THE PRESIDENCY: Alarms and Excursions

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¶ Keeping an appointment at the White House which he had originally scheduled for Hyde Park, the President saw James Henry Roberts Cromwell of Somerville, N. J., amateur boxer and economist, author of In Defense of Capitalism and husband of Tobacco Heiress Doris Duke ("Richest Girl in the World") Cromwell. Afterwards Mr. Cromwell, who startled a Senate committee this year by proposing that the Government lend farmers money and then pay them interest on it, told newshawks that he and the President had discussed "economic conditions." Asked whether New Jersey's Governor-elect A. Harry Moore planned to appoint him as his successor in the U. S. Senate, 40-year-old Mr. Cromwell, whose wife contributed $5,000 to the Moore campaign fund and $50,000 to re-elect Franklin Roosevelt last year, repeated his statement that he would accept the appointment if it were offered. Said he: "The trial balloon is still flying in the sky."

Two days after Thanksgiving, hospitable Anna Eleanor Roosevelt and pretty Mrs. Cromwell, who got control of $10,000,000 more of her $30,000,000 fortune on her 25th birthday last week, motored in a White House car from Washington to visit the Tygart Valley homestead project near Elkins, W. Va. In the evening Mrs. Roosevelt, wearing a plain tailored coat, and Mrs. Cromwell, wearing mink, turned up at a square dance given by local settlers and farmers. While the President's wife danced and called the reels, Mrs. Cromwell sat quietly sipping apple cider, shyly refused when her hostess and West Virginia's gallant Representative Jennings Randolph urged her to join the dance. Next morning with Representative Randolph in tow, the party drove 70 miles north to spend the week-end at Mrs. Roosevelt's pet resettlement project at Arthurdale where they dined with Mrs. Roosevelt's old friend President Manager Glenn R. Work. Straying over into the desolate, dusty Scott's Run mining area to inspect the shacks where Arthurdale's miners used to live, Mmes Roosevelt and Cromwell came across one stranded family of eight which was two months behind in its $5-a-month rent.

This week before rich Mrs. Cromwell set out for New York and busy Mrs. Roosevelt for Washington they made a final stop at a 250-acre rehabilitation project for unemployed miners being opened by the American Friends' Service Committee at Uniontown, Pa. There Mrs. Roosevelt spoke a good White House word for the activity of "private interests" in housing, then added a word of her own: "Conditions ... are some better than in 1931, particularly as more people have become conscious of them. This has partly been brought about," ventured Mrs. Roosevelt, ':by Community Forums, the idea of which I think is good in spite of the fact that I have been listed as a 'Red'* on account of it. I don't think I am a Red, however."