Saint In Serge

(See Cover) If and when the New Dealers leave Washington, they will have learned at least one thing--how to take it. Franklin Roosevelt has been lambasted from hell to breakfast. Secretary Wallace has been called a crazy numerologist who cooks up fantastic agricultural schemes to break the country. Fanny Perkins gets it coming & going from A. F. of L. and C. I. O. Louis Johnson is supposed to be running the Army and Attorney General Murphy is out to steal poor Tom Dewey's thunder. Harold ("Donald Duck") Ickes is to Republicans a windy mad mahout.

In all the New Deal's seven years, the one New Dealer who never got his lumps from the opposition was good grey Cordell Hull, the homely and ascetic Secretary of State who remained placidly in his old rookery on Pennsylvania Avenue, quietly preaching the apparently unassailable doctrine that good trade follows good will. Last week Mr. Hull's turn came.

As he sat in his lofty official chamber, his long, sensitive hands clasped and unclasped in thought, to Cordell Hull's ears came only the muffled tick of the ancient grandfather clock that has been in the Department of State offices since 1777. But the tick may well have seemed like the tick of a timebomb. He had just received a blunt warning--a demand by Michigan's Senator Arthur Vandenberg that Mr. Hull's reciprocal trade agreements be investigated by the Senate.

There were other dynamiters on the prowl. New York's' Rep. Daniel A. Reed had declared that the appointment of Ambassador to Belgium Joseph Davies to be Mr. Hull's special assistant was nothing more than the establishment by the Administration of a rich Washington lobby to resell Congress the trade agreement principle when the power to make agreements expires in June. And 17 blocks east, a handsome, jibjawed Republican Representative, Clifford Hope of Garden City, Kan., was reporting to House G. O. P. Pilot Joseph William Martin Jr. of Massachusetts.

Mr. Hope had just come back from a bush-beating tour of the Midwest and West, where he had headed one of Leader Martin's "fact-finding" committees, collecting complaints against the Administration. Mr. Martin listened happily to reports of discontent over the trade treaties, set off across the Capitol Plaza to counsel with Senate G. O. P. Pilot Charles Linza McNary of Oregon.

Leaders McNary and Martin are old hands at bomb-plotting (TIME, July 31). But last week they were engaged in their biggest project. For the dynamiting of Cordell Hull's trade agreements might also blow up the Presidential prospects of Mr. Hull--and he is the only man in sight on whom Democrats of all shades can compromise as a candidate this year.

1940. Repeatedly in recent weeks Franklin Roosevelt has told callers that Cordell Hull was his choice for White House succession--repeatedly the callers have let this information leak (TIME, Dec. 18, et seq.). And each leak has given three groups of U. S. politicos a sharp case of the cramps: 1) militant New Dealers who are out of step with the President's new appeasement program, and who consider Mr. Hull a single-track fuddy-duddy; 2) those Democrats pledged irrevocably to the candidacy of John Nance Garner; 3) Republican wiseacres who think Mr. Hull would be hard to beat, and who would much prefer a split Democratic party anyway.

Cordell Hull has not only sharply declined, in most specific terms, to sanction any movement designed to make him a candidate; he has stated he will refuse to run. But the wise men know that Mr. Hull's reluctance can be overcome and when that will be--when his trade agreement program is safely in harbor. Solemnly all Washington admits that if Mr. Hull today were to be given his choice of the Presidency or the success of his program, he would unhesitatingly choose the latter. No higher tribute could be paid a U. S. politician in an election year. That No. 1 appraiser of U. S. selfishness, Post master General James A. Farley, once said: ". . . Cordell Hull is the most unselfish man I ever met." Agreement Disagreement. The saint like man in the blue serge suit, whose only physical exercise is occasional putting-practice, an occasional game of croquet, has long been an adept in the most torturing of all mental gymnastics -- foreign trade statistics.

Since 1934 the U. S. has concluded 22 agreements, with three now on the fire. The figures show that in nearly every case the U. S. exports to those countries have immediately zoomed, imports from those countries have moderately increased. In the trade agreement with Canada the U. S. lowered restrictions on imports of 16 farm products; Canada lowered restrictions on 57 U. S. farm products.

