Up Eccles

Last week President Roosevelt named as Governor of the Federal Reserve Board a onetime Republican who, eight days before Herbert Hoover left the White House, urged upon a Senate committee a recovery program which today can hardly be distinguished from the New Deal. Recommending big relief grants to the States, a $2,500,000,000 public works outlay, domestic allotment farm relief, high income and inheritance taxes, unification of the banking system and government regulation of the securities business, the witness smiled at the startled Senators and remarked: "I'm a capitalist."

That New Dealer was Marriner Stoddard Eccles, 44, Utah banker who since last January has served Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau as a special assistant. Grandson of a covered-wagon pioneer, son of a rich & pious Mormon, Governor Eccles graduated from Brigham Young College at 19, promptly went to Scotland as a missionary. As if to allay fears of his Leftish theories, his business career was carefully itemized last week in a long White House release. He had been: 1) one of the founders and longtime head of a $50,000,000 group of Utah and Idaho banks "which came through the banking crisis in such splendid condition as to reflect great credit upon his ability as a bank executive"; 2) president of a big construction company which got fat contracts at Boulder Dam and owns a 300,000-acre ranch with "40,000 sheep and 25,000 cattle"; 3) director of Pet Milk Co.; 4) president of Sego Milk Products Co.; 5) vice president & treasurer of Amalgamated Sugar, a big Mormon beet-sugar enterprise; 6) president of Stoddard Lumber Co. which cuts 30,000,000 ft. of timber annually, in eastern Oregon; 7) director of a chain of lumber yards; 8) director of a farm implement house. Said the White House release: "All of these concerns have successfully weathered the years of Depression."

Governor Eccles is a thoroughgoing New Dealer who will do what President Roosevelt wants him to do. Yet when he was putting his ideas into the Congressional record nearly two years ago, he declared: "Such measures as I have proposed may frighten those who possess wealth. How ever, they should feel reassured that it is to save the rich and not soak them."

Last week Governor Eccles stepped to the stage front to pooh-pooh any radical impressions his Senate testimony may have created. "I have certainly, for instance, never advocated the redistribution of wealth," he said. "That is perfectly impossible under the capitalistic system."

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