The Coolidge Week

P: Reminded by the Red Cross that 71,052 refugees from last year's flood were still being fed and sheltered by charity in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee, President Coolidge evinced an ever-increasing. desire to have Congress get a flood measure passed this session. He looked upon the measure drafted and reported by Chairman Jones of the Senate Commerce Committee and found some good in it, since it recognized the principle of local contribution and since it placed Chief of Engineers Jadwin, and a civilian engineer to be appointed by the President, on a board of three (with the president of the Mississippi River Commission) to oversee the work. However, the Jones bill called for $325,000,000, or some 31 millions more than the discarded Administration bill. It called for all this outlay from the U.S. Treasury, local communities contributing only one third of the costs of raising old levees to their proper level, and the land for new levees. Congressmen from States watered by the Mississippi's tributaries, which the Jones bill did not benefit, were bridling and bickering. To spur their debates to a modest conclusion, President Coolidge hinted that he might have the War Department proceed at once with anti-flood construction, using the authority of the Rivers & Harbors Act and money from the current Army appropriations.

P: From National Democratic Headquarters, publicity material has been issuing for weeks, discounting "Coolidge prosperity," citing figures on unemployment, on declining orders, on bankruptcies. Last week President Coolidge announced that he had been informed business is as good now as this time last year--better steel, better trade movements, slacker department store business but, generally speaking, no lack of prosperity.

P: The week was featured by presidential appointments, published and pending. President Coolidge named Governor John E. Martineau of Arkansas to be Federal District Judge for the eastern half of his State.

To succeed Jesse S. Cottrell of Tennessee as U. S. Minister to Bolivia, the President named David E. Kaufman, native of Carlyle, Pa., graduate of Dickinson College law school, Philadelphia practitioner.

In choosing a new Minister to Egypt, to succeed Senator Willis' friend, J. Morton Howell, the President listened to Senator Swanson (Virginia) and prepared to elevate Franklin Mott Gunther, a "career man" from New York and Virginia and whose 20-year service has embraced France, Nicaragua, Portugal, Brazil, Norway, Britain, Holland, Italy and the Mexican division of the State Department.

Friends of "career men" were disappointed when they heard that the desirable portfolio to Peru was to be entrusted to large, loquacious Alexander Pollock Moore (see THE CABINET).

P: Mrs. Coolidge continued well last week and accompanied the President to a dinner given by the Hoovers. But the condition of her 78-year-old mother, Mrs. Lemira Goodhue, who had been lying ill in Northampton, Mass., for three months, became more serious. Accompanied by White House Physician Joel T. Boone and by Mrs. Reuben B. Hills of Northampton, her friend since girlhood, Mrs. Coolidge went home. Mrs. Goodhue rallied, then sank again. John Coolidge went down from Amherst to join his mother, accompanied by Miss Florence Trumbull. They waited. . . .