Huey Long is the Senate's No. 1 Colorful Figure. School children of the future will know enough political theory to titter at the Kingfish's comic relief after wading through dreary pages on the National Recovery Act. But for the present, the prospect of a large overproduction of general and special Hueyana brings up graver problems of government control than does a wheat surplus. One wonders who pays for the rain of Huey pamphlets which is meant to soak the rich.

No one has yet appeared to beard the funny man in public. But someone blackened the Colorful Figure's eye one dark night in the washroom of a Long Island beach club, all in the true spirit of fascistic democracy. Although this fistic filibusterer, the Kingfish, in a spirit of pure research, has located him on a preferred list of J.P. Morgan, the financial wizard recently tried for financial witchcraft. Now in the egalitarian thinking of Mr. Long, to be on a Morgan list is to be Morgan-owned, and Mr. Morgan owns Collier's weekly. This was discovered by Huey when he was covering the Morgan investigation for his quaint magazine "The American Progress."

Many weeks passed while Mr. Morgan was murdering impoverished grousies in Scotland and Huey was helping with National Recovery. Curiosity got the best of the Morgan editors however, so Collier's offered a cash prize and medal to the unknown soldiers of the Sands Point washroom, should be make himself known. Nor did the Kingfish let any scaweed grow under his finny big foot. He has written a friendly letter, open and anonymous to Al Capone (Morgan-owned) telling how that tax-dodger can become friendly with the big-men in his racket, it is headed "J.P. Morgan and Co Points Way for Capone's Release," and is signed merely "Subscribe to the American Progress." So diplomacy may succeed where the gentle art of self-defense failed, and the best defense is a gallant offense such as libel. If Capone claims the reward from Colliers', Mr. Morgan, by putting the government on one of its fashionable lists will see that Capone is set free. Capone would no doubt like to round off the Century of Progress with a riotous New Year's eve on the Loop. But for the present, while the injured Kingfish and the tottering financier are still in the public eye, the pretender to the medal is in jail, and the modal itself is locked for good in the Museum of the American Numismatic Society.