Homecoming

Over the White House the air was black with chickens coming home to roost. When Franklin Roosevelt returned from his 16-day, 7,600-mile junket to Mexico, he came back to the biggest all-around mess of his ten years in office. The mess was, in the last analysis, of his own making.

Home Front. Worst mess was the work stoppage in the coal mines, because it was accompanied everywhere by lessened confidence in the White House. Not only the entire nation, but the world, watched in amazement as a mere labor leader, head of half-million men, defied, thwarted and outmaneuvered the head of 135,000,000 people. This was a sandbag blow at Presidential prestige. It was also the direct result of years of open-armed favoritism to labor, of years in which every attempt to make unions responsible had been defeated. Every part of the mess was linked. The miners had some justice on their side; if prices had not been allowed to zoom up by Administration dillydallying on price control, the miners would have had no case at all.

Even at present high prices, and despite rationing, food shortages mounted. The Department of Agriculture started taking Canadian grain to meet a new, dangerous shortage--feed for cattle. Meanwhile Congress mouthed over a Rube Goldbergian tax bill engendered mainly by the Administration's failure to advance a courageous tax program in the first place.

The President moved swiftly along his jerry-built Maginot Line against inflation, shoring up the timbers, nailing up the windows and doors against the attack. But it was a terrible task; too many things had been let slide or mismanaged. Political bloc was arraigned against political bloc, farm bloc against labor, pressure group against pressure group. Franklin Roosevelt was partly at fault; he had not discouraged their warfare.

The War Front. The week had produced neither decisive victories nor crushing defeats to make the people forget the tangles and the brawling at home. And even as Franklin Roosevelt tooled around admiring his war plants and war camps, his top war administrators in Washington were locked in another bitter, frustrating fight, caused by divided authority (see p. 22).

On two strategic fronts, the President's foreign policy, ace-in-the-hole of the Fourth Term movement, had bogged down. The tentative, unofficial overtures to Finland to break with the Axis were stalled. The appeasement of Martinique's Admiral Georges Robert had brought no results.

Postwar planning bogged down, too. Delegates arriving for the International Food Conference at Hot Springs, Va. found the original foggy agenda unchanged. The mere fact that food experts of the United Nations will soon get together now seemed of little consequence. And in Bermuda the International Refugee Conference continued its dutiful discussions in a vacuum.

Disenchanted People. At his press conference Franklin Roosevelt exuded optimism: things were great, the war plants were wonderful, the Army was "grown-up." The President stressed his new line: the rest of the country is doing fine, only Washington is off the beam, only Washington lacks perspective and intelligence and a sense of proportion about the war.

But the crises in Washington now were too repetitive, too wholesale for the people to dissociate them from their President. The chickens coming home to roost led straight to the White House door.

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