"Continental Solidarity"

National defense, the subject foremost in President Roosevelt's mind since the elections, was pushed aside by him for a few minutes last week while he enunciated with icy deliberation the nation's considered opinion of Adolf Hitler & Co.'s super-pogrom (see p. 10). When he returned to national defense, it was with implied reference again to Adolf Hitler & Co. The possibility of the U. S. being air-raided, he said, had increased tremendously in five years. When asked if he had any particular air-raiders in mind, he told his questioner to reread the international news of those same years.

Out of his broader discussion of the reasons for national rearmament came a new high-policy phrase: "Continental solidarity." The President confirmed the intimation previously voiced by Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles (TIME, Nov. 14): that one object of U. S. rearmament is to implement the good-neighborly understanding achieved in 1936 at the Pan-American Conference in Buenos Aires and about to be refreshed at Lima, Peru.

Just two years ago, speaking at Buenos Aires, Franklin Roosevelt said that employment given by rearmament work (which Germany was then rushing, England beginning to rush) was "false employment, it builds no permanent structure and creates no consumers' goods for the maintenance of a lasting prosperity. We know that nations guilty of these follies inevitably face the day either when their weapons of destruction must be used against their neighbors or when an unsound economy, like a house of cards, will fall apart." To get as much virtue as he could out of his new necessity, Mr. Roosevelt last week explored ways of putting Relief money and workers into rearmament work.

P: The ceremonial signing, at long last, in the historic East Room of the White House, of trade treaties with Great Britain and Canada, came to pass last week (see p. 53). To the Nation's First Hostess was left the first official announcement of another major international event. At her press conference Mrs. Roosevelt made known that George VI & Queen Elizabeth, after making a royal tour through Canada, will spend three days in June at the White House, one in New York City at the World's Fair. King George will have the northeast pink bedroom suite which Anna Roosevelt Dall Boettiger used to occupy. Queen Elizabeth will have the larger blue suite on the southeast corner which, before the executive wing was built, used to be the U. S. President's study. Each suite has one large and one small bedroom, plus a bathroom. Forty ladies & gentlemen accompanying Their Majesties (except a few personal attendants) will be bedded elsewhere about town.

P: To the dinner given him annually by the National Press Club went Franklin Roosevelt last week. Last year at this dinner the President was poisoned by bad capon, but this year the food was as excellent as the wine (Lanson 1928). In deference to his philately, a lantern-slide performance was staged to show a new series of stamps commemorating high moments

("no matter how high") in the Roosevelt regime: the Budget's ascent into the fiscal stratosphere; the Purge (Senators George, Tydings & Smith pushing over a back-house); Reorganization--of the Democratic Party (a donkey with Bull Moose horns, an elephant's trunk, a Tammany Tiger leg and WPA udders); the partial 1938 eclipse of the Roosevelt sun by the Conservative moon. On the banquet-hall walls hung 37 new cartoons of Mr. Roosevelt, specially drawn for his personal scrapbook by as many newspaper cartoonists.

All showed him smiling (see cuts).

The guest of honor acknowledged that Washington reporters have been fair and sympathetic to his Administration, after the club's president, Harold Brayman of the Philadelphia Evening Ledger, introduced him as follows:

"Win, lose or draw, in triumph or reversals, regardless of our personal opinions of your policies, we feel you have been a newspaperman's President. . . . You have made historic news, and you have served it hot and steaming."

P: To news of the resignation of Attorney General Cummings (see p. 11), the President added the announcement that Son James Roosevelt, recuperating from a stomach ulcer operation, would resign temporarily as a White House secretary, return if able in the spring. From California to clean out his desk (used in his absence by Tommy-the-Cork Corcoran) flew Son James, preceded by reports that he would take a job in Hollywood.

He denied receiving or accepting any movie offer, but said: "If it was good I would."

P: Last fortnight and again last week President Roosevelt talked with Associate Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis, 82, dean of the U. S. Supreme Court, about the plight of Germany's Jews. Report was that Justice Brandeis was under heavy pressure to leave the bench, put his full energy and prestige behind the Zionist movement. Into his Thanksgiving Day proclamation the President inserted a call for "prayers for unfortunate people in other lands . . . in dire distress."

P: Three dozen Washington ladies of the suffragette type marched up to the White House one day, demanded to see President Roosevelt. They were led by effervescent Eleanor ("Cissie") Medill Patterson Gizycki Schlesinger, publisher of the Washington Times and Washington Herald, who had excited them through her newspapers and by radio to "save the cherry trees." Mrs. Patterson disappeared into the executive wing, Secretary Marvin Mclntyre came out. The President, he said, was much too busy to see the ladies.

The ladies started chanting Joyce Kilmer's Trees.

At issue were Japanese cherry trees-- whose blooming around Washington's Tidal Basin attracts swarms of tourists to Washington every spring--some of which must be removed to make way for the new Jefferson Memorial. Workmen were already on the site. Next day Cissie Patterson's embattled followers appeared at the site with chains, to chain themselves to the trees. Embarrassed workmen hung back until word came from the President to go ahead and, if necessary, transplant trees, ladies, chains & all.

Cissie Patterson's chain gang departed, but she continued her fight with the President over the number of trees involved. At his press conference he said she was flimflamming the public to get circulation. Her last word was a cartoon showing a disreputable figure labeled "Flimflam Politics" saying, "All right, so we LIED to you--so what? And we're cutting down your damn CHERRY TREES."

P: To Warm Springs, Ga. for ten days or more went Franklin Roosevelt, detoured to Chattanooga to inspect TVA's Chickamauga Dam. Twenty-one drunks were let out of jail to see him.

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