Charge most often made against trade agreements is that in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1937, U. S. agricultural imports increased and exports decreased over preceding years. Broken down, this is found: total increase in imports between July 1934 and July 1937 was $699,000,000. Of this, $252,000,000 was in tea, coffee, rub ber, silk, bananas and other items noncompetitive with U. S. products; $141,000,000 was in imports required to supplement items affected by the 1935-36 drought--corn, wheat, barley, fodder, butter, etc. But these imports, Mr. Hull can show conclusively, did not displace U. S. farm products; they supplemented the U. S. supply, prevented a shortage. Further, they came in because farm prices were high, and their only effect on domestic prices was to check a rise to famine levels, thus benefiting all consumers--including farmers who bought livestock feed. Another $45,000,000 of the increase was in sugar imports--that was mostly in higher prices, as sugar imports are controlled by quotas. Of the $261,000,000 remaining, $178,000,000 is accounted for by commodities like vegetable oils, olives, skins and wrapper tobacco which the U. S. always imports. The final $83,000,000 unbalance was picayune.

What Mr. Hull points out is this: When farm income is high, farm imports are high, and vice versa--simply because when U. S. production is low, and prices high, it is profitable for foreign nations to send their farm products here--no matter how high the U. S. trade barriers.

Cordell Hull thinks he can explain this to Congress and the public this year. Many politicos are less certain, and the Republican high command is sure Mr. Hull will be rolled over a barrel of imported Argentine beef. It was the farm bloc who wrote the Emergency Tariff of 1921, the Fordney-McCumber tariff boost of 1922, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. Republicans may again become "friends of the farmer." Last week Mr. Hull said he welcomed an investigation, if it were not made by chums of the Smoot-Hawley tariff.

Old Hickory. Dogged adherence to fixed ideas, independence, equality, a tradition for violence and abhorrence of ostentation--upon all these Tennessee prides herself. She likes to think she inherited them from Andrew Jackson, the old border fighter and duelist who declared: "Ask nothing but what is right, submit to nothing wrong. . . . True virtue cannot exist where pomp and parade are the governing passions; it can only dwell with the people--the great laboring and producing classes that form the bone and sinew of our confederacy." Old Hickory's shoots still spring green in the Volunteer State.

There are three Tennessees. There is East Tennessee, the home of shrewd mountain traders, Republicans, the Great Smokies, Knoxville and the TVA. There is Middle Tennessee, the Cumberland plateau, a land of bluegrass, rich farms, horsey squires (who keep a fighting-cock in the tobacco barn), of Nashville, "Athens of the South." There is cotton-growing West Tennessee, flatland of "red-necks," of Memphis, and Beale Street, Mistuh Ed Crump and the Mississippi.

Pappy Billy. Cordell Hull, a Tennessean by birth, bone, breeding and background, comes from Middle Tennessee, but the whole State takes pride in him. Nevertheless, around Star Point, where he was born, the saying is that "Cord Hull is the knowin'est man in the world--but he warn't never a match for his pappy." Pappy Billy Hull was indeed pretty much in a class by himself.

In the 1860s, where the Wolf and the Obey (pronounced obee) Rivers run together to make the Cumberland, Billy Hull moved with his bride, a Virginia girl named Elizabeth Riley, whose family had some Cherokee blood. Billy walked with a sidewise slouch. Even after he was rich he was "an ornery-dressin' fella." He often went to Nashville "wearin' no more than five dollars worth of clothes." Elizabeth was tall, dark, sweet-eyed. Their first home was a sheephouse; their first furniture some chestnut stumps for table and chairs; their first bed Elizabeth's riding-skirt filled with rushes.

Billy Hull moonshined for awhile. Then, when he had his first $1,000, he bought a stand of fine poplars, logged them himself, snaked them down to the Obey River with a pair of steers. He became a timberman. From 1870 to 1900 millions of walnut and poplar logs went to the Nashville mills. Billy Hull, with his red tool box and little round cap without a bill, stayed with the lumber-rafting business long after Son Cord was a prominent politician.

"Billy Hull," in the local estimate, "was as rough as a porcupine." Trigger-tempered, 140-lb. little Billy had a friend, Alec Smith; two enemies, Brothers Jim & Dave Stepp. One day Alec Smith and Billy Hull were at the mountain farmhouse of a neighbor named Cindy Lovelace when the Stepps rode up, started shooting. Smith fell dead. A bullet hit Billy Hull between the nose and the right eye, came out the back of his head to lodge in his collar. He dropped. The Stepps dashed over to finish him but, says a family chronicler, "Cindy wrapped her apron around his haid and shouted, 'Lord a' mercy, don't shoot him again, he's dead now.' "

Next day Billy Hull came to, muttered, "I'm not daid; do somethin'furme." Blind in his right eye, he grimly waited until his wound was healed, then started after the Stepps. They had gone to Kentucky. For miles Billy Hull trailed Jim Stepp, found him one day sitting on a fence, chatting. Stepp jumped down, said, "Why, hello, Billy."

