Budget-Beginning

Elections must be over before any dependable forecast of the next Roosevelt Budget is available, but last week--with Congress' return ten weeks off--the President began budget making. Since the next deficit looms at least $4,000,000,000 (his second largest), his first conferences with Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, Assistant Secretary John Hanes, Budget Director Bell could hardly have been gay.

Other events soon indicated the trend of Franklin Roosevelt's budget ideas. WPA was served notice that it must make $764,000,000 remaining from its 1938 appropriation last until next March as Congress stipulated. This pointed toward Relief economy. Fresh expenditures were pointed to by the remarks made on the White House steps by a departing Presidential caller. Bernard Mannes Baruch, oldtime Roosevelt adviser, long estranged but, since the carving of Czechoslovakia, again a visitor, declared as he emerged from the Presidential presence that the U. S. is dreadfully short of arms, ammunition and equipment for a needed standing army of 400,000 men; that bottlenecks in industry must be eliminated to ensure war supplies. "And I know what I'm talking about," added Mr. Baruch, who headed the last War Industries Board. He proposed a special one-shot tax, payable now, to finance Preparedness.

President Roosevelt followed up this warning by saying that $150,000,000 would have to be added to next year's Navy budget if work was to go ahead on six new battleships. Besides expanding the fleet and the ground forces, air forces must be geared up by mass production of planes, as they are doing abroad (see p. 18). And private utilities must be stimulated to spend $1,000,000,000 if the U. S. is to have adequate wartime power resources. Observers took all this as a tip: watch for billion-dollar Army & Navy items in the next budget.

> When the President quipped that Electric Bond & Share's long-awaited acquiescence to SEC's holding company regulations showed that the utilities' "death sentence" was really a "health sentence" (see p. 56) a newshawk asked: "You wouldn't call it a life sentence?"

> Inaugurating the 1938 Mobilization for Human Needs (national community chest drives), Franklin Roosevelt said: "You may well ask if the need for community action is as great as before, now that your Government has provided a national program of social security. I would answer that the need is just as great as before."

> For the second time since entering the White House, Franklin Roosevelt went to the theatre. Last time in 1935 he saw Walter Huston play Dodsworth. This time he saw Walter Huston play peg-legged Pieter Stuyvesant in Knickerbocker Holiday, written by Maxwell Anderson & Kurt Weill. In the play Washington Irving decides in 1809 to make some money by writing a New York history. He (Actor Ray Middleton) .becomes the play's narrator, constantly appearing on-stage to warn characters to mend their behavior lest posterity think ill of them.* The President tossed his head and roared when among seven ridiculously fat New Amsterdam councilmen one answered meekly to the name of Roosevelt. Pieter Stuyvesant, one of Franklin Roosevelt's first predecessors as Governor of New York, wras represented as a tyrant who eventually capitulates to Democracy. Line with most visible effect on Franklin Roosevelt's funnybone: "Democracy is when you're governed "by amateurs."

> After much political chivvying, and assertions that because Senator Tydings was not purged, President Roosevelt would go back on his promise to give Maryland new bridges (TIME, Sept. 12), last week he approved the second PWA bridge at Morgantown.* He also approved the long-pending construction of a subway system for Chicago (see p. 33). Other new PWA projects of the week: $585,000 for public schools at Hyde Park, N. Y.; a radio fire alarm atop the Washington Monument.

> Anna Eleanor Roosevelt passed her 54th birthday in usual good health, spirits, humor. Her husband gave her more of his time than a President can usually give his wife. Washington newspaperwomen gave her a party (21 candles). The snob-conscious press gave her, besides birthday notices, advice on whether she should curtsy to Queen Elizabeth if Britain's crowned heads visit the U. S. next year. Verdict: no. Prettiest birthday bouquet was brought her by General Hugh Johnson. Excerpts: "I hear a lot of knocks about her column as being composed of trifling piffle. I have just read her book, My Days....It is a sort of daily diary of a woman who is the wife of one of the world's greatest leaders in a time of one of the world's greatest agonies. Priceless today would be Josephine's irrelevant thoughts during Napoleon's first Italian campaign or at the time of the First Consulate. So, I believe, will Eleanor's book be priceless....

"I happen to know that the decision on which the whole career of Franklin Roosevelt turned--his consent to leave his apparently successful cure at Warm Springs to run for Governor of New York in 1928--was Eleanor's. Johnnie Raskob put it up to her before he put the heat on her husband....

"I don't know whether a woman is ever going to be President, but, if that happens, I have my candidate."

* A palpable reference, enjoyed by audience and President, to Senator O'Mahoney's crack the last time he was received at the White House: "Mr. President, think what posterity will say about your Court Bill."

* First one approved at Havre de Grace, September 22.

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