Fun With Flies

Unlike most of his predecessors, President Roosevelt does not hesitate to take vacations from Washington while Congress is in session. Last week, after seven weeks of a very dull session, he decided to slip away for four or five days of fun. Against his trip was the fact that it meant postponing his recommendation for new taxes, which Congress was impatiently awaiting in order to perform its election-year duty of going home as quickly as possible. In favor of it was the fact that Secretary Morgenthau was absent attending the funeral of his mother-in-law, and the President's deep desire to be present in Cambridge when Harvard's Fly Club initiated his youngest son, John.

So early one morning, on an empty stomach, the President boarded his special in Washington, after breakfast alighted in Philadelphia, drove to Temple University where he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Jurisprudence. Then he hustled back to his train, whizzed off toward Cambridge.

At Worcester Governor Curley of Massachusetts popped aboard to regale the President with friendly conversation. A few minutes after the special's arrival in Boston's freight yards, police cars sounding sirens pulled up in front of No. 2 Holyoke Place, Cambridge, home of the Fly. A crowd came running at the sound, packed close around the big car from which Franklin Roosevelt emerged. "Boooh!" shouted voices in the rear. "Boo! Boo!" Seldom in his life had Franklin Roosevelt been booed. He looked straight ahead as he was helped toward the door of his Club.

Within, Fly members sat down to roister together. Outside there was roistering too. In nearby Lowell House, Harvard undergraduates staged a mock broadcast of the dinner at the Fly. Play by play they reported the event from open windows: "Now the President is taking off his galoshes. . . . The President is choking on an oyster. . . . Now he is drinking champagne. . . . Flash! Al Smith has just disappeared in the basement. . . ." The broadcast came abruptly to an end when the police interfered.

The President's merry dinner came to an equally abrupt end with a real news flash from Washington. He knew that Secretary of the Navy Swanson had been critically ill with pleurisy all week. But the news was that the President's cousin, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Henry Latrobe Roosevelt, had suddenly succumbed to a heart attack during an attack of intestinal influenza. Cutting his Harvard evening short, the President and his three sons drove to the Presidential special, did some hurried telegraphing. In an hour he had word that his cousin's funeral would be held in Washington three days later, that to attend it he would have to cut short his vacation. Then the President chugged off to Hyde Park for a couple of days' play.

One duty he had at Hyde Park: to make a Sunday night radio address in honor of Brotherhood Day, sponsored by Jews and Christians. In view of the various reasons for his unpopularity with many of the pious, the speech was of political rather than religious importance. Although his Episcopal training kept him from invoking his Maker, he mentioned Him twice, saying: "The vision of the early days [of the U. S.] still requires the same qualities of faith in God and man for its fulfillment. No greater thing could come to our land today than a revival . . . that would sweep through the homes of the Nation and stir the hearts of men and women of all faiths to a reassertion of their belief in God. . . ."

P: In the diplomatic reception room at the White House Franklin Roosevelt was last week initiated into his eleventh lodge,* the Knights of Pythias. In telescopic order he was put through the degrees of page, esquire and knight. Chief inductor was onetime Senate Inquisitor Ferdinand Pecora, now a New York Supreme Court Justice. Knight Pecora's job, for which he was well equipped, was to give Page Roosevelt a sound dressing down to inculcate in him the spirit of Knightly humility.

P: Like all Army officers, Major General Johnson Hagood, Commander of the Eighth Corps Area, bridles when he thinks of how little the Army gets from the New Deal and how much other agencies get. Like most heavy artillerymen, General Hagood lacks neither brains nor tongue. Pleading for money for Army housing before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee last December, he spoke as follows: "[I am] not familiar with the various pockets in which Uncle Sam keeps his money [but I understand that] there is budget money which is very hard to get; there is PWA money which is not so hard to get, and then there is a vast quantity of WPA money which is very easy to get for trifling projects but almost impossible to get for anything worthwhile. . . . It is harder for me to get 5-c- to buy a lead pencil than to get $1,000 to teach hobbies to CCC boys. . . . At the present time there is a vast flow of silver--I won't say gold--spreading out all over the country like mud. . . . For God's sake put some of it into stone and steel!"

Last week, at President Roosevelt's direction, the War Department issued an order summarily relieving General Hagood of his command, ordering him to proceed from his headquarters at San Antonio, Tex. to his home at Orangeburg, S. C. to "await orders."

*The others: Masons, Elks, Odd Fellows, Sojourners, Maccabees, Eagles, Try-po-bed Grotto, Shepherds, Ahepa, and the Fly.

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