THE PRESIDENCY: Alarms and Excursions

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NATIONAL AFFAIRS

Alarms and Excursions

Again last week, Franklin Roosevelt applied himself with experienced calm to battling his second depression. Most spectacular moves in the campaign were two talks with the heads of two huge Eastern utilities companies (see p. 14).. Then came the President's message to Congress calling for legislation to encourage private capital to start a private housing boom (see p. 18). On the pressing subject of taxes, the President announced that he favored the revision being discussed in .the House as soon as "Congress is ready." A balanced budget in 1939 would be a business stimulant. The President reiterated to Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley his insistence that the new Farm Bill include provisions for whatever expenses above the current $500,000,000 appropriated for annual farm programs which it might entail. To a press conference, he announced his intention of asking Congress to reduce next year's Federal subsidies for State highways by about $110,000,000. Paradoxically, while business would like the prospect of a balanced budget, it would also like the immediate stimulus of a flow of Government spending. Equal to this apparent dilemma, Franklin Roosevelt told the same press conference that he would urge Government departments to spend current appropriations totaling $245,000,000 for upkeep and supplies at once instead of spreading them over the next seven months.

In dealing with the current Recession, a less confident executive than. Franklin Roosevelt might have made the tactical blunder of adopting the attitude of most business that it was: 1) unforeseen and 2) thoroughly alarming. Equipped with a temperament to which crises are almost a necessity, Franklin Roosevelt did nothing of the sort. In high good-humor, he held the first press conference of the week in the Oval Study next his bedroom where he told an audience of ten correspondents which tooth had given him trouble the week before: "No. 3 hold, starboard side." Informed that in Uvalde, Tex. Vice President Garner had developed a kind of "magic seed" which might make grass grow under the trees on the White House lawn, the President asked him to send for some. At week's end, he made his attitude even clearer. Leaving Congress to struggle along in Washington, he boarded a train for Florida, there to embark on a week's fishing trip in the Caribbean. In the party that boarded the Potomac at Miami were WPA Administrator Harry Hopkins, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and Assistant Attorney General Robert H. Jackson, to help the President evolve a plan for modernizing anti-trust legislation.