STENCH ON THE POTOMAC

...By and large, they have become, wittingly or unwittingly, the lackeys of the business boys who know what they want...

...Cox of Georgia...

...Yet I left Washington with a disgusted certainty of the decadence of the Roosevelt Administration that 100 solid articles and 1,000 cold facts could never have made so vivid...

...It is a town of personal feuds and cocktail-party rumors, of backbiting and bootlicking and jockeying and throat-cutting...

...They made mistakes, but they did more that was right than was wrong...

...And underneath it all, confident and quiet, the big-business crowd, the monopolists and carteleers, the believers in back-to-the-good-old-days-of-no-taxes-and-no-regulations-to-speak-of are staking their claims to the postwar world...

...Spiritually, Washington is a dead city...

...And while change need not mean progress, there can be, in the long run, no progress without change...

...It is only important that none of a dozen people I asked would unqualifiedly add another name to that list of two...

...sometimes a car must back up to get started forward...

...Stench On The Potomac By FRED RODELL IF ANYONE really wants to know to what a low state this Government of ours—once optimistically defined as "of the people, by the people, and for the people"—has fallen, in this 12th and last year of Franklin Roosevelt's light-hearted up-tilted-eigarette tenure, I recommend a quick trip to Washington...

...A long-time pro-Roosevelt reporter, writing in a long-time pro-Roosevelt magazine, recently confessed: "The New Deal approach isn't good enough to meet our postwar needs, and it is time that liberals began to think in fresh terms...

...And if you don't believe that this nation badly needs to get rid of Roosevelt as President—even at the cost of a frankly reactionary Republican in the White House for four years—go to Washington yourself and take a good long whiff of the corpse of the late New Deal...

...They were not working for money, for most of them could have commanded far more from the law offices ©r the business firms or the advertising agencies— none of which ever sneer at brains if the brains are on their side...

...The same sort of premonition is in the Washington air today after almost 12 years of F.D.R., and even the Democrats, sensing it, do not wholly deplore it...

...The Pseudo-Progressives He has more power now—and more prestige—but both are still being used to further the financial welfare of himself and his kind...

...And so Washington, which was only yesterday so alive with confident and almost arrogant public purpose, has become a town that seems to be looking back over its shoulder...

...they know that their interests are being taken care of—and well...

...They built the New Deal...

...Almost indistinguishable, except for their past records, they are in one sense an even greater menace to the nation's good than is the bare-faced business type—for they lend to official Washington, as seen from a distance, a look of liberalism that is pure mirage...

...Stet...

...The other breed of official polecat is the pseudo-progressive, of which there are two sub-species: the lily liberal, who never had any fight in him to begin with, and the licked liberal with all the fight gone out of him...

...Time was, in the days of the long-deceased New Deal, when a visit to the Capital could be a thrilling thing to anyone interested in progressive political action...

...For, men with nothing big or rewarding to which to devote their time and talents begin to spew them on trivia, and to suppose that the trivia matter...

...In fact, he has been fulfilling this function so successfully that his fellows who are not in official posts, and who used to flock to the Capital and fill its hotels and its taxis to overflowing, no longer bother to make the trek...

...even the Republicans, sensing it, did not wholly deplore it...

...You know," said a friend of mine, "in all of the policy-making posts in the Administration there are only two honest-to-God New Dealers left—only two men with guts and with their hearts wholly in the service of the people...

...The Jersey marshes smelled sweet on the way home...

...I am afraid that this [a decent postwar program] is a goal only a new movement and a new leadership will be able to achieve, and then after a period of reaction...

...For, leaving aside the men in the services, official Washington in the upper reaches is today peopled almost exclusively by two breeds of polecat...

...Young men with young ideas and a pretty free rein were working their hearts-out to make a people's government a living reality...

...Utter Disillusionment Today, most of those eager young men are in the Army or Navy, or else in fat business or legal jobs to which they repaired when the New Deal shut up shop...

...In fact, the almost universal feeling of utter disillusionment, both about the war (except from the angle of eventual military victory) and about the postwar picture as it shapes up today, only adds to the dispirited and dejected whole...

...It is a sobering and a depressing experience...

...Men do not move around Washington any more with springs in the soles of their shoes...

...Not even the war, for all the uniformed glamor and pumped-up patriotism that came with it, has managed to give back to Washington the old sense of achievement and crusade...

...It is not important that the two he named were Abe Fortas, Undersecretary of the Interior, and Clifford Durr, the Federal Communications Commissioner who pushed Chairman Fly into standing up to the contemptible Rep...

...Tidbits of trivia are almost all that matter to too much of Washington today...

...These young men—the Douglases and the Corcorans and the Cohens and all the frequently anonymous rest—were working for that satisfaction ©f decent accomplishment which can rarely come to the man who works mainly for cash...

...The town (Washington has never really been a city) burgeoned with life and excitement...

...And their excited spirit of going ahead, of almost Boy Seoutish idealism, pervaded the air of Washington, and made the place a mecca for other young men with brains and a yen for public service...

...For decay is not pleasant to live with...

...If You Don't Believe This This is tenuous stuff of which I write, for it is hard to put an odor into words...

...In the closing months of the Hoover Administration—after Andrew Mellon, three Presidents, serving under him, had run the Government for almost twelve years—there was a premonition of political crumbling in the official Washington air...

...The first is the businessman type, the pseudo-public servant who, though he holds a public job, has no more real interest in the welfare of the people than he had when the desk behind which he sat happened to be located in Pittsburgh or Portland or Peoria...