Rumps Together, Horns Out

For 18 years, roly-poly George E. Allen bobbed around Washington like a pneumatic rubber horse; everybody liked to ride him and he was always good for a horse laugh. Then he disappeared from the public gaze. George was back tending to his well-paying private affairs which have made him a millionaire.

This week the fun-loving George appeared again. He peeped out from what he jocularly calls his autobiography, entitled Presidents Who Have Known Me (Simon & Schuster; $3). In it he had collected all his old jokes, set down glimpses of the well-known figures who laughed at him and with him as he floated in & out of Government bureaus, the White House and smoke-filled rooms. Beyond that, George records some of the political sights which he descried from the tops and troughs of his small waves. In his modest way he makes a contribution to U.S. political history.

"You Can't Beat the Horses." In 1933, "everybody who hadn't been anybody," the buoyant George writes, "was going into Government." George had drifted from a law practice in Okolona, Miss. into the hotel business, and had wound up in Washington. Like most of his friends, in 1929 he had gone broke ($500,000 in the red). But he liked Washington and he made a lot of friends. Franklin Roosevelt did not know him "from George Spelvin," but the President appointed him one of the three District Commissioners of Washington, D.C.

They were grim days, but for Commissioner Allen full of exhilarating experiences. He recalls some of them. Harry Hopkins made him the District of Columbia's Relief Administrator. George played golf with Harry, who was a hopeless duffer, and spotted Hopkins two strokes a hole "for an additional million dollars for District relief projects." George Allen got his million, kindness of U.S. taxpayers.

Some of it he spent to put unemployed newsmen to work computing the percentage of favorites who had won over the past 20 years at reputable race tracks. "They found that 33% of the favorites had won but not with any consistency," George reports. "You can't beat the horses." (He has never quit trying, however.) He admits the research might seem a "horrible" boondoggle to some, but the problem "was to save human beings from feeling useless."

"Such a Pipsqueak As I." As George tells it, his biggest splash in the news was the result of his doing a favor for a friend. After he quit the commissionership in 1938 and went to work recouping his fortune in private business, he continued to serve as unsalaried waterboy, choreboy and funnyman, first to Franklin Roosevelt, then to Harry Truman. In 1946 Truman asked him to serve on the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. "I must have been off my rocker," George recalls. "I should have said, 'Why pick on me? Let's load this onto one of our enemies.'" Instead George Allen took the RFC appointment.

He tells with happy candor the story of the resultant uproar. The few supporters "who thought I wasn't so bad" were "drowned out by the chorus of dismay . . . Just how such a pipsqueak as I turned out to be could also become a major scandal was one of the incongruities of the episode." The other incongruity was a Senate committee going into stitches over George's testimony and ending up by confirming him. He quit after one unspectacular year in RFC, and settled down again to his private enterprises.* Says George modestly: "My record . . . was the record of a man who had no qualifications for the job except the political patronage of Truman."

"Reign of Terror." He had no malice --or at least he admits none now. In all his years around Washington, apparently the only person he disliked was Columnist Drew Pearson. "The punishment for noncooperation with Pearson can be quite terrible, as many public officials have found"--among them, he records, the late Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. George thinks the Pearson "reign of terror now one of the least inspiring aspects of the Washington spectacle."

The man he most respected: Franklin Roosevelt, "although I had to learn to like him as one learns to like olives." And "The fact remains that he laughed only perfunctorily at my jokes." Roosevelt, furthermore, made George the butt of F.D.R.'s own sometimes broad practical jokes, which George also never quite got over. Once in 1937, to a crowd of folks gathered around the Roosevelt train in Sparks, Nev., Roosevelt suddenly introduced George as a district judge. Before George knew it he was thrust out before 10,000 people to make a stammering speech. As the train pulled out of Sparks, "Roosevelt laughed harder than I have ever heard him before."

"Cynical Middle Age." Sometimes during those years, George, the pneumatic horse, let out some air, submerged, and took a look at life below the surface. Swimming around, he came upon some of the more curious aspects of U.S. politics. Allen discovered some corruption, but, he wrote, "the fortunate thing for America is that under our system nobody ever achieves absolute power and that we therefore do not become absolutely corrupt ... I am a little ashamed to confess that petty corruption doesn't shock me very much, because in my cynical middle age I have come to think of it as inevitable."

He found Washington lobbyists to be "precisely as effective as the number of votes they can deliver . . . Labor's lobby is today the most effective in the capital." Politicians will sometimes "go along with policies they don't believe in personally for votes, but almost never for any other kind of gain." George thought Arizona's ex-Senator Henry Ashurst, one of Congress' greatest orators, summed it up. After making an impressive fight for a cause he sincerely believed in, Ashurst abruptly switched. Said a colleague: "Thank God, Henry, you have seen the light." Said Ashurst: "Oh, no ... I felt the heat." Says George: "People who think the mighty in Washington can be persuaded by, or corrupted, if you will, by anything less than votes just don't understand what it's all about."

"My Bulging Waistline." The other thing to understand about U.S. politics, says Author Allen, is political loyalty, which is "a special kind of virtue ... In a field of activity where the outs are forever on the hunt for some way of getting in; the ins must herd together for mutual protection, rumps together and horns presented to the would-be intruders."

Faithful Democrat Allen himself provides a case in point. He is an almost reverent admirer of Dwight Eisenhower who, George declares, refused the Republican nomination because "he didn't think it would be wise of the American people to pick as President a man they knew only as a military leader." If the Republican Party had gotten Ike, George avows, it "would have had a candidate worthy of its Abraham Lincoln tradition." Would George have voted for him? Not on your life. George Allen is first and last a party man. Politics are politics. At all costs, the herd must be saved: rumps together, horns out.

* Among them: Occidental Life Insurance Co., Penn Mutual Life Insurance Co., Avco Manufacturing Corp., Philadelphia Co., Standard Gas & Electric, Duquesne Light Co., ACF-Brill Motors, Steep Rock Iron Mines, Ltd., Republic Steel Corp., Washington's Carlton and Wardman Park hotels.

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