Alarms and Excursions

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

Alarms and Excursions

Again last week, Franklin Roosevelt applied himself with experienced calm to battling his second depression. Most spectacular moves in the campaign were two talks with the heads of two huge Eastern utilities companies (see p. 14).. Then came the President's message to Congress calling for legislation to encourage private capital to start a private housing boom (see p. 18). On the pressing subject of taxes, the President announced that he favored the revision being discussed in .the House as soon as "Congress is ready." A balanced budget in 1939 would be a business stimulant. The President reiterated to Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley his insistence that the new Farm Bill include provisions for whatever expenses above the current $500,000,000 appropriated for annual farm programs which it might entail. To a press conference, he announced his intention of asking Congress to reduce next year's Federal subsidies for State highways by about $110,000,000. Paradoxically, while business would like the prospect of a balanced budget, it would also like the immediate stimulus of a flow of Government spending. Equal to this apparent dilemma, Franklin Roosevelt told the same press conference that he would urge Government departments to spend current appropriations totaling $245,000,000 for upkeep and supplies at once instead of spreading them over the next seven months.

In dealing with the current Recession, a less confident executive than. Franklin Roosevelt might have made the tactical blunder of adopting the attitude of most business that it was: 1) unforeseen and 2) thoroughly alarming. Equipped with a temperament to which crises are almost a necessity, Franklin Roosevelt did nothing of the sort. In high good-humor, he held the first press conference of the week in the Oval Study next his bedroom where he told an audience of ten correspondents which tooth had given him trouble the week before: "No. 3 hold, starboard side." Informed that in Uvalde, Tex. Vice President Garner had developed a kind of "magic seed" which might make grass grow under the trees on the White House lawn, the President asked him to send for some. At week's end, he made his attitude even clearer. Leaving Congress to struggle along in Washington, he boarded a train for Florida, there to embark on a week's fishing trip in the Caribbean. In the party that boarded the Potomac at Miami were WPA Administrator Harry Hopkins, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and Assistant Attorney General Robert H. Jackson, to help the President evolve a plan for modernizing anti-trust legislation.

P: Keeping an appointment at the White House which he had originally scheduled for Hyde Park, the President saw James Henry Roberts Cromwell of Somerville, N. J., amateur boxer and economist, author of In Defense of Capitalism and husband of Tobacco Heiress Doris Duke ("Richest Girl in the World") Cromwell. Afterwards Mr. Cromwell, who startled a Senate committee this year by proposing that the Government lend farmers money and then pay them interest on it, told newshawks that he and the President had discussed "economic conditions." Asked whether New Jersey's Governor-elect A. Harry Moore planned to appoint him as his successor in the U. S. Senate, 40-year-old Mr. Cromwell, whose wife contributed $5,000 to the Moore campaign fund and $50,000 to re-elect Franklin Roosevelt last year, repeated his statement that he would accept the appointment if it were offered. Said he: "The trial balloon is still flying in the sky."

Two days after Thanksgiving, hospitable Anna Eleanor Roosevelt and pretty Mrs. Cromwell, who got control of $10,000,000 more of her $30,000,000 fortune on her 25th birthday last week, motored in a White House car from Washington to visit the Tygart Valley homestead project near Elkins, W. Va. In the evening Mrs. Roosevelt, wearing a plain tailored coat, and Mrs. Cromwell, wearing mink, turned up at a square dance given by local settlers and farmers. While the President's wife danced and called the reels, Mrs. Cromwell sat quietly sipping apple cider, shyly refused when her hostess and West Virginia's gallant Representative Jennings Randolph urged her to join the dance. Next morning with Representative Randolph in tow, the party drove 70 miles north to spend the week-end at Mrs. Roosevelt's pet resettlement project at Arthurdale where they dined with Mrs. Roosevelt's old friend President Manager Glenn R. Work. Straying over into the desolate, dusty Scott's Run mining area to inspect the shacks where Arthurdale's miners used to live, Mmes Roosevelt and Cromwell came across one stranded family of eight which was two months behind in its $5-a-month rent.

This week before rich Mrs. Cromwell set out for New York and busy Mrs. Roosevelt for Washington they made a final stop at a 250-acre rehabilitation project for unemployed miners being opened by the American Friends' Service Committee at Uniontown, Pa. There Mrs. Roosevelt spoke a good White House word for the activity of "private interests" in housing, then added a word of her own: "Conditions ... are some better than in 1931, particularly as more people have become conscious of them. This has partly been brought about," ventured Mrs. Roosevelt, ':by Community Forums, the idea of which I think is good in spite of the fact that I have been listed as a 'Red'* on account of it. I don't think I am a Red, however."

* In Mrs. Elizabeth Billing's The Red Network.

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