Lamont's Lay

The wildest predictions about the Hoover Cabinet never placed in the Secretaryship of Commerce a man of rebellious originality. Everybody knew that to that office would go some particular Hoover choice (the last to be made as it turned out) who would execute the Hoover program as already established.

Last week Secretary of Commerce Robert Patterson Lamont did what was expected of him when he said YES to all his predecessor's plans and policies, thus:

"When a man of unusual endowment has stayed with a job for nearly eight years as Mr. Hoover did he knows more about it than anybody else. It is my intention to find out his ideas and visions and to carry out those policies."

Secretary Lamont has on his hands one problem that will certainly require the interposition of the President's power to straighten it out. This problem is the relationship in foreign fields of the State Department's diplomatic and consular representatives and the Commerce Department's commercial attaches. As Secretary of Commerce, Mr. Hoover greatly multiplied these commercial attaches and raised them to a new plane of importance. He picked shrewd men who knew U. S. business and sent them forth to scout the world for new markets. Inevitably they have clashed with the regular foreign service men, producing keen rivalry.

Diplomatic officers, forewarned of a Hoover shakeup, were honestly apprehensive lest the President increase commercial attaches' prestige at their expense. Only President Hoover himself can say whether they are unduly alarmed, but symptoms of his impatience, in the past, with the social graces of younger diplomatic secretaries, have not been wanting.

The kind of thing in Secretary Lament's department which greatly vexes State Department representatives occurred last week in Vienna where 40 U. S. commercial attaches from all Europe gathered to hear a trade talk by Dr. Julius Klein, chief of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce now traveling abroad. Foreign countries saw in this business conference only another manifestation of "Salesman Sam." The London Daily Express snorted:

"Americans . . . regard their representatives abroad as commercial travellers and Hoover as the sales-manager of a colossal business organization whose agents everywhere are 'on the road' seeking orders and drumming up trade."

One of Mr. Lament's first tasks as Secretary of Commerce will be to continue this trade-boosting and simultaneously pacify the State Department.

Not only abroad but in the U. S. as well have the Commerce Department's agents been fired upon critically. U. S. liberals, including Oswald Garrison Villard, Charles Edward Russell, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, banded together as the American Friends of Italian Freedom to combat Fascist propaganda, recently jerked up the U. S. commercial attache at Rome on the ground that he had misreported Italian government figures to the Department of Commerce. The U. S. agent found Italian finances "in good shape with large cash reserves." The A. F. of I. F. found that Italy's reserves "have decreased continuously until now they are less than half of what they were in 1926." The Italian public debt and Italian unemployment also become controversial between Mr. Lament's agent in Rome and the A. F. of I. F., which circulates its propaganda far and near through the land.

Last week a personal problem came back to plague Secretary Lamont. He was asked if his resignation from the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment had been accepted (TIME, March 18). Curtly he replied: "Is that cat back again? I think we'd better bury it. ... The resignation has been accepted."