The Roosevelt Week

According to the New York Times, Franklin Delano Roosevelt last week decided to renew his efforts to get Congress to pass his Reorganization Bill this session--on the theory that the results of the Florida primaries last fortnight would make it sure to pass. True or false, the report and the fact that it was generally credited were in themselves indications that the President was functioning in top form. Improved by: 1) his eight-day fishing trip, and 2) his confidence that Congress was again in a tractable frame of mind, he breezed through a week including everything from Hell to helium with complete finesse, good humor and enthusiasm.

P: To a press conference question about his current $5,000,000,000 pump-priming campaign, the President replied with a definition of the aims of his antimonopoly message. To another, as to what he thought of the brawling primary campaign that was drawing to a close in Pennsylvania, he replied by advising his caller to read Dante's Inferno.

P: Severe internal stress & strain of Franklin Roosevelt's second Administration have produced remarkaby few upheavals in personnel. Last week, several threatened, one occurred.

Secretary of State Cordell Hull was reported by the Baltimore Evening Sun last week considering resigning because of the President's approval of the Anglo-Italian Pact. Mr. Hull failed to resign, hotly denied he planned to. More plausible was a report that Secretary of Commerce Daniel Roper had written the President to say he would resign if his Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce was transferred to the State Department as State's Under Secretary Sumner Welles had suggested. Said Secretary Steve Early for the White House: "You can make a categorical denial that Secretary Roper is expected to resign."

Reported on the point of resigning for months has been Under Secretary of the Interior Charles West, who has really functioned as a Congressional contact man for the White House and whose presence Secretary of the Interior Ickes has openly deplored. Last week Mr. West, whose office staff had departed ahead of him, actually did resign. Announced promptly was Mr. West's successor as Under Secretary of the Interior: his special assistant. Harry Slattery, who was also assistant to Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane, later helped do the groundwork exposing the Teapot Dome scandal. Not announced at all was a new job for Mr. West.

P: As director of the Navy's War Plans Divisions. Captain Royal Ingersoll last winter went to England to exchange data about Naval building with the British Admiralty. At House hearings on the Big Navy Bill, this prompted talk of a secret alliance between England and the U. S. Last week. Franklin Roosevelt upped 54-year-old Captain Ingersoll to a rear admiralty. His job when confirmed by the Senate': command of the Sixth Cruiser Division, at San Pedro.

P: Among the few U. S. columnists who admire Franklin Roosevelt, none is more loyal than William Randolph Hearst's Walter Winchell, the nation's No. 1 expert on Broadway. In Washington to pick the Government's prettiest female employe, Columnist Winchell dropped in for a White House press conference, stayed 43 minutes, swapped stories with the President. Mr. Roosevelt's best story concerned his most embarrassing moment: when, as Wartime Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he set a trap for a lady friend whom he suspected of espionage. The trap was never sprung.

P: Campaigning for re-election as Governor of Oregon, Democrat Charles Henry ("Old Iron Pants") Martin last week announced that when the President visited Bonneville Dam last fall, he had exclaimed: ''You and I make a good pair.'' Said Secretary Early: "When this was called to the President's attention he expressed surprise at its publication and said that to the best of his knowledge he never made such a statement to Governor Martin."

P: Launching his campaign for reelection, California's 74-year-old Senator William Gibbs McAdoo produced a two-months-old letter beginning "Dear Mac." signed by Franklin Roosevelt. Its purport: "I earnestly hope that you will run again."

P: Announced by Secretary Steve Early was the President's decision that he was powerless to overrule Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes' refusal to allow the sale of 17,000,000 cubic feet of helium to Germany.

P: In Lexington. Ky.. President Gilmour Nunn of American Broadcasting Co. revealed that, at a Kentucky Derby party, Elliott Roosevelt had challenged a stranger to a fist fight for remarks that "besmirched the President's name."

P: In Washington. Harry Oldperson. 55, and Joe Butterfly. 71, both Blackfoot Indians, gave 30-year-old James Roosevelt a headdress, a Blackfoot membership and a new name: "Eagle Child."

P: Wrote Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt in My Day: "I am not trying to plan how I may accomplish the most this summer but how I may arrange to spend two-and-a-half months as lazily as possible.''

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