Unnamed Government Officials

When the title character of "Uncle Willy" is told he cannot fly until he provides "a permit from a doctor" certifying he is healthy enough, he complains about "these Republicans and Democrats and XYZ's" who are to blame for all such government regulations (241). "XYZ's" is probably his way of referring to the many new agencies that the Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt created, beginning in 1933, to try to lift the country out of the Great Depression; by 1935, when the story was published, these New Deal programs - the WPA, the CCC, the TVA, and so on - were popularly referred to as the "alphabet agencies" or even the "alphabet soup." But nearly all the "Republicans" in government were opposed to Roosevelt's programs, so Willy's inclusion of them in his complaint makes this allusion more general.