THE PRESIDENCY: The Roosevelt Week: Dec. 11, 1933

If Gus Menafee ever has a son he will probably name him Franklin Roosevelt Menafee. During the War, Gus was a seaman on the destroyer Fanning. When a petty officer was said to have attacked him with a monkey-wrench in the Fanning's engine room, Gus whipped a service automatic out of his dungarees and shot him dead. A Navy court martial sentenced Seaman Menafee to be executed by a firing squad, but Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt, to whom capital punishment was abhorrent, acting in the absence of Secretary Daniels, commuted Menafee's sentence to life imprisonment. Last year Prisoner Menafee was released from Atlanta penitentiary on a writ of habeas corpus, only to be returned when a Federal court changed its mind. Again, last week the only person who could save Gus Menafee was Franklin Roosevelt with an executive pardon. He did.

¶ Through acting Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, last week President Roosevelt sent a message to Chairman Fletcher of the Senate Banking & Currency Committee. Aware that the debts of corporations to the extent of $1,500,000,000 must be refinanced within the next 18 months, and also aware that in the past six months Capital has virtually been on strike, the President wanted the situation eased by having Congress liberalize the rigid Securities Act.

¶ Last week President Roosevelt held fast to his managed currency program. The Treasury upped the price of gold to $34.01. To dampen persistent tales of a rift between the Treasury and the hard-money Federal Reserve Board, Governor Eugene Black, by all odds the funniest and funniest-looking man in the Administration, showed up at Warm Springs. While his chief was paddling about the tepid swimming pool, Governor Black stood nearby, sorrowfully rattled a copy of the Atlanta Constitution which headlined the recurrent story that he was about to resign. "It isn't so much that it's all wrong," he lamented. "But here [it] occurs in the paper on which I was a director for 35 years. That's what you get for being a newspaperman yourself once."

¶ As he had for the past nine years, President Roosevelt ate Thanksgiving dinner with the Warm Springs patients. He was in fine fettle, cracking little jokes at his critics and the Press. Introducing Julian Boehme of Atlanta, an amateur magician, the President announced: "I am going to ask him to entertain us with a number of things we have never been able to solve. Perhaps he will put on something about the gold standard."

To assist him, Magician Boehme chose hulking Augustus Adolph ("Gus") Gennerich. onetime New York City detective who is now the President's bodyguard. "There are certain newspapers you need not read tomorrow," joked the President, "for I can tell you what they are going to say. They are going to say that Dr. Boehme is going to be appointed Secretary of the Treasury and Gus Gennerich head of the Federal Reserve Board."