Battler's Exit

One of the last of the original New Dealers left Government service last week.* Lanky, begoggled James Lawrence Fly, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, had finished his job, and done it well. Some of the men who had most maligned him (top executives of the major U.S. networks, independent U.S. radio operators) begged him not to quit. There were even suggestions that the industry provide funds to raise his $10,000 salary to $50,000. Once they thought that Fly wanted to control the content of their programs. They knew now that he had been their bulwark against Government ownership.

"Larry" Fly came to Washington in 1929 by way of Texas, the U.S. Naval Academy, Harvard Law School, and private law practice in Manhattan. He joined the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division under President Hoover. There he won national renown by defeating Wendell Willkie in the historic battle of the Tennessee Valley Authority v. Commonwealth & Southern. Said Willkie: "He is the most dangerous man in America--to have on the other side."

Moonlit Mackerel. When Franklin Roosevelt appointed Fly to the FCC chairmanship in 1939, FCC was a seven-man tangle of bickering members. Its job was to regulate radio, telegraph and telephone communications, but it was not having much success. Radio, as Fly saw it, was a newly rich business which had little idea of its public responsibility. It was, he decided, a "duopoly" dominated by two national networks (NBC and CBS), and Fly set out to break it.

The struggle was bitter (he once paraphrased John Randolph, saying that radio management reminded him "of a dead mackerel in the moonlight which both shines and stinks," and management replied in kind). The fight ended with a blockbuster which the Supreme Court dropped on the industry in 1943, ruling that FCC had the power to enforce its regulations on the radio industry. The sum of these regulations was the freeing of the 900-odd U.S. stations from total network domination (TIME, May 24, 1943).

FCC's victory moved the networks to tear their hair and howl that they were not long for this world.* But it nailed down Fly's main objectives: 1) reduction of NBC from two chains to one (the Blue became a separate network); 2) the end of dual ownership (no one can now own two radio stations in a single city); 3) the stations' awareness of the fact that they also exist to serve their own communities and the public.

Beautiful Opportunity. The telegraph and telephone fields have also felt the weight of Fly's hand. He improved the efficiency of U.S. telegraph service by fighting for the merger of Postal and Western Union. He insisted that long distance telephone rates be reduced; the reduction has meant a yearly saving of upwards of a quarter of a billion dollars to telephone users.

No visionary, Larry Fly, 46, is an intelligent, careful liberal who believes in finding and stubbornly serving the facts. Congressional investigations of his office have merely proved his competence. He leaves Washington to return to his private law practice and "make some money for my old age." Says he:

". . . [The stations] are making money, and they now have a beautiful opportunity to get tough and raise their own standards."

*Among the few remaining: Harry Hopkins, Judge Samuel I. Rosenman, Supreme Court Justices Frankfurter, Jackson and Douglas.

* They are now making more money than ever.

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