Delinquents

At the White House, last week was a week of visits. President Roosevelt and Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau sipped tea one afternoon with Mr. Chen, Mr. Koo, Mr. Kuo and Ambassador Sze, emissaries of China, who were there to make polite inquiries about the future of their country, inasmuch as the New Deal had seen fit to boost the price of silver so high as to force China off the silver standard.* Another set of callers included Vice President Garner, Senator Fletcher of Florida and Senator Brown of New Hampshire, who sought the President's help in concocting a measure to revive the Florida Ship Canal and Maine's Passamaquoddy Dam.

Still a third group of visitors were 45 Navajos, Pueblos and Hopis who turned up under the guidance of the Department of the Interior just as the President and Mrs. Roosevelt got into their open touring car one afternoon to drive to Mt. Vernon. The Indians came bearing gifts, a blanket for the Great White Father, a ring for the Great White Mother. Solemnly they filed past the Father's car shaking his hand until the turn came of Chief Kolchavteewah. For a moment, to Franklin Roosevelt's surprise, it looked as if Kolchavteewah was going to kiss the Presidential hand, but the Redman's lips never actually touched the Roosevelt flesh. Following an old Indian custom, he made a secret sign. Then the tribesmen did a buffalo dance on the lawn, and the President drove off.

Most notable visitors of the week were those whom Mrs. Roosevelt entertained on the South Lawn after the President departed on his week end yachting trip on the Potomac on the Potomac. Fortnight ago Mrs. Roosevelt, in her syndicated newspaper column, told of her visit to the National Training School for Girls, the District of Columbia's lock-up for female delinquents. Dr. Carrie Weaver Smith, new superintendent who recently induced Congress to appropriate $100,000 for the School, also induced Mrs. Roosevelt to visit it. In My Day, the First Lady wrote:

''Never have I seen an institution called a 'school' which had so little claim to that name. Buildings are unfit for habitation-badly heated, rat infested, with inadequate sanitary facilities. Children are walled in like prisoners, in spite of ample grounds and beautiful views.

"The girls are without an educational program or a teacher. There is no psychiatrist to examine and advise on the treatment of these unfortunate children. . . .

"I am more ashamed than I can say that this is my first visit. . . ."

Promptly Mrs. Roosevelt invited the girls to a garden party at the White House. On the eve of the party, she told her press conference with indignation of conditions at the School: 60 girls, mostly Negroes, aged 14 to 21, were its inmates. All had been thrice convicted, mostly for sex offenses. Twenty-six of the girls were syphilitic and practically all of them had gonorrhea. There was no full-time doctor in attendance. The girls lived in locked cells on unlighted brick corridors, with only one toilet and one bathtub (with no hot water) for every 16 girls. One delinquent had her illegitimate baby in her cell. All of them ate in the kitchen where the laundry was hung to dry. The only training was doing the School's chores.

On the day of the garden party all reporters and photographers were barred from the White House grounds on Mrs. Roosevelt's orders. Eleven white girls in dresses they had put together out of white muslin arrived first in automobiles. Behind them came 49 Negro girls in print dresses furnished for the occasion by WPA. Twenty matrons and several Secret Service men patrolled the South Lawn to keep the guests from escaping. Under one marquee the white girls were seated, under another the black girls. Footmen in livery served them ice cream, cake, lemonade. Mrs. Roosevelt received each & every one with a warm handshake, and after an hour of cake-eating took them through the new White House kitchens and the State Chambers on the lower floor, gave them each a small engraved photograph of the White House.

Said Dr. Smith afterward: "This is the most eventful day in the treatment of delinquent children in America. The First Lady of the land with courage and enthusiasm, and, far more important, without condescension, or the insufferable patronizing manner which so many persons in like position would manifest, has opened the White House to a group of forgotten children who have hitherto been the objects of neglect and social contempt."

*As a sequel to this tea party, Secretary Morgenthau announced that the U. S. had agreed to make "substantial purchases" of Chinese silver, pay in gold which China must use solely for stabilizing its currency.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.