New Dealer

A MAVERICK AMERICAN--Maury Maverick--Covici, Friede ($3).*

Fontaine Maury Maverick dropped his first name (so he says) as a small boy, riding in a wagon up a steep hill, when the driver told him that unless he thus lightened the load they would never make the grade. Critics of New Deal Congressman Maverick assert he has dropped more than a name, accuse him of throwing over family traditions, party principles, national ideals. A literate legislator, Maury Maverick replies to this wholesale charge in a rambling, engaging, man-to-man discourse on the state of the nation and himself.

Maury Maverick's "purpose is to tell an ordinary story of an ordinary man with ordinary ideas." but he has a right to consider himself more American than most. His ancestors were early first citizens of Manhattan (whose etymology he gives as Man-a-hat-ta-nink, a place of general in-toxication), Virginia, South Carolina, Texas. His grandfather's unbranded cattle gave rise to the term '"maverick"--an unbranded yearling; hence independent, a rover. With this background it would not have been surprising if Maury Maverick had turned out a clan-conscious, reactionary Southerner. Clan-conscious he undoubtedly is, but he says he is as conscious of his forbears' failings as of their fame. cites an Irish murderer and an opponent of Patrick Henry to prove it. "Even the best of us," says he. "have ancestors who were not ping-pong players."

The future Congressman was born (1895) in San Antonio, a stone's throw from the Alamo, the eleventh and last of his family. After a year at V. M. I. he finished college at the University of Texas, took three years of law in one and was admitted to the bar at 20. At 24 he was president of the San Antonio Bar Association. His War record did him no harm with future voters. As a lieutenant in the Argonne he was severely wounded, twice decorated. He returned from the War a rabid antimilitarist. When he went into politics he soon became known as a forceful speaker of the old knock-'em-down-&- drag-'em-out school. Since those days he has had a change of heart, believes now in plain speaking, but "the politician of today cannot afford to be a bore, and by the same token he cannot afford to affect the incomprehensible jargon of the professor." Maverick thinks Tugwell's fearful and wonderful vocabulary, plus his inability to jolly newshawks, had much to do with his unpopularity.

Maverick studied his constituents with more thoroughness than most politicians, even made a trip through Texas disguised as a hobo (see cut). Even before Hoover's Reconstruction Finance Corp. was functioning. Maverick had started a relief experiment, the Diga colony, on a cooperative, barter basis. He was elected to Congress in 1934. has since made a name for himself as a progressive New Dealer. His greatest admiration is not Roosevelt but Senator Norris.

Probably the most reconstructed Southerner in Congress, Maury Maverick has things to say about the South which no Northerner could safely say. "The truth is we have the lowest dairy and garden production . . . we have the lowest fertility of the soil, lowest wages, lowest per capita production of pure bred livestock, and the cheapest and worst type of housing in the whole United States of America." He thinks the South got off on its wrong foot on three crucial occasions: 1) when it allowed Jefferson's attack on the slave trade to be deleted from the Declaration of Independence; 2) when it fought the Civil War; 3) when it invited Northern industries to come down and exploit the South's cheap labor.

Maverick believes the New Deal is here to stay, has cold sympathy for repiners. Republicans or others, whom he regards as misguided praisers of times that have gone forever or perhaps never really existed. "My idea is that, if it becomes necessary for the government to regulate or own, the government should simply go ahead and do it." To save the U. S. from depressions, dust-storms, drought and the devastations of the Supreme Court, says Maverick, the U. S. Government has got to govern. He welcomes the new type of Government official, "Tommy Corcoran and Benny Cohen--the hated braintrusters of the President. ... In Washington, and all over the country. Tommies and Bennies are coming up, and in ten years they will either run the country, or be run out of it.''

*Scheduled for publication in June.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.