Great Boyg

Last fortnight Chairman Arthur Ernest Morgan of the Tennessee Valley Authority startled Washington and the nation by demanding a full-fledged Congressional investigation of his colleagues, Harcourt Morgan and David Eli Lilienthal, in language that suggested that their great enterprise might be the Teapot Dome of the Roosevelt Administration (TIME, March 14). So last week the three TVA directors appeared in Washington for their long threatened showdown before Representatives, Senators, Capital correspondents and the President of the U. S. By week's end the TVA family row, like the Great Boyg which oppressed Ibsen's hero Peer Gynt, was beginning to seem a tantalizing something at once too big to ignore and too shapeless to grasp.

Congress. First reaction of Congress, one of stunned amazement, did not last long. Second reaction was a frantic effort by Administration leaders to forestall a muckraking committee investigation. In the House, TVA appropriations are under the Military Affairs Committee, whose new chairman, Kentuckian Andrew Jackson May, is a crusty opponent of the TVA power program and willing to rake all the muck possible. Best thing Majority Leader Sam Rayburn could do under the circumstances was to trust his fellow Texan Maury Maverick, who had introduced a resolution calling for a joint House and Senate investigation of all charges.

In the Senate, however, where New Hampshire's Bridges and Utah's King were demanding a wholesale investigation on 23 assorted "charges," the job was considerably harder. Best that Administration leaders could do when Republican Bridges got up to orate on the necessity of uncovering the scandals which he expected to be revealed in TVA was to heckle him, which they did with a will.

Senator Bridges wanted to know why an investigating committee appointed by Vice President Garner would not be acceptable. Having already admitted that he thought Vice President Garner was "pure gold," Tennessee's McKellar tried a new trick: "I think some newspaper must have published a statement that the Senator from New Hampshire was a new Coolidge, and was a candidate for the Presidency, and it has gone to the Senator's head. . . ."

Senator Bridges: Nothing has gone to my head. . . .

Senator McKellar: I think the Senator is correct for once. . . .

Senator Bridges (in an effort to show that TVA had wasted public funds): There is the story about a jackass down in the Tennessee Valley.

Senator Barkley: This is not an autobiography, I hope.

Senator Norris sternly questioned the motives behind the King-Bridges proposal for an investigation. "I am just as anxious as any man on earth," he shouted, "to expose any evil, if there is an evil. .... In perfect fairness I would say to the Senator I would just as lief Willkie should be on the committee as the Senator from New Hampshire. ... He hates the TVA." Senator Norris had proposed an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. But to many Congressmen the idea of one group of Roosevelt appointees sitting in judgment on another looked, despite the sincerity of George Norris' intentions, too much like an unsatisfying whitewash.

"Truth Party."' When Majority Leaders Barkley and Rayburn told Franklin Roosevelt that the situation was likely to get out of their hands, the President stepped confidently in, summoned all the directors to explain their charges to him at the White House. Up to this point Washington had proceeded on the assumption that the TVA squabble was full of political dynamite. But Franklin Roosevelt in the past has seen plenty of such dynamite turn out to be a squib, and he knew the three TVA directors better than anyone else in Washington. And Franklin Roosevelt is a political showman without peer. Even so, Washington was hardly prepared for the kind of show he decided to put on.

When newshawks turned up at the White House on the day of the conference, even veterans chuckled at the "truth party" the President had prepared. No sooner had the doors closed on the conference room where the three directors were seated in a semicircle in front of the President's desk, with Secretary Steve Early directing a battery of stenographers who took complete notes of the proceedings in relays, than a serious hitch developed in Showman Roosevelt's plans. Like a stern county magistrate, the President announced that he would take up Chairman Morgan's charges first, the majority directors' counter-charges second, demand all supporting "facts" any of them could give him. He began with Chairman Morgan's most celebrated charge: that there had been collusion between Tennessee's Senator George Berry and the majority directors in agreeing to "conciliate" the Senator's subsequently disproved claims for marble properties flooded by Norris Dam. What, asked the President of Chairman Morgan, were the facts?

Chairman Morgan: "During a long period I have repeatedly but unsuccessfully endeavored to secure the President's adequate consideration of grave conditions within the TVA. ... I am of the opinion that this meeting is not, and in the nature of the case cannot be, an effective or useful fact finding occasion." Pressed, the chairman snapped: "I am an observer and not a participant in this alleged process of fact finding."

