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The first step taken was in the latter direction, when the Senate passed a bill creating an Assistant Secretary of Commerce in charge of commercial aviation (see LEGISLATIVE WEEK). But the debate had little to do with military naval aviation, and so the figure who will probably have most to do with determining the question did not ap- pear. He is the Chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee. Amid all the hubbub he has remained silent, venturing no opinions, making no speeches. His only actions worth mentioning in Congress during the past three weeks, have been occasionally to assume the gavel in the absence of the Vice President, and to introduce a resolution "authorizing the Secretary of War to receive for instruction at the U. S. Military Academy at West Point two Siamese subjects, to be designated hereafter by the Government; of Siam."
That is his way of going about matters. But he is a queer sort of politician anyhow, this James Wolcott Wadsworth Jr. from Geneseo, N. Y. In the first place he comes from a family of Cincinnati— farmer-soldiers. His family has been buying farm land ever since 1790. A few years ago they owned 35,000 acres in Livingstone County, N. Y. His grandfather, once an unsuccessful candidate for Governor of New York, was killed in the battle of the Wilderness. His father went into the Army at 18 and fought through the last year of the Civil War. He himself, when he got out of Yale in 1898 enlisted as a private and went into the Spanish-American War.
Afterwards he went back to Geneseo and farming; then went down to the Panhandle of Texas and ran a ranch there for a few years. In 1902 he married Alice Hay, daughter of John Hay, the Secretary of State. Back in New York, he was elected to the Legislature for seven years in a row, the last five of which he served as Speaker. In 1914 he ran for the Senate, defeating James W. Gerard and Bainbridge Colby. He has been in the Senate ever since.
He occupies a peculiar place among the hoary Senators. He is an acknowledged authority on military affairs, a thorough Republican party man, says little, works hard, and is strangely respected by all factions, although still comparatively a young man (only 48). The combination of being a "regular" leader and yet aloof is unique. He is a farmer without a bloc, but that is because he is not a dirt farmer, but something more like a landed aristocrat. He has no political glad hand, no oratorical or political tricks. As Clinton W. Gilbert describes him: "When he speaks, he talks.common sense in an easy, unemphatic way, with a slight touch of impatience in his voice."
What Wadsworth has to say and do about this matter of reorganization of aviation, is going to be one of the controlling factors. But Wadsworth has remained peculiarly silent in the hubbub. Evidently the time for business as distinct from the time for talk has not quite arrived.