Mankind Invited

A picture of Franklin Roosevelt sitting at a table aboard ship in the Azores or some equally remote anchorage, settling the world's hash personally with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, was drawn in calm, confident words last week on the front page of the New York Times by its Washington correspondent, Arthur Krock. Some time last summer, said Mr. Krock, Mr. Roosevelt asked the Dictators to slip away and meet him at sea, but they declined.

Franklin Roosevelt read this latest Krock "scoop" the same morning that Adolf Hitler replied to his peace message, and he swiftly denied it.* Said he affably: "It is not true, but otherwise it is interesting and well written."

Replied Arthur Krock: "It was related separately and uniformly at different times to this correspondent by men of high repute and clear minds who have the White House entree."

Fellow newsmen felt confident that the Krock story was accurate in direction if not detail. Certainly it did not exaggerate the might & main which Franklin Roosevelt has been exerting to save the peace of the world. Last week Raymond Leslie Buell, research director of the Foreign Policy Association, went so far as to give Mr. Roosevelt full credit for averting war at least twice: last month and just before Munich (September).

Since then, Franklin Roosevelt has been engaged in an oratorical struggle with Adolf Hitler. In his last two sallies, he tried Woodrow Wilson's tactics of talking past Germany's leader to its people. Orator Hitler in his reply last week (see p. 18) did the same, seeking to widen the split in U. S. public opinion behind the U. S. President, to bolster isolationist sentiment in the U. S. by twitting Mr. Roosevelt unmercifully for Woodrow Wilson's failure at world intervention.

Herr Hitler who has his press and polls under Nazi lock & key, made the error, so far as his U. S. audience was concerned, of caricaturing the free press of the U. S. and calling it a liar. The U. S. press and people, if they credited Herr Hitler with some hits, seemed still to believe that Mr. Roosevelt's search for world peace with relative justice was a search more honest than Hitler's reply; and that, although the U. S. may not have a perfect moral record in history, the only hope for men of good will now is in a moral future.

>Mr. Roosevelt made a point of sleeping through Herr Hitler's speech at 6 a. m. E. S. T. So far as he was concerned, Hitler was "stopped" for the time being and the President of the U. S. was busy at home. He had a World's Fair to open, visiting royalty to entertain.

No role suits the Squire of Hyde Park better than that of well-born man-of-the-world hobnobbing with distinguished visitors. He drove down to the Poughkeepsie lumber yard where the Potomac docks when it is there, got out of his car to handshake handsome Crown Prince Olav & Crown Princess Martha of Norway. Mr. Roosevelt, though fluent in French, speaks no Scandinavian tongues, but he did not need to. The royal Norwegians speak Mayfair English.

A hot-dog picnic at their outdoor fireplace was the Roosevelts' chief treat for the Norwegians. Two days later they gave the same kind of party for Crown Prince Frederik & Crown Princess Ingrid of Denmark, who had come into the U. S., via the Panama Canal, at Los Angeles. Between times Franklin Roosevelt journeyed down to Flushing Meadows to invite "all mankind" to the New York World's Fair.

>Perhaps 300,000 of mankind (certainly not 1,000,000 as advertised) attended the Fair's opening. Several acres of them sat and stood in the echoing Court of Peace to hear Franklin Roosevelt, expecting him to say something more to Adolf Hitler. He used the occasion internationally only to say that the U. S. wagon, 150 years after George Washington's inauguration, is "hitched to a star ... of peace." >By appointing him U. S. Minister to Canada,* President Roosevelt last week rewarded dowdy Daniel Calhoun Roper, 72, of South Carolina for stepping out of his Cabinet last December to let Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins in. "Uncle Dan's" first big job: bowing to King George & Queen Elizabeth of England. His next: bringing into being a Great Lakes-St. Lawrence deep waterway, one of Franklin Roosevelt's dearest dreams. >President Roosevelt signed, and the U. S. Air Corps promptly put into effect, the bill carrying $46,400,000 for immediate expenditure on air defense planes (see p. 15). >To Congress the President last week sent: a message calling for $1,750,000,000 for Relief in fiscal 1940, all but $273,000,000 of it for WPA, none for PWA;* a Reorganization Plan No. I, regrouping 29 Administrative agencies (see p. 13); a message recommending Federal construction of 26,700 miles of trunk highways (five East-West, seven North-South).

*Last Krock scoop (also denied): Harry Hopkins' famed line about spending, taxing, electing (TIME, Nov. 21, et scg.). *A portfolio vacant since January 1938, when Norman Armour was made Ambassador to Chile. *Mr. Roosevelt forecast that 1,250,000 Relief clients would be absorbed by private industry by mid-summer of 1940.

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