Power & Politics

The U.S. Senate's coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats, only half successful in its fight against Henry Wallace, has been pointing up for a fuller victory. If they could not keep Wallace out of the Commerce Department, there was one thing they could do: keep leftish, New Dealer Aubrey Willis Williams from becoming Rural Electrification Administrator.

Last week, after a debate notable for irrelevant oratory and the bored absence of most Senators, the time came to strike. Franklin Roosevelt's nomination of Aubrey Williams was rejected, 52 to 36.

Disapproval of the lank, onetime NYAdministrator had been a foregone conclusion, but the strength of the opposition was surprising. Against Williams were 19 Democrats, most of them from the South, and 33 Republicans. On his side were 31 Democrats, 1 Progressive, 4 Republicans. Not in nearly six years had a Presidential nomination been turned down.* For the anti-New Deal bloc it was a thumping victory; for the White House it was a stinging and perhaps significant defeat.

The Fight. Lean-jawed, contentious Aubrey Williams, social-worker protege of Harry Hopkins, had been an easy target. Before the Agricultural Committee, the fight was led by Tennessee's knob-nosed, choleric Kenneth McKellar, an old Williams foe, and no holds were barred.

McKellar accused Williams of being a Communist sympathizer, a waster of government money (particularly in NYA), and unqualified for the job. Soon McKellar produced a letter from a clergyman charging that Williams, onetime student for the Presbyterian Ministry, had "renounced the Divinity of Christ." Then Williams' religious and political beliefs got a going-over. The Committee rejected his nomination.

On the Senate floor, the issue of religion, which has a way of backfiring, was touched only lightly. But new attacks on Williams as a leftist with no special qualifications for the job came from Mississippi's Theodore G. ("The Man") Bilbo, from Ohio's Taft, from South Dakota's Bushfield, many another.

When it was all over, Aubrey Williams had his own interpretation. In the headquarters of the National Farmers Union, where he works as an organizer, he said he was defeated "because I openly espouse the idea of getting [political] power into the hands of the common people. . . . I'm just Joe Doaks in this thing. . . ." In the manner of P.A.C., Aubrey Williams' Farm Union friends threatened to go into Senatorial bailiwicks for a "total war of issues."

But the bloc which had turned him down gave no sign of worry. The fact was that, however sound their reasons, they just didn't like Aubrey Williams or what he stood for.

* In June, 1939, the Senate rejected the nomination of William S. Boyle to be U.S. Attorney for Nevada. Later, in the face of certain defeat, nominations of Edward J. Flynn to be U.S. Minister to Australia and James V. Allred to be a judge of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals were withdrawn.

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