Political Week

"Do something'' was the philosophy which Franklin Roosevelt announced two months ago at Baltimore. But last week, although it was touch and go whether Congress would adjourn June 6, the President took a strictly laissez faire attitude toward legislative matters. No message of his was rushed to the Capitol to spur jaded legislative steeds or to direct their course. At his press conferences he told newshawks that he really had not heard how the tax bill was getting on, etc., etc.

But when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Raymond Brandt asked whether the President had read an article in the current Saturday Evening Post praising Charles Michelson's astuteness, the President cocked an interested eye at the Democratic pressagent seated nearby.

Said Brandt: "Charlie can get a job any place after that ad."

The President beamed. Charlie, he said meaningly, was "hooked," would not need a job for a long time to come. And it was evident that if Franklin Roosevelt was indifferent to what might pass last week in Congress, he still had a lively interest in the campaign which lay beyond Congress' closing.

In the parade of visitors past his desk that fact was emphasized. He confabbed with Senator Wagner who will write his 1936 platform; with John L. Lewis, backer of Labor's Nonpartisan League to re-elect Roosevelt, Democratic Chairman Farley, Governors Davey of pivotal Ohio and McNutt of pivotal Indiana, with AAAd-ministrator Davis who lately returned from a trip to Europe to begin a grand tour of the farm states to bind farmers to the New Deal.

When the week was over and all these political palaverings were done. Franklin Roosevelt motored down to Annapolis to relax aboard the Potomac for a cruise down Chesapeake Bay in company with Dr. Stanley High, sponsor of the Good Neighbor League, lately hired from National Broadcasting Co. to win the church vote for Roosevelt.

One particular bit of political strategy also required the President's attention. Aware that partisans were charging that his scheduled speech at Little Rock, Ark. during the Republican Convention at Cleveland was timed to steal radio attention from his political opponents, Franklin Roosevelt had Secretary Stephen Early write to Columbia and National Broadcasting: the President did not want the broadcasting of his speech to interfere with the Convention's time on the air.

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