Clean Slate at Aniline

With a new crowd in full control, the bitter purge of General Aniline & Film Corp. (TIME, Jan. 26, March 2) appears to be almost complete. Month ago, just before Leo Crowley became Alien Property Custodian, Aniline lost what was left of its old directorate, got a new, Treasury-picked, four-man board. Last week the new board had a new law firm to help it complete the reorganization job. Thus ended the last important link between Leo Crowley's No. 1 alien property and its old board of directors, led by Breed, Abbott & Morgan's William C. Breed.

Aniline has been a lawyer's feast ever since its putative connections with Germany's I. G. Farben (through Swiss I. G. Chemie) became a matter of U.S. Government concern. Breed, Abbott's fees for counseling Aniline last year: some $250,000. William Breed's final attempt to forestall the Aniline purge cost another $100,000-the price of ex-U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings' advice on how to prettify Aniline's board last fall.

The big names that Homer Cummings dreamed up for Aniline's board were a dream indeed: Franklin Roosevelt's old Dutchess County friend Judge John E. Mack for president, ex-Ambassador William C. Bullitt for chairman, ex-defense transportation head Ralph Budd for good measure. But President Mack went on handling his legal practice, Chairman Bullitt went diplomatizing in the Middle East,* Director Budd went home to Chicago to run the Burlington; and the dream faded.

Aniline's new Treasury-picked "managing directors" sound as if they could cope with a chemical manufacturing business somewhat better than the old political protectorate. President and chairman is Engineer-Financier Robert E. McConnell, ex-Wall Street investment trust manager (Mayflower Associates), now head of the Engineers Defense Board, which cracks tough engineering problems for WPB. His teammates are Pan American Petroleum President Robert E. Wilson, Corn Products Refining Chairman George Moffett, and Rumford Chemical Works President Albert E. Marshall.

The new law firm is new both in fact and its approach to Aniline's legal problems. Wickes, Riddell, Bloomer, Jacobi & McGuire is a recent amalgam of a smallish 20-year-old Wall Street law firm (formerly Wickes, Neilson & Riddell) and of three lawyers who first worked together at Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine & Wood. With other big-time clients like Shell Union Oil, Commercial Solvents, Republic Steel and Reynolds Tobacco to fall back on, they regard their Aniline job as strictly "interim."

McConnell's job is something else again. Much of Aniline's technical strength now is due to the fact that, during its formative years, it was heavily staffed with

German experts. The spy-minded Treasury, flailing around in this morass of German and German-American names, has fired some 50 employes already, is looking around for more. Morale among those who are left has gone from bad to worse.

Thanks largely to Government business, all these alarums and excursions have not yet affected Aniline's production or profits.

McConnell's big job is to see that they never do.

With Aniline in good hands, Custodian Crowley seized two other alien properties last week, and also appointed a new deputy custodian. The deputy: James Markham, a tall, grey-haired lawyer from Lowell, Mass., who has been a Crowley crony since he went to be Solicitor for Crowley's FDIC in 1933. The seizures:

>The half-interest in Magnesium Development Corp. formerly owned by I. G. Farben. Alcoa, which owns the other half of patent-holding Magnesium Development, fabricator American Magnesium Corp., producer Dow Chemical and American Magnesium are up to their ears in an anti-trust action in which the Justice Department is alleging a plot to limit magnesium production in the U.S. Expected this week was a consent decree, to be signed by all parties.

>The alien control of Luscombe Air plane Corp., almost all in the hands of Leopold H. P. Klotz, now of New York City, formerly of Liechtenstein. Luscombe also got a new chairman (Chicago investment banker Matthew J. Hickey) and president (Lee N. Brutus, production man from Waco Aircraft). The seizure was at the express request of the U.S. Navy, for whom tiny Luscombe makes trainers and engines.

*About two months ago, Bill Bullitt quietly resigned from the board chairmanship, returned the first (and only) payment on his $12,000 a year salary.

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