"Problem No. 1"

With one of those gestures which he loves and executes so well, Franklin Roosevelt last week assembled 23 Southerners in Washington and sent them a message which made Page 1 news throughout the South.

"It is my conviction," he said, "that the South presents right now the nation's No. 1 economic problem--the nation's problem, not merely the South's."

He said he had had various of his administrative agencies draw up a statement of the South's economic handicap and shortcomings. He wanted the 23 Southern gentlemen to examine and discuss this, restate it if they liked until it represented "the South's own best thought." Then he would present it to the Congress. To guide the Southern gentlemen's deliberations he detailed Lowell Mellett, director of his National Emergency Council.

The personnel of the deliberating group included assorted college presidents, a Columbia, S. C. lawyer, two minor judges, a C. I. O. organizer, an A. F. of L. delegate, Publisher Barry Bingham of the Louisville Courier-Journal, a representative of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union. Southern business was represented by a lumber man from Picayune, Miss., a Birmingham banker, an aviation-company official from Dallas, a Virginia utility man, a Ken tucky varnish maker, and President J. Skottowe Wannamaker of the American Cotton Association.

Prepared for these gentlemen to frown over and approve was an indictment of the South's condition as to markets, freight rates, capital, absentee ownership, farm earnings, health, education, soil abuse, fertilizer, power, etc., etc. The gentlemen solemnly "agreed" to it all, adding Wages & Hours as a point of their own to be considered. Then they left Washington apparently leaving it up to Director Mellett to frame their "report to the President."

Lowell Mellett, 54, is a coiner nowadays in the Administration's inner circle. Brother of the late crusading Editor Don Mellett of the Canton, Ohio News, he, too, is a newspaperman of wide experience. This year Franklin Roosevelt signed him on. Fellow newspapermen see him as a candidate being groomed to succeed wily old Charles Michelson, 69. Democratic national pressagent (see p. 27).

If he does a good job on the report of the 23 gentlemen from the South, Mr. Mellett will present President Roosevelt with a useful document: a "report" whose homely truths would go down more easily in the South than such blunt criticism of Southern wages and economic standards as Franklin Roosevelt voiced last March at Gainesville; a basis for Administration action which would then look more like an obedient answer to the South's requests than Presidential interference in the South's favorite ways of life.

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