Happy Returns

Before he started on his two-week tour to the Northwest, Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that the purpose of the trip was "intake," that he wanted to see for himself how the country was faring under the New Deal and how the country liked it. Last week, back in Hyde Park, it was clear that whatever else he had taken in, Franklin Roosevelt had thoroughly absorbed one thing from the huge crowds that had turned out to see and hear him: assurance that he was as popular as ever in the Northwest.

The mysterious, nervous mind of Franklin Roosevelt nourishes itself on crises. When the President is feeling as he was last week after his reassuring tour, he likes his crises not singly but in bunches. On the way home last week, he stopped off at Chicago to dedicate a bridge and incidentally revise U. S. foreign policy of the last some 15 years (see col. 3). In Hyde Park the next day he sprang another rabbit. Sitting on the stone porch of his mother's house he gave a press conference to understand that he had practically made up his mind to call a special session of Congress next month, to start "spadework" on new legislation. He immediately laid out the special session's program, starting where the 75th Congress' tired first session ended last summer: crop control, antilynching, wages and hours legislation, reorganization of the executive branch of the Government, regional planning. The President promised his final decision on an extra session probably within a week. In Washington three days later, he announced that he would make the first "fireside talk" of the autumn to a national radio audience early this week.

P:When news that Associate Justice Hugo Black had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan appeared a month ago, the President's only comment was that he would have nothing to say until Justice Black returned from Europe. Last fortnight when Justice Black was addressing some 50,000,000 other U. S. citizens, the President was pointedly riding in an open car (without radio), stopping to exchange small talk with a U. S. Army officer at the gateway to Fort Lewis near Tacoma. Last week, in Chicago, Franklin Roosevelt drove through cheering lines of thousands of Chicagoans to see his old friend, Chicago's top Roman Catholic, George Cardinal Mundelein. Dressed in a black cassock, scarlet mantle and scarlet skullcap, the Cardinal met the President at the door of his gloomy mansion across from Lincoln Park. After a chat in the archiepiscopal throne room, he and the Cardinal sat down to a private snack of fried chicken.

Back in Hyde Park, reporters made one more effort to get a direct Presidential comment on Associate Justice Black. When a reporter read the President's previous statement, implying that it implied there might be another, Franklin Roosevelt's smile vanished. He announced that he had not heard from Justice Black since his return from Europe and that he had nothing more to say about the matter.

P:On Oct. 11 the President celebrated two anniversaries, those of 1) the death of Polish General Casimir Pulaski, Revolutionary War hero, for whom he made a brief speech upholding ". . . the ideal of human society which makes conscience superior to brute strength." 2) The birthday of his wife, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, to whom he gave a watertight wrist watch to replace one she ruined at a beach last summer.

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