THE CABINET: 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.