On all his other widely publicized charges--including the accusations that the majority had concealed records from him and that he had detected a "joker" in a contract signed by Director Lilienthal with Arkansas Power & Light Co.--the chairman would say nothing concrete.

The President: Have you anything to say? . . .

Chairman Morgan: The first statement I made covers my reasons for not commenting. . . .

Irritated but by no means flustered by these tactics, the President asked Directors Morgan and Lilienthal about the charges, found them eager to deny them, occasionally in chorus. As to "boyish open candor" being a "mask for hard-boiled selfish integrity," as the chairman maintained, Director Lilienthal retorted: "I certainly wouldn't argue whether I have a pleasant personality."

When he turned to the charges made by the majority against the chairman, Directors Morgan and Lilienthal also did all the talking, Chairman Morgan none. But highly documented though these were with magazine articles, letters, telegrams and interoffice memoranda which the President judicially accepted as "exhibits," they sounded less like the beginning of a Teapot Dome than like the charges in a divorce suit. Samples: that Chairman Morgan, in an Atlantic Monthly article on public power programs, had "impugned the integrity of the Tennessee Valley Authority," that he had consulted with a former private utility executive, onetime Vice President George Hamilton of Insull Middle West Utilities, whose TVA contract stipulated that his services should be limited to design and construction problems, on questions of power policy, had once neglected to send a Board telegram to the President, and had meddled in the preparation of TVA lawsuits.

Six hours and 81 pages of testimony later, weary Franklin Roosevelt had uncovered neither political dynamite nor very much else, told the directors to give him further "facts" a week later either in person or in writing. Breaking his silence, Chairman Morgan had the last word: "I personally want to thank the President very much for the fine consideration he has shown us."

Explanations. With a Congressional investigation apparently more of a possibility than before but also less of a threat, the strange behavior of the TVA directors still awaited a satisfying explanation. Like many another observer, old George Norris, who this week introduced a compromise resolution demanding a five-man Senate investigation, blamed the split on the unbending personality of Arthur Morgan: "I was shocked beyond expression and suffered untold agony of heart when gradually I began to see that he [Chairman Morgan] was moved by an intense jealousy against some of his associates on the Board, and that his jealousy has led him beyond reason and beyond logic. When jealousy, that green-eyed monster, obtains possession of the human heart, it is not long until it has control of the human intellect, the human mind."

To other observers the biggest puzzle was why TVA's internal difficulties had taken so long to come into the open. For as their conduct at last week's hearings made clear, the breach between Arthur Morgan and David Lilienthal on almost every front is of truly enormous proportions. Chairman Morgan dismayed hard-boiled Director Lilienthal from the start with schemes for encouraging barter and even a separate system of coinage for the Tennessee Valley, and Director Lilienthal's concentration on a price war with the private utilities dismayed Chairman Morgan even more. In 1936, when the TVA "truce" with Commonwealth & Southern and Director Lilienthal's first term were about to expire, the chairman vainly appealed to the President not to reappoint him. This year, soon after the legal victory of TVA over 18 private utility companies which encouraged Director Lilienthal to dicker for Commonwealth & Southern properties, Chairman Morgan blasted his methods in a letter to 35 Senators and Representatives and endorsed another policy far more favorable to private utility men. To many advocates of public power, a good indication of Chairman Morgan's views is the inscription on granite blocks which he put on all five dams he constructed for the Miami River Conservancy District in Ohio after the 1913 flood: "The dams of the Miami Conservancy District are for flood-control purposes. Their use for power development or for storage would be a menace to the cities below."

To Pundit Walter Lippmann, however, the fundamental TVA difficulty was clear. Wrote he in his syndicated column: "It is plain, I think, that there is needed a radical reorganization of the management and control of the enterprise. . . . The failure to distinguish the functions of management and control is, it seems to me, at the root of the whole trouble. . . . Who is watching the enterprise to see whether Mr. Lilienthal's utility program is in fact the program that Congress intended? Mr. Lilienthal. Who is watching Dr. Harcourt Morgan's fertilizer and agricultural program? . . . Dr. Harcourt Morgan. Who is watching the dam construction? Dr. Arthur Morgan, who is building the dams. . . . The system of the TVA is like that which would prevail in General Motors if the board of directors consisted of the operating heads of the various plants."

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