National Affairs: Couch & Coach

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Representative Carter Glass wrote his Federal Reserve Act. William Jennings Bryan handled his foreign relations. William Gibbs McAdoo ran the Treasury. Franklin Roosevelt is a practical politician who has surrounded himself with college professors to help him work his executive will. The oldest, closest and most trusted of these is Raymond Moley. He is not a great man but he is a powerful one. His influence on the Administration is felt far beyond his nominal job of Assistant Secretary of State. Through his ear is the shortest and swiftest route to the heart of the White House. He does not make up the President's mind for him but he supplies the raw material on which that mind is made up. What Postmaster General Farley & Col. Howe are to President Roosevelt in the realm of practical politics Dr. Moley is to him in the realm of political practice. Raymond Moley has come far by his own wits since his humble birth at Berea, Ohio, outside Cleveland. His grandfather, Hippolyte Moley, was a Frenchman who went to Trinity College, Dublin, married an Irish woman. A precocious child, "Ray" Moley was reading Ivanhoe at 7. discussing the Trojan Wars at 8. At 19 he was graduated with a Ph.B. by Berea's Baldwin-Wallace College. Migrating to the neighboring village of Olmsted Falls, he served as superintendent of schools, was elected mayor at 21. Tuberculosis drove him to Denver. Two years later he was back in Ohio a well man, though to this day he has to be careful about his health. In Cleveland he got a job teaching high school history, while on the side he took his master's degree at Oberlin. His call to Western Reserve as assistant professor of political science resulted largely from his reputation for using the library. That summer he married Eve Dall (no kin to the President's son-in-law), who bore him twin sons, now aged 8. At Western Reserve he is still well remembered as the professor who required his classes to read the New Republic when that polite journal of parlor liberalism was considered Red. In 1919-20 crime suddenly engulfed Cleveland. Professor Moley resigned from Western Reserve to take charge of the Cleveland Foundation and, with it conduct a notable survey of criminal conditions in the city. His report not only resulted in a civic clean-up but also marked his real start as a professional factfinder. He conducted similar crime investigations in Missouri, Illinois, Virginia. Pennsylvania, Connecticut. Michigan. California. Indiana. Later his service on the New York State Crime Commission gave him the final stamp of authority as an expert on the administration of criminal justice. Yet despite his insight into conditions, he declares: "I feel no call to remedy evils. I have not the slightest urge to be a reformer. Social workers make me very weary. They have no sense of humor." In 1923 he transferred as an associate professor of government to Columbia Uni- versity where he had got his Ph.D. five years before. In 1928 he was made a professor of public law. To the girls of Barnard College he taught government and politics in a humorous, informal way that charmed most of them. They also liked his after-class teas.

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