Moley Out

When Raymond Moley, 46-year-old Professor of Public Law at Columbia University, stepped into the State Department as an Assistant Secretary on March 4, he was widely acclaimed as President Roosevelt's closest, most trusted economic adviser, the head Brain Truster who had shaped his winning campaign, a mighty power in the New Deal. When after six months he stepped out of the sub-Cabinet last week, the country hardly needed to be told why.

Dr. Moley's resignation was the first major break in the President's Washington lineup. Vincent Astor, rich young Roosevelt friend, took Dr. Moley off the Administration's hands by opportunely announcing plans for a 5-c- political weekly (as yet unnamed) and making the outgoing Assistant Secretary of State its editor. Other sponsors of the magazine were Mrs. Mary Harriman Rumsey, NRA Consumer Board chief, her brother William Averell Harriman, Union Pacific board chairman, and Virgil V. McNitt of McNaught Syndicate who was to be executive editor. The weekly will support and expound the New Deal's politics and economics "in plain square-toed English,'"' according to Publisher Astor who said he and Dr. Moley had been concocting the magazine for months. Each week since June Dr. Moley has been writing a rather stuffy syndicate article called "The State of the Union." For months the Administration has felt an acute need for a party organ to spread its gospel.

The formalities of the Moley resignation were conducted in an Alphonse & Gaston atmosphere at Hyde Park. Wrote Dr. Moley to the President: "The regret that I shall otherwise experience at severing my official tie with your administration is absent on account of the fact that this new work permits me not only to further the ideals common to us both but to continue to enjoy friendly association with you. ... I pledge you my active and continued support of the ideals to which you have given such a hopeful and auspicious realization. ... I regard this present opportunity to edit a national weekly as opening the door to a most important means of furthering these ideals."

Addressing him as "Dear Raymond," the President replied: "It is with a sense of deep personal regret that I accept your resignation. . . . You have rendered a very definite service to your country. . . . The ending of our official relations will in no way terminate our close personal association. . . . Every good wish and my affectionate regards."

Dr. Moley denied, and so did Secretary of State Hull, that the. resignation resulted from bad blood between them. But every one remembered how, in the opening days of the Administration, the Assistant Secretary, as the President's personal representative in the State Department, far outshone the Secretary in the headlines ; how Dr. Moley called at the White House morning, noon & night, was a member of the exclusive Roosevelt bedside Cabinet; how he, an economic nationalist, clashed with internationalist Secretary Hull before, during and after the World Economic Conference, to which Moley's visit as the President's "messenger boy" was pompously over publicized. Back in the U. S. Dr. Moley discovered that his conspicuousness had produced a sour public effect. No longer was he welcomed at the President's bedside before breakfast. The spotlight had shifted to General Johnson and NRA, leaving Dr. Moley no more important as an active adviser than a dozen other sub-Cabinet officials. When Secretary Hull got back from London all primed to resign, President Roosevelt pacified him by transferring Assistant Secretary Moley to the Department of Justice to conduct a crime survey. As the State Department was obviously not big enough for both men, the President decided Dr. Moley was the least essential.

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