In his high mountain whine Billy Hull screamed, "God dang you, don't you speak to me!" He pulled a pistol from his left armpit. Stepp turned to run. Hull shot him "right atween the galluses." On the ground he had the prudence to shoot Stepp again. Then Billy Hull crossed the river, and back in Tennessee no one ever said another word to him about it.

Billy Hull held on to his money, was worth around $250,000 when he died, mostly in real estate in Tennessee and Florida. He built a home in Celina, 15 miles west of Star Point; another at Carthage; a three-story brick business block which Celina still calls "the skyscraper." But to the end of his life he would go off to Florida for the winter with all his clothes in a cardboard valise, a battered tin cup tied to the handle, riding the caboose with the brakemen.

The Boys. Billy and Elizabeth Hull had five sons. First was Orestes, a smart boy who "made a doctor" and went to Louisiana where he died young "of a lock of the bowels." Second was Sanadius Selwin, who was a "Gamblin' Hull," wasted $30,000 of his pappy's money failing in business. Cordell was the third son by 7 months, and Cord became the favorite. Fourth was Wyoming Hull, who was known all his life as the "general"; sick as a. baby, he remained childish, wore Cord's old clothes, wandered about Carthage begging a quarter for circus tickets, read the Bible continuously for years before he died.

The fancy names all gone, Son No. 5 was named merely Roy. He had all his father's bad temper, and more. A stable-hand saved Billy from his son's wrath one day after a fight; Roy went off, joined the Army, died in a fall downstairs in a Chattanooga hotel.

Billy Hull once said: "Cord was always just like a grown man, from the time he could walk." Nade had the best memory but Cord was the best speaker. Once he wrote a powerful essay titled "Clothes Don't Make the Man," delivered it wearing a blue homespun work shirt. But his one real passion seemed to be politics, which he followed with the same sort of scorecard interest with which schoolboys now follow baseball.

After Joe McMillin's Montvale Academy, Cord entered Cumberland University at Lebanon, Tennessee's famed short-order law school. After a ten-month course he was pronounced a lawyer, was admitted to the bar at 19.

Cord's hero was Joe McMillin's brother, Congressman Benton McMillin, a rock of old-line Democracy, a low-tariff man, an advocate of a high income tax law on those millionaires back East. In Bent's buggy at campaign time, young Hull absorbed demo cratic doctrine. It was Bent McMillin who later drafted the first U. S. income tax law, killed by the Supreme Court; and it was Cordell Hull, many years later, who drafted the income tax law (1913) that stands today.

Lawyer, Legislator. In little Celina, Cordell Hull began practice in 1891. In the fall of 1892 he was elected to serve in the Legislature in Nashville, before he was old enough to vote. In his first term he performed yeoman party service: Acting as lawyer for an elections committee, he helped throw out 20,000 ballots as fraudulent, thereby replaced an apparently elected Republican Governor with an apparently defeated Democrat.

Captain, Judge. In the Legislature he stayed year after year, Lincolnian in frame and profile, quiet, serious, steady, until the Spanish-American War. From around Celina he recruited a company of mountaineers, joined the Fourth Tennessee Regiment--dashing in his long Custer mustaches, big rolled hat. To Cuba they went too late to fight. Captain Cord Hull now turned his attention to poker to kill time.

When he came back from Cuba he had $6,300, three-fourths of all the money in the regiment. "He had one big advantage," his aide recalled. "He could look sad and beautiful and humble while he held four of a kind, timidly and carefully betting against other people's full houses."

Hull was 32 when a vacancy occurred in the Circuit Court. Governor James B. Frazier, remembering his services during the election crisis, appointed him judge--a title he still values more than any other. "They changed his name from Hull to Hell," complained the moonshiners. Once he fined his own pappy $5 for sitting in court with his hat on.

Congressman. In 1906 Cordell Hull announced for the Fourth District Congressional seat and won election. He stayed in Congress, as Representative and Senator, 14 years, generally pounding along the single track of "free trade." By 1919 he was calling for world economic conferences to level trade barriers. Tossed out in 1920 by the Harding landslide, his-services to the party had been such that he was made Democratic National Committee Chairman as a compliment.

