Winter's End

Newshawks at the White House could not miss it: Franklin Roosevelt's mood had changed. His whole legislative program was in the pot and boiling. At last everything was coming to a head. The Social Securities Bill, the Banking Bill, the Utilities Bill, the Wagner Bill, the fate of NRA. And last week at that important juncture, suddenly the irritability which had marked his recent actions dropped from him. His "winter peeve" was over. Once more he was the President of two years past, taking the political initiative, breaking precedents with verve and satisfaction.

Last week it looked indeed as if he would get most of his legislative program from Congress but everything was not rosy. His proposal to extend NRA for two years seemed about to take a licking (see p. 16). He had on paper only a bare margin to prevent passage over his veto of the Bonus Bill which would dump $2,000,000,000 worth of greenbacks on the nation. He had the problem of roundly rejustifying his whole program of lavish expenditure--in order to justify excluding the Bonus.

Yet Franklin Roosevelt not only looked as if he did not mind. He showed it. To farmers who "invaded" the Capital demanding more AAA (see p. 16), he made a rip-snorting speech. To rumors that he was going to wobble on his Bonus veto, he replied with a flat announcement that his veto would be as strong as he could make it. And two days later he electrified his press conference by abruptly grinding out a cigaret and saying he would not send a Bonus veto message. He would go to the Capitol and deliver it in person --the first time any President had ever done such a thing. Cause of the marked change in Franklin Roosevelt nobody knew, but everyone could see that the winter of his discontent had ended.

P: With all his pressing program the President found time to entertain guests, at the White House, Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago, Governor & Mrs. Lehman of New York, disabled veterans (at their annual garden party); on the Sequoia cruising in the Potomac, Judge Samuel Rosemann, who was his counsel when he was Governor of New York.

P: "I am in receipt of the following letter from the Secretary of the Interior," President Roosevelt wrote tersely to Congress. The letter from embarrassed Harold Ickes: "I regret to report the loss of enrolled bill HR 6084 authorizing a bond issue for Ketchikan, Alaska, which was delivered to my office on May 3 by a messenger from the White House. The bill was receipted for by a messenger at my door. . . . I have caused everyone to search all papers in and on their desks. . . . I am chagrined to have to report the loss of this bill in spite of the care with which enrolled bills are handled. . . ."

P: To be Minister to Canada the President appointed Career Diplomat Norman Armour, succeeding the late Warren Delano Robbins. Minister to Haiti since 1932, Diplomat Armour has served the U. S. for 23 years at Vienna, Paris, Tokyo, Brussels, Montevideo, The Hague, Washington and Petrograd, where in 1919 he married Princess Mvra Koudacheff.

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