Back to the Front

While Franklin Roosevelt was splashing in a glass-covered swimming pool, driving out to inspect Rural Resettlement and CCC projects, and generally amusing himself last week at Warm Springs, taunts were being hurled at him from a distance. Why, the taunters demanded, did he not do something about Sit-Down Strikes?

His old critic, Columnist David Lawrence, pointed a monitory finger at Section 5299 of the U. S. revised statutes. That law says that whenever "domestic violence, unlawful combinations, or conspiracies in any State" so obstruct the execution of its laws as to ''deprive any portion or class of the people'' of their rights it shall be lawful for the President "and it shall be his duty" to use Federal force to restore order. Another newer critic, Columnist Walter Lippmann, wanted to know whether the President would be any better equipped to deal with strikes if he had a revamped Supreme Court. How much, asked Mr. Lippmann, had Mr. Roosevelt done about two serious shipping strikes? And a political critic, Senator Vandenberg of Michigan, declaring to the Senate that "there is nothing of greater importance to the nation at the present time," intimated that it was high time the President took action about the Sit-Down epidemic.

Only actions that the President took were to telephone Governor Murphy congratulations when he got an agreement to evacuate the Chrysler plants, to accept an honorary membership in the Phi Kappa literary & debating society at University of Georgia, to sign bills accepting gifts from Old Dealer Andrew Mellon of $19,000,000 worth of old masters (TIME, Jan. 11), from Old Dealer Henry Ford the site for a veterans' hospital in Michigan.

Newshawks thought that real labor action was imminent when the President called Congressional leaders in Washington by long distance and asked them to meet him on the day of his return to Washington. Then on a sunny afternoon he drove down to Warm Springs station, waved good-by to 100 genial natives, to his two mules Tug & Hop who were also present drawing a wagon, and set out for Washington.

Next morning in Washington's Union Station his wife, a couple of grandchildren, his Secretary of State and Attorney General welcomed him back to the front of Political action. That afternoon he was closeted with Vice President Garner, Speaker Bankhead and Leader Rayburn of the House, Leader Robinson of the Senate. When they emerged Senator Robinson declared that the Sit-Down situation had passed its crisis. Mr. Garner said: "I am deaf, dumb and blind." Paterfamilias Roosevelt took his family to church on Easter, cast a beneficent smile on the Easter Monday egg-rolling for 53,000 children on the White House lawn. Unless a real strike crisis forced him to it or until he was ready to use it as an argument for his Supreme Court plan, Sit-Downs were apparently one platter of potatoes on which Franklin Roosevelt did not intend to singe his Presidential fingers.

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