THE PRESIDENCY: Unusual Spot

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"Lift the embargo on Loyalist Spain! Lift the embargo on Loyalist Spain!"

Times Square, Manhattan, rang with that chant one night last week, the night that bomb-pocked Barcelona was falling and U. S. warboats were speeding to evacuate U. S. citizens (see p. 14). Letters and telegrams poured in at the White House. Even North Dakota's Senator Gerald P. Nye, longtime champion of the Neutrality Act, came out for lifting the embargo on Loyalist Spain. Even the President's wife made a speech about Neutrality.

Amid such sentiments, subject to such pressure, Franklin Roosevelt who never loved the strict provisions of the Neutrality Act stood by it. He knew that at such a late hour lifting the embargo would involve the U. S. in diplomatic trouble and threaten U. S. peace far more effectively than it could help Loyalist Spain. This put the President in an unusual spot for him: on the unpopular side of a question. But he did not refer to these facts when he replied, through the press, to the clamoring friends of Loyalist Spain. He referred all pleaders to the State Department, whose legalists gave his answer: The President is powerless to lift the embargo on Spain. The general Neutrality Act of May 1937 added civil war to the conditions in a foreign country under which the President must establish an embargo, if a "state of war" exists which endangers U. S. peace. But even if this act could be got round, the President is still bound by a joint resolution passed four months earlier by which Congress itself specifically embargoed arms to Spain.

On Capitol Hill, two deans of the Senate, Lewis of Illinois and Borah of Idaho, arose to support this view. They were joined by rowdy Bob Reynolds of North Carolina, who exclaimed: "We should wash behind our ears before telling other nations of the world to take a bath."

> Having obtained confirmation of three controversial characters in highest appointive posts (Frankfurter, Murphy, Hopkins), Franklin Roosevelt last week sent to the Senate a still hotter appointment: Thomas R. Amlie, Wisconsin radical Progressive, to be a member of the Interstate Commerce Commission (see col. 2).

> Five nights before his 57th birthday, Franklin Roosevelt motored over to Fort Myer, Va. to a gala Army horseshow, proceeds of which (around $3,000) began this year's anti-infantile paralysis collection in his honor. With him he took Mrs. Roosevelt, horse-loving Harry Hopkins, and Madam Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, currently under fire in the House (see p. 8).

> On his birthday (Jan. 30) he cut a cake with 21 candles at the White House for a big party of family & friends including, as usual, members of the Cuff-Links Gang—eight men whose friendship dates back to Franklin Roosevelt's days as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and to whom he gave cufflinks in remembrance of their help in his unsuccessful campaign for Vice President in 1920.