McNutt to Manila

The list of candidates for Harry Woodring's temporary job as Secretary of War was lopped from the top last week when President Roosevelt appointed Indiana's Paul Vories McNutt to be U. S. High Commissioner to the Commonwealth of the Philippines. In Washington, the New York News's Columnists John O'Donnell & Doris Fleeson reported the following exchange between two Indianians who had been grooming their handsome ex-Governor for the White House.

First Hoosier: "Oh. well, there isn't much difference between an $18,000 job in Manila and a $15,000 job in the Cabinet."

Second Hoosier: "There's 11,000 miles difference, so far as 1940 is concerned."

First official act of big, bronze-skinned Mr. McNutt will be to sit in on discussions of U. S.-Philippine trade relations with President Roosevelt and little, brown-skinned Commonwealth President Manuel Quezon, who last week sped across the land from Los Angeles to keep his White House engagement. Informed of Mr. McNutt's appointment in Chicago, President Quezon tactfully observed that if President Roosevelt had chosen him he must be the best man for the job. But in Manila, the U. S.-owned-&-edited Bulletin declared: "If politics had not been considered, if special fitness had been the deciding factor, J. Weldon Jones [Commonwealth financial adviser and Acting High Commissioner] would have been appointed."

Paul McNutt may not know much about Philippine economic problems, but in 45 years he has acquired an impressive experience in law, war and politics. Finishing Harvard Law School in 1916, he became an assistant professor at Indiana University Law School, rose to be the youngest dean it had ever had. Meantime he served as instructor in U. S. camps during the War, rising from captain to major in the Field Artillery. In 1928 he was elected national commander of the American Legion, went on from there to become Governor of Indiana in 1933. Blessed with a distinguishing shock of white hair and bold black eyebrows, a gregarious lover of golf, poker and football, he has made many a friend by his forceful, eloquent, ingratiating personality. He has also made many an enemy by his autocratic disposition, his use of militia in labor disputes. The troops, plus his use of the semi-dictatorial emergency powers he won from the Legislature few weeks after he took office, won him the title of "Hoosier Hitler." Citizens squirmed under his stiff taxes but otherwise it was generally admitted that he did a businesslike job of running his State. He worked hard to deliver it for Franklin Roosevelt last November.

By no means a political blind alley are the Philippines, as the subsequent careers of onetime Civil Governor William Howard Taft, Governor-General Henry Lewis Stimson and High Commissioner Frank Murphy well demonstrate. Far from relinquishing his Presidential ambitions last week, Paul McNutt let slip to the press that it would probably be only a year or so before he was back on the U. S. scene.

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