When President Roosevelt sailed off on his vacation the first of July, he left on his desk at the White House a document which seemed to indicate that not he but Postmaster General James Aloysius Farley was the real political boss of the Administration. Last week President Roosevelt, back in the White House again, got around to reasserting his political supremacy over his P. M. G.
In July John Wellington Finch, dean of the University of Idaho's School of Mines, was called to Washington to be made Director of the U. S. Bureau of Mines. The day he arrived to receive his commission it was discovered that the President had not signed it. Scribbled on the margin was the note: "Held up because of political objections by the P. M. G." (TIME, July 30). Mr. Farley had found that the 61- year-old engineer, who had mined in Siam, Siberia, South Africa, Turkey, India and China, had once described himself as a Republican, had even tried to become Director of Mines under Herbert Hoover. Boss Farley was determined to let no Republican into the Bureau of Mines or anywhere else if he could help it.
The Angust issue of Engineering and Mining Journal sternly cried in a first page editorial: "The incident marks a climax in a series of political maneuvers that have embarrassed and handicapped the Bureau of Mines under this Administration. . . . It is a technical Bureau. Its Director and personnel should be selected primarily for technical qualifications . . . should be kept free from the obvious taint of political patronage ... if the Bureau of Mines is to escape still further indignity and disintegration."
Even Mr. Farley was sufficiently embarrassed by such a slap to have one of his underlings tell the Press that he really would not interfere with a technical appointment, that he merely liked to know who was appointed before the announcement was made. And as soon as the President returned Mr. Ickes went to the White House to protest the indignity which had been thrust on his Department.
Last week Dr. Finch for a second time traveled all the way from Idaho to Washington. He received the same presidential commission which had been prepared for his false inauguration last month. This time it was signed and the pencilled marginalia about the P. M. G. was erased.