Monday, Apr. 10, 1939
Warhorses' Day
> "I've got small busts. My boss wants a girl with big busts."
> "I'm a good, pure girl, so I can't get promoted."
> "The boss in this office has been out with four of the girls working for him inside of two weeks."
These were some of the 20,000 complaints which have poured in upon Louisiana's curly-haired Senator Allen Joseph Ellender, henchman of the late Huey Long and his successor in Washington. Allen Ellender lacks the Kingfish's political potency and likewise his flair for publicity. But last year he struck a workable vein of publicity when he agitated for a special Senate committee to investigate injustices in Civil Service promotions. He got his committee and $2,500 to finance it. Last week his hearings made headlines in capital dailies. His theme: Why pretty girls get ahead of homely ones as Government workers, with examples in the flesh.
>After 21 years in the Commerce, Treasury and Justice Departments, Bertha Lonergan, salary now $1,620 a year in the Department of Justice: "We old warhorses" are passed over for younger, prettier girls such as Miss Margaret Stanley (a niece of Special Assistant Attorney General William Stanley) with no Civil Service rating and only two years' experience, who now is paid the same as War Horse Lonergan (see cut).
Said Post Office Superintendent William J. Dixon, defending his selection of a blonde secretary: "She is alert, apt, quick, energetic . . . best suited. You Senators and others call at my office and it is necessary that you all be courteously treated."
Senator Ellender: "Does it require intelligence to greet a Senator or does it require looks?"
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