Back in Congress in 1923, long before the New Deal originated, Cordell Hull enhanced his reputation as the party's leading economist. Many times he pointed out that after World War I the U. S. had become a creditor nation, that Europe could pay back only in goods, that it could not pay at all if tariff barriers were built ever higher. He still hates the Smoot-Hawley Act so fiercely that he has denounced it almost daily for nine years; he is certain it caused the world depression.

Mr. Secretary. Franklin Roosevelt began consulting him in the 1932 campaign, and Cordell Hull was ready with a revision of his old plan for international multilateral trade agreements, whereby benefits accorded any one nation were unconditionally granted to all. This was directed against all barriers. This breadth of view had made him famous; now it helped set him in the Cabinet, to the surprise of many.

At first, in the glittering company of Raymond Moley and the other brilliant original New Dealers, Mr. Hull's homespun generalities and international outlook seemed dreamy idealism. But over the years Cordell Hull showed staying-power, and gradually Franklin Roosevelt became a Hull man, carrying out Hull doctrines, whereas nowhere was there evidence that Mr. Hull was a New Dealer. "I just tends to ma inte'national affairs," he always said when chums tried to needle him into criticisms of the gyrating show around him.

The New Dealers are not a showy lot, but none matches the official simplicity of Jacksonian Mr. Secretary Hull. At Montevideo for his first major Latin American conference, an hour after the boat docked, with hat in hand he was trudging about the town, informally calling on the delegates, meticulously mispronouncing their names. He would knock on the door, say "I'm Hull of the U. S." and begin chatting. Astounded, then charmed by this informality, delegates from the banana republics laid aside their silk hats and silk manners, forgot their jealousy and hatred for the Colossus of the North.

In 1936 at Buenos Aires, the night before the U. S. plan for a 21-Republic agreement was to be broached, Mr. Hull and his glacial, able, pompous Assistant Secretary, Sumner Welles, sat brooding in their rooms in Alvear Palace. Mr. Hull had decided that some other nation must present the U. S. plan, and do the "fronting" for it, as a mere matter of strategy. It was 10:30 p. m. Protocol-minded Mr. Welles insisted nothing could be done that night. But to his horror, his worried chief shoved his feet into carpet slippers, his pajama coat dangling over his trousers, wandered out into the marble corridors.

He shuffled down to the room of Francisco Castillo Najera, Mexican Ambassador to the U. S., knocked on the door of that poet-musician. Next day Dr. Najera presented the plan, lined up the suspicious delegates behind the new theory of continental solidarity, which has since had two additions: 1) hemisphere defense, 2) the Pan-American 300-mile safety belt.

Simply on the basis of his achievements in international affairs, Cordell Hull has become, of all things, very nearly an idol of the very men who know how difficult his task has been--the two living former Secretaries of State. Henry L. Stimson (Hoover) believes Hull is one of the greatest of all Secretaries; dashes off letters to the New York Times every time Mr. Hull is criticized. Charles Evans Hughes (Harding & Coolidge) is known to believe implicitly in both Hull's ideals and capacities; even John Bassett Moore (many times Assistant Secretary of State and author of the bible of international law) is said to approve.

Few ever see Mr. Hull angry. One of the few is his wife, Rose Frances Witz Whitney Hull, who never knows whether the fierce "Chwist!"* that comes from the bathroom in the mornings at shaving time means he has cut his jugular or is thinking of some dastardly tariff provision. Mrs. Hull, descended from an old Jewish family of Staunton, Va., is an Episcopalian, is generally regarded as the best all-around wife in the Cabinet. The Hulls have no children.

Cordell Hull is the biggest political paradox Washington has seen in many years. With his program in large part nullified by World War II, and under its first real gunfire in Congress, with his idealistic world in realistic ruins, he stands at the pinnacle of his career. The most conservative member of the Roosevelt Cabinet of New Dealers, he is its best-loved. He seems meek, but the Department dooryard is figuratively heaped with the bones of bolder, shaggier men who have tried to elbow him to one side.

The paradoxes pile up: He has less to say and has consistently said less at his press conferences than any Cabinet member; yet with the sole exception of the White House, they are the best-attended in town. A backwoods Congressman, he is the No. 1 U. S. Internationalist. An old-fashioned Jeffersonian free-trader, he has lived and worked at the heart of the centralized, streamlined nationalism of the New Deal for almost seven years--and has changed the New Deal more than it has changed him.

*Mr. Hull's plates give him a slight lisp, often interfere with his "r's," which makes him say "mowality" and "twade" for morality and trade.

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