The Waterbury Democrat., 1938-04-02

OA VAAS 4UOOSS'NAV OSSNA4ANU W cent flop.
 His colleagues have their dismal sides, but each also has one or more redeeming features. Miss Perkins, for example, has been sad failure as a public execu- tive, but an excellent administra- tor of Labor Department routine. Attorney General Homer Cum mings has been a complete fail- ure as a trust-buster, but he does know law. And so on through the list.
 Only Uncle Dan" is with out a qualifying virtue. Of the ten cabineteers, he alone is an undifuted washout.
 He is dull, mealy-mouthed, in- competent ar l reactionary. He is no more qualified to be a Cabinet member, particularly in a liberal Administration, than the Man in the Moon. Roper's kin ship to the New Deal goes on further than sitting in a swivel chair and drawing $15,000 year.
 Yet he hangs on. How he has done so is one of the mysteries of Washington.
 After the Presidents re-elec- tion, some of his close friends bluntly told him he ought to get rid of Roper; that whatever po- litical debt owed Roper in 1892 now was amply repaid, and the Department of Commerce should be governed by a first-class man. So everyone around the White House was sure Roper would be "kicked upstairs" to soft dip lomatic post.
 But the inauguration came, went, and nothing happened. Roosevelt made no move to oust his Secretary of Commerce and last thing Uncle Dan" contem- plated was to exit without an of- ficial invitation.
 Various explanations have been offered by White House intimates for the Presidents retention of Roper. The most common is that Roper underwent serious fi- nancial reverses, and Roosevelt, unable to find him another &C., ceptable job, has not had the heart to oust him.
 Whatever the reason, Roper is still hanging on and hanging his Department with him.
 Sorry Mess
 Under the secretaryship of Her bert Hoover, the Department of Commerce became one of the most powerful branches of the government. True, the much vaunted foreign exports which it promoted were largely financed by never r-to-be-repaid foreign loans. But on the whole it was an efficient, and certainly a live organization.
 Today, however, it is a
 shambles of incompetence, cheap politics, dissension and Reorganization. It has no standing in the Administration, in Congress, with business men or with the public. When it is not being laughed at, it is being denounced.
 This disgust reached such a pitch over Roper's m.smanage- ment of the U. s. Shipping Board that the agency was taken away from him by Congress and trans formed into the independent U. s. Maritime Commission. Recent ly, legislation was introduced to do the same thing with the Bu- reau of Air Commerce.
 The record of the Air Bureau has been disgrace from the day Roper took office. For a time it was run by a political appointee of Mrs. Roosevelt's, an ex-law partner of the late Senator Joe Robinson, and a close friend of the late Representative Buchanan of Texas, all pickering among themselves and letting air safety go to pot.
 Now the present director, Fred D. Fagg, conscientious eXecu- tive, is going to quit. REASON: Too much Roper political med- ding.
 Shipping Safety??
 Roper's Bureau of Marine In- spection and Navigation has been equally, though less spectacularly politics-ridden. The big ship operators could get almost any thing they want from 8 steam ship inspector, and when two young men in the Bureau tried to clean out some of the float ing fret traps" which ply the wa ters of New England and the South, they were promptly fired.
 So inefficient have been Rop- CTS various shipping officials that when the Nantucket Light ship was rammed by a British