THE PRESIDENCY: Home Again

Last week President Roosevelt left Washington for Hyde Park in time for the first snow of the season. Through sleet and rain he drove to church, stayed to preside as senior warden at a vestryman's meeting. Home to Uvalde on the windswept Texas plains went Vice President John Nance Garner, to a State that has been fussing about a proposed special session of its Legislature, and an appalling murder down at Comanche.* Back to his old Kentucky home (Paducah) went Senate Leader Alben Barkley.

To Salem, Ore., went Senate GOP Chief Charles Linza McNary; House GOP Chief Joseph William Martin studied timetables to Hawaii; House Democrat Chief Sam Rayburn headed home to his beloved shorthorn cattle in Bonham, Texas. By mutual agreement the leaders decided that events did not justify their remaining in Washington to counsel with Franklin Roosevelt as had been promised when the special session assembled.

Home was the word last week, home to Tallahassee, Tonopah, Cheyenne, home to Havana, Ill., Searcy, Ark., Atherton, Calif., Tacoma, Wash., Jasper, Ala., Yankton, S. Dak., Clovis, N. Mex.—home to the 531 communities, hamlets, cities and wide places in the roads where dwell the 531 Congressmen and Senators of the U. S. For debate on the arms embargo was over. And as President, Vice President, Senators, Representatives and their wives, secretaries and advisers hurried home last week, it was plain that few big legislative discussions in U. S. history had ever begun so tensely, ended so quietly.

Forty-four days before he signed the joint resolution lifting the arms embargo, President Roosevelt had stood before Congress and gravely begun: "I have asked the Congress to reassemble . . . in order that it may consider and act on the amendment of certain legislation which, in my best judgment, so alters the historic foreign policy of the United States that it impairs the peaceful relations of the United States with foreign nations." Last week the legislation was amended. And although Washington correspondents speculated on the political consequences, on the effects on business, shipping and foreign policy, the plainest reaction was calm.

Calm to the point of boredom was the ceremony of the signing. It was 12:04 p.m. when President Roosevelt, grasping an inexpensive black & tan fountain pen, affixed his signature to the joint resolution. Next minute, using another pen just like it, he signed proclamations defining combat areas (see p. 16), and banning belligerent submarines from U. S. ports. To Senator Key Pittman went one pen. To Representative Sol Bloom went another. A third—an expensive one that memento-loving Sol Bloom had bought just for the ceremony—the President decided to keep for himself. Off-stage a newsman won a dollar. He had bet that Representative Bloom would get the pen that signed the paper that lifted the embargo on the sale of arms and implements of war to warring nations.