). Henry Wallace kept mum and tended the corn in his Washington victory garden. But Milo Perkins told the BEW workers that Mr. Wallace's attack on Jones was what "any red-blooded American" would do when he turned over a rock and saw "slimy things crawling" under it.

It was becoming plain at last that New Dealers were unwelcome in the Administration.

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