Damns, Peanuts & Masses

Damn it all, the business of an army is to win the war, not to quibble around with a lot of cheap buying! Hell-and-Maria, we weren't trying to keep a set of books over there! We were trying to win the war. The public reputation of Charles Gates Dawes for profane vehemence originated with this testimony of his, given Feb. 2, 1921 as the A. E. F.'s Chief of Procurement to a Congressional committee investigating War expenditures. A few months later this reputation further expanded when Mr. Dawes, as first Director of the Budget, gave an audience of Federal bureaucrats a literal demonstration of how to economize on brooms. On March 4, 1925 when he was being sworn in as Vice President the violence of Mr. Dawes's castigation of the Senate and its time-wasting rules completely stole the inaugural show from Calvin Coolidge. Last week Mr. Dawes, now president of Reconstruction Finance Corp., was back before a Congressional Committee making lively front page news with his desk-pounding, his belligerent gestures, his oaths--and his homely appeal to common sense. Mr. Dawes had been summoned before the House Ways & Means Committee to give his opinion on the Patman bill to pay off the Soldier Bonus by an inflationary issue of $2.400,000,000 in new currency. He gave the proposition short shrift. Said he: "This issue of fiat money would undermine the credit of the country . . . and shake the soundness of the United States Government itself. It's an invitation to start on the primrose path Germany followed until her mark went down. . . . Look out when you tamper with the soundness of your currency. These Bonus bonds you hear about are just greenbacks. . . . Inflation of a currency once started in a country seldom stops short of its complete economic ruin." When a Congressman asked him to study other Bonus-paying proposals, Mr. Dawes shot back: "Oh, hell, don't ask me to do that. I'm busy and I got to work day & night on this reconstruction job." Of larger importance than the Bonus was Mr. Dawes's testimony on the economic state of the Union as viewed from the R. F. C.'s presidency. To the committee he explained that in its first 77 days his agency had lent $370,347,802 to 1,757 institutions, of which 1,520 were banks. Answering the criticism that R. F. C. favors large banks over small ones, he declared that 23% of its loans had been in towns under 10,000, 68% in cities under 100.000. He vigorously defended R. F. C.'s loan to Missouri Pacific R. R. to pay a bank debt as "a benefit to the thousands of investors in the bonds & securities of the railroad and in the general public interest." Then he swung into a discussion of the "masses"--or what Franklin Delano Roosevelt calls "the forgotten man" in his political orations.* Rasped General Dawes at his sharpest and shrillest: "It's the mass attitude that controls and. this mass attitude is changing from pessimism to optimism. Take a look at agriculture and the ordinary business of the country and compare them with the picayunish antics on the New York Stock Exchange. The whole country, it seems, is watching a little group of speculators in Wall. Street--a peanut stand affair magnified out of all importance. Damn it all, it's not what the crowd in Wall Street thinks that controls. It's what the mass of people think and feel and, take it from me, the mass is feeling better! We know a damn sight more about what is going on than those fellows sitting at that security peanut stand in Wall Street. "Yes sir, it's not what you think, not what the peanutters in Wall Street think. Damn it, we're approaching business recovery. Prosperity, sure as the sun, will rise tomorrow morning. . . . But for God's sake, keep politics out of the Reconstruction Finance Corp. We're not giving any money away. We're loaning it on adequate security. We could have political bunk and political smut committees and damned demagogy down there at the corporation but we're doing a business job and, damn it, we intend to continue doing it. If we make any mistakes wait until the return of better times and then, if you want to, give us hell individually. . . ." Charles Gates Dawes is credited with being the shrewdest exponent of studied indiscretion since Theodore Roosevelt. Political observers were stirred by his sudden, profanely popular outburst about the "masses"--not as an object for specific relief (Candidate Roosevelt's thesis) but as a national barometer more important than Wall Street and business tycoons-- to fresh speculation as to what, if anything, the G. 0. P. might do for or with Charles Gates Dawes when it convenes two months hence.

*For further report on Candidate Roosevelt's latest oration, see p. 16.

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