Trouble down the Line

The Democratic Party not only had trouble at the top (see p. 14); it faced a pressing down-the-line problem: finding snug berths for party members defeated in November. President Roosevelt started the ball rolling by naming Oklahoma's silver-tongued Senator Josh Lee, who had performed many a New Deal chore, to the Civil Aeronautics Board. It mattered little whether Mr. Lee knows much about aviation ; the rules of the game made him eligible for an early good job.

In a short time able, yet defeated, Senator Prentiss M. Brown will reluctantly move into Leon Henderson's hot spot as head of OPA (see p. 13). Massachusetts' able Thomas H. Eliot will head the British Division in the London Bureau of OWL But the list of defeated, deserving Democrats is much longer than three; and the ambitions of some of the candidates are not as restrained as Senator Brown's. California's bumbling Governor Culbert Levy Olson blithely told friends in Washington last week his eyes were lifted toward the Supreme Court vacancy.

From old-time Democrats, from tried & true party workers, came a clamor about jobs already given out in OPA and WPB. With but few exceptions, top places in these agencies were assigned on a non-political basis. State Democratic leaders choked with wrath when they found regional OPA and WPB offices headed by and staffed with Republicans. This political unorthodoxy extended even to the Solid South: the OPA regional rationing officer (eight States) is Georgia's G.O.P. national committeeman ; Georgia's OPAdministrator campaigned for Willkie in 1940. Said a prominent Missouri Democrat: "Those bureaus [are] all full of Republicans and mugwumps and carpetbaggers, fellows we never heard of before."

For many a Democrat, brooding about the November defeat, looking with jaundiced eye at the prospects for 1944, it was enough to make him weep.

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