Evening Star
- PRESIDENT’S RIGHT UPHELD IN OUSTING OF POSTMASTERS
- REED SCORES WALB FOR INDIANA SLUSH FUND ALLEGATIONS
- TWO GIRAFFES COMING TO ZOO; THIRD DIED BEFORE SHIP SAILED
The Evening Star's front page led with the Supreme Court's decision in the Myers case, in which Chief Justice Taft's opinion upheld the President's power to remove postmasters and other executive appointees without Senate consent and voided statutes that had been read to deny it. From Kansas City came the resumed Senate campaign-fund inquiry into Indiana, where Joseph Myers Jr. of the League of Nations Non-Partisan Association dismissed as “poppycock” Republican chairman Clyde Walb's charge that the group's propaganda aimed to defeat Senators Watson and Robinson over their World Court votes. A lighter dispatch from Boston reported that Hi-Boy, the giraffe Washington's children had sent an expedition to Africa to fetch, had landed with an unexpected companion among 2,000 animals.
Translation
PRESIDENT’S RIGHT UPHELD IN OUSTING OF POSTMASTERS
The right of the President of the United States to remove postmasters and other executive appointees from office without the consent of the Senate was upheld today by the Supreme Court in the Myers case from Portland, Oreg. In an opinion by Chief Justice Taft the court held that Federal statutes which have been regarded as withholding that power from the President are void. The case, involving removal by President Wilson of Frank S. Myers as postmaster at Portland, had proved a focal point upon which the legislative and Executive branches of the Government had come to a notable trial of constitutional right before the highest court.
REED SCORES WALB FOR INDIANA SLUSH FUND ALLEGATIONS
KANSAS CITY, October 25. — Testimony before the Senate campaign fund committee that the League of Nations Non-Partisan Association was trying to effect the senatorial campaigns in Indiana is “poppycock,” Joseph Myers, jr., declared today at the resumption here of the Senate inquiry into that campaign. Myers represented that association in Indiana during the first six months of this year and Clyde A. Walb, chairman of the Indiana Republican State committee, testified last week at Chicago that “the propaganda” put out by the association was designed to defeat Senators Watson and Robinson, Republicans, because of their vote against the World Court.
TWO GIRAFFES COMING TO ZOO; THIRD DIED BEFORE SHIP SAILED
BOSTON, October 25. — Hi-Boy, the giraffe for whom the children of Washington sent the Smithsonian-Chrysler expedition into the wilds of Africa, is here. And so’s his old jungle playmate, much to the surprise of everybody. Unaware that Hi-Boy was bringing a fellow-giraffe along with him, there was no name with which to christen the newcomer upon his landing here in company with 2,000 other mammals, birds and reptiles, brought to America on the City of Calcutta.
Context
How a Portland postmaster's dismissal reached the Supreme Court
The ruling the Star reported closed a dispute that had begun six years earlier. President Woodrow Wilson removed Frank S. Myers as postmaster at Portland in 1920 without publicly explaining why and without seeking the advice and consent of the Senate. Myers sued for his salary and lost in the Court of Claims on the ground of laches, undue delay in pressing his claim; after his death his widow carried the litigation forward to the Supreme Court. The paper reported that federal statutes regarded as withholding the removal power from the President had been declared void, and later legal history gives that point particular weight: Myers was the first Supreme Court case to invalidate a federal law for violating the separation of powers.
How far Taft's reasoning reached, and how the Court narrowed it in 1935
The dissenting justices warned that an unrestricted presidential removal power could undermine the civil service system by reviving the spoils system. Within a decade the Court took up the question again. On August 31, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt wrote to Federal Trade Commission member William Humphrey, and he later removed him from the commission by letter. In 1935, in Humphrey's Executor, the Supreme Court upheld a statute protecting the FTC commissioner from politically motivated removal; writing for a unanimous Court, Justice Sutherland ruled against the president and held that the Myers decision is confined to purely executive officers. The 1926 holding has since regained force: in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (2020), the Roberts Court reaffirmed the core holding of Myers that the president generally has an unencumbered removal power.
What the Reed committee was investigating in 1926
The “Senate campaign fund committee” in the Kansas City dispatch was a special committee that the Senate convened in 1926, after allegations of excessive spending in the Pennsylvania primary, to examine expenditures and possible corruption in senatorial campaigns. Chaired by Missouri Democrat James A. Reed, it held hearings in Chicago throughout the summer and fall of 1926, chiefly on the Illinois primary; the paper's note that Walb had testified at Chicago the week before fits that schedule. The committee worked under a legal limit: the Supreme Court had ruled in the Truman Newberry case that the Federal Corrupt Practices Act could not constitutionally apply to primary elections. The Senate's own history of the inquiry centers on Pennsylvania and Illinois, so the Indiana phase is known here from the Star's report. The investigation had lasting consequences: on January 19, 1928, the Senate voted 61 to 23 that Illinois senator-elect Frank L. Smith was not entitled to his seat.
Watson, Robinson and the World Court vote
Walb's charge, as the paper records it, was that the association's propaganda targeted Senators James E. Watson and Arthur R. Robinson for voting against the World Court. Votes on the World Court did serve as campaign weapons in 1926: in neighboring Illinois, Frank L. Smith vigorously criticized Senator William B. McKinley's vote for the resolution in favor of the World Court. Indiana had two Senate seats on the ballot that year. In the election of November 2, 1926, eight days after this edition, Watson was re-elected. Robinson, an interim appointee to his seat, was re-elected to finish the term over Democrat Evans Woollen. The page records only conflicting testimony; it does not show whether the association actually worked to defeat the two senators.
Original
PRESIDENT’S RIGHT UPHELD IN OUSTING OF POSTMASTERS
The right of the President of the United States to remove postmasters and other executive appointees from office without the consent of the Senate was upheld today by the Supreme Court in the Myers case from Portland, Oreg. In an opinion by Chief Justice Taft the court held that Federal statutes which have been regarded as withholding that power from the President are void. The case, involving removal by President Wilson of Frank S. Myers as postmaster at Portland, had proved a focal point upon which the legislative and Executive branches of the Government had come to a notable trial of constitutional right before the highest court.
REED SCORES WALB FOR INDIANA SLUSH FUND ALLEGATIONS
KANSAS CITY, October 25. - Testimony before the Senate campaign fund committee that the League of Nations Non-Partisan Association was trying to effect the senatorial campaigns in Indiana is " poppycock, " Joseph Myers, jr., declared today at the resumption here of the Senate inquiry into that campaign. Myers represented that association in Indiana during the first six months of this year and Clyde A. Walb, chairman of the Indiana Republican State committee, testified last week at Chicago that " the propaganda " put out by the association was designed to defeat Senators Watson and Robinson, Republicans, because of their vote against the World Court.
TWO GIRAFFES COMING TO ZOO; THIRD DIED BEFORE SHIP SAILED
BOSTON, October 25. - Hi-Boy, the giraffe for whom the children of Washington sent the SmithsonianChrysler expedition into the wilds of Africa, is here. And so's his old jungle playmate, much to the surprise of everybody. Unaware that Hi-Boy was bringing a fellow-giraffe along with him, there was no name with which to christen the newcomer upon his landing here in company with 2, 000 other mammals, birds and reptiles, brought to America on the City of Calcutta.
Source: Holding institution