In one heavy stroke of the pen the President made one of the most thoroughgoing Government reorganizations in New Deal history. He abolished the Lend-Lease Administration (Edward R. Stettinius), the Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations (Herbert Lehman), the Office of Economic Warfare (Leo Crowley), and the Office of Foreign Economic Coordination (Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson).
In their place the President set up the Foreign Economic Administration, put in shrewd, ambitious Leo Crowley as its head. Leonine Leo also took authority over RFC subsidiaries dealing with foreign economic problems (Metals Reserve Co. and Rubber Reserve Co.), retained the board chairmanship of the U.S. Commercial Corp. through which he controls all foreign purchases.
This made snow-haired Leo Crowley (ten years ago a relatively obscure Wisconsin businessman) the czar of all foreign economic dealings, which are the guts of foreign relations. Significantly Crowley will work with the State Department, but answers only to the President.
Aging Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who, as the winner of the celebrated Jones-Wallace fight (TIME, July 26), had arrogated most of these powers to himself, has now lost them again. But he seemed satisfied: friends reported that he wanted to keep State a strictly diplomatic agency.
On Wisconsin. In upping Wisconsin-born Leo Crowley as Washington's newest czar, the President threw him a whole bouquet. Said he: "Leo Crowley is one of the best administrators in or out of government and I find great satisfaction in promoting him to a position which will centralize all foreign economic operations in one operating agency."
As FEA chief, Leo Crowley will: 1) control the foreign purchase of all strategic materials; 2) supervise all relief operations in liberated countries; 3) direct the supply of U.S. arms to Allied nations.
With this sweeping reorganization Franklin Roosevelt hoped to quiet complaints that the four abolished agencies had quarreled constantly in the field, that in specific areas, such as North Africa, no one knew who was boss.
Only a few weeks ago the President had tried to clear up this situation by the appointment of State Department "area directors," responsible to OFEC. The first were ex-OCD Director James M. Landis, assigned to the Middle East, and Calvin B. Baldwin, assigned to Italy. Now the area directors will be Leo Crowley's eyes & ears in the field, will represent U.S. interests in economic operations abroad.
Three new ones:
>For the Dutch East Indies and Malaya: Charles P. Taft, 46, brother of Ohio's Senator Robert A. Taft and famed Cincinnati do-gooder, author of a book on city management, currently Director of the Office of Community War Services.
>For the Low Countries : Ernest McKinley Fisher, 50, research director for the American Bankers Association, onetime economic adviser to the Federal Housing Administration, European housing expert.
> For Scandinavia: Grenville Ross Hoiden, 34, special assistant to OPA General Manager Chester Bowles, onetime Harvard economics instructor.
On paper, Franklin Roosevelt's long-needed overhauling looked good: At last, responsibility and authority had been centered in one man.