The Coolidge Week

P: At breakfast at No. 15 Dupont Circle, President Coolidge, Senator McNary of Oregon (coauthor of the vetoed McNary-Haugen farm relief bill) and sundry powers of the Republican party shook hands all around. "We will pour balm on the farmers' wounds. Senator McNary will go scouting in the West and report to the President next summer with a compromise bill that will satisfy agriculture and not vex industry. Congress will pass the bill next winter," said last week's breakfasters in effect. Such strategy was predicted three weeks ago (TIME, April 4).

P: Annoyed by persistent rumors, the President let it be known that his Cabinet is not split on the Chinese problem, that Secretary of State Kellogg has the situation well in hand and is not going to resign. Furthermore, said the President, even if Secretary Kellogg should resign, Secretary of Commerce Herbert C. Hoover will not be appointed to succeed him.

P: His right wrist having recovered from lameness, the President threw a white baseball to Tristram Speaker to open the season for the Washington nine. Mrs. Coolidge wore a green hat, a green coat.

P: Among the gentlemen who called on the President last week were: Clarence W. Barron, financial publisher, who reported that hard-times cycles are rapidly becoming impossible in the U. S.; Silas H. Strawn, Chicago lawyer and traveler in China, who thought that the Administration's Chinese policy was 100% right.

P: "Dear Mrs. Coolidge: We are sending you these flowers because we love you," said a letter signed by 200 children of the Salvation Army Home at Lytton Springs, Calif. The flowers were brought from the coast by airplane and were presented by two Washington children, whom Mrs. Coolidge kissed affectionately.

P: The President restored U. S. citizenship rights to the famed La Montagne brothers (Rene, William, Morgan, Montaigu), alert Manhattanites, who succeeded their father in the liquor business before Prohibition, supplied champagne to members of the Racquet & Tennis Club after Prohibition, were jailed in 1923 for violating the Volstead Act.

P: Rubbernecks and idlers were offered rusty nails at $1 apiece, from the White House roof, now being repaired, before the police stopped the workman who was selling them.

P: Charles Evans Hughes, one-time Secretary of State, closeted himself with President Coolidge and Secretary of State Kellogg to discuss ways and means in Nicaragua, Mexico, China.

P: The President told visitors last week that he would not be hostile to the appointment of a native as Governor of Porto Rico--but, he added cautiously, he did not wish to suggest the retirement of the present Governor, Horace Mann Towner.

P: The White House Spokesman's conference with newspapermen was suddenly interrupted when his white collie, Rob Roy, barked loudly, rushed to the Spokesman's side. "What's the matter?" said the Spokesman. "Are they stepping on your toes?"

P: Having held a. "harmony" breakfast with Secretaries Mellon and Hoover, Speaker Longworth and several members of Congress, the President and Mrs. Coolidge attended Easter services at the auditorium temporarily used by the First Congregational Church.

"Historic Incident"

The presidential nominating conventions are more than a year distant; the election is more than a year and a half distant--but conspicuous now, throughout the land, are booms, prophecies. The forest of presidential timber is thickening with oaks and acorns, with green wood and dead wood. Each party has an oak which towers higher than any of the rest. In the Republican party the oak is Calvin Coolidge and the feeling is that if he wants the 1928 nomination, he can have it. But no one, perhaps not even the President himself, knows yet whether he wants to risk a third term attempt. In the Democratic party the oak is Alfred Emanuel Smith and the feeling is that he is the one substantial hope of victory in 1928.

The Letter. Last week, more than ever, the Governor of New York held the centre of the presidential forest. He attempted to scotch for all the time the talk that his Roman Catholic religion would interfere with his upholding the U. S. Constitution in any office to which he might be elected. In a letter published in the Atlantic Monthly-- and addressed to Charles C. Marshall, Manhattan lawyer, who had asked him certain questions (TIME, April 4), Governor Smith set forth his creed "straightforwardly, bravely, with the clear ring of candor."

Significant excerpts from Governor Smith's letter:

"Taking your letter as a whole and reducing it to commonplace English, you imply that there is conflict between religious loyalty to the Catholic faith and patriotic loyalty to the United States. Everything that has actually happened to me during my long public career leads me to know that no such thing as that is true. I have taken an oath of office in this State 19 times. Each time I swore to defend and maintain the Constitution of the United States. . . . During the years I have discharged these trusts I have been a communicant of the Roman Catholic Church. If there were conflict, I, of all men, could not have escaped it, because I have not been a silent man, but a battler for social and political reform. These battles would in their very nature disclose this conflict if there were any. . . .

"You as a lawyer will probably agree that the office of Chief Justice of the United States is second not even to that of the President in its influence on the national development and policy. . . . During one-fourth of its history it has been presided over by two Catholics, Roger Brooke Taney and Edward Douglas White. . . .

"What is this conflict [between Church and State] about which you talk? It may exist in some lands which do not guarantee religious freedom. But in the wildest dreams of your imagination you cannot conjure up a possible conflict between religious principle and political duty in the United States, except on the unthinkable hypothesis that some law were to be passed which violated the common morality of all God-fearing men. And if you can conjure up such a conflict, how would a Protestant resolve it? Obviously by the dictates of his conscience. That is exactly what a Catholic would do.

"It is a well-known fact that I have made all of my appointments to public office on the basis of merit and have never asked any man about his religious belief. In the first month of this year there gathered in the Capitol at Albany the first Governor's cabinet that evert sat in this State. It was composed, under my appointment, of two Catholics, thirteen Protestants and one Jew.'

After showing that some of Lawyer Marshall's arguments were based on incomplete quotations from Church documents, Governor Smith wrote: "I summarize my creed as an American Catholic. I believe in the worship of God according to the faith and practice of the Roman Catholic Church. I recognize no power in the institutions of my Church to interfere with the operations of the Constitution of the United States or the enforcement of the law of the land. I believe in absolute freedom of conscience for all men and in equality of all churches, all sects, and all beliefs before the law as a matter of right and not as a matter of favor. I believe in the absolute separation of Church and State. . . . I believe in the principle of non-interference by this country in the internal affairs of other nations and that we should stand steadfastly against any such interference by whomsoever it may be urged. And I believe in the common brotherhood of man under the common fatherhood of God.

"In this spirit I join with fellow Americans of all creeds in a fervent prayer that never again in this land will any public servant be challenged because of the faith in which he has tried to walk humbly with his God."

Said the Atlantic Monthly: "This is an historic incident, historic for the country and for the Church."

The Boom. Meanwhile, the Smith boom had found new heralds. One-time (1920-24) Governor John M. Parker of Louisiana, a progressive who had supported Theodore Roosevelt and a gentleman with the richest of Southern traditions, cheered for Governor Smith as "a heman, with the courage of his con-victims." Onetime (1925-27) Governess Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming, an ardent Dry, announced a fortnight ago after visiting Governor Smith: "He will conquer everyone he meets by his personal charm, his humanity and his great courage." A few discordant notes were struck. Among them: Senator Thaddeus H. Caraway of Arkansas said the South is 50-to-1 against Smith-for-President. But the fact remains that Republican leaders have come to regard the Democratic nomination of Alfred Emanuel Smith as inevitable, and they have begun to build their fences to fight him,

*This letter was to be released to the newspapers on April 25. But last week the Boston Post and the New York Daily News (tabloid) appeared with unauthorized versions of the letter, so the Atlantic Monthly officially released the letter on April 18. The Atlantic Monthly threatened to sue the Post and the News for gross violation of copyright.