"Same With Me!"

So pained and vexed with Franklin Delano Roosevelt grew James Ramsay MacDonald that for a time last week the British Premier spoke of the U. S. President as "that person."

Spleen boiled up bitterest around a green-topped table in one of the small private committee rooms of the World Monetary and Economic Conference. As Conference President, snowy-crested Scot MacDonald had taken the table's head. Around him were grouped the chairmen, rapporteurs and vice chairmen of the two chief Conference groups, the Monetary Committee and the Economic Committee. Last to arrive was U. S. Delegate James M. Cox who battled so fiercely when the Conference first met to be elected Monetary Chairman. As he strolled in several minutes late Mr. Cox heard high words, realized that the other Conference officials were flaying President Roosevelt.

"Gentlemen!" cried Ohio's Cox, "I agree with you that in this grave hour absolute candor is essential. I realize that my presence may embarrass you in your exchange of views. If so, I am quite willing to withdraw."

They made him stay and listen to their views on the President's blunt refusal to stabilize the dollar in terms of gold.

"I went to Washington!" cried Italian Finance Minister Guido Jung. "I talked to President Roosevelt a few weeks ago. He said the stabilization of currencies was one of the first essentials of this Conference. Now he seems to brush all that aside. I cannot understand it!"

"When we sent M. Herriot to see Mr. Roosevelt," tersely remarked French Finance Minister Georges Bonnet, "it was the same with him."

"It was the same with me!" cried Prime Minister MacDonald, after which the session waxed really warm. Mr. Cox, upset by all he heard that day, was sent to bed by his doctor at 7 p. m. with one degree of fever.

Meanwhile, his sea vacation over, President Roosevelt returned to the White House to find his desk littered with urgent cables from Chief U. S. Delegate Cordell Hull in London. In them Mr. Hull--described by London newshawks as a "stricken man"--revealed that the Conference steering committee was ready to vote adjournment. Blame seemed about to fall squarely on the President. By utmost efforts Mr. Hull had barely managed to persuade the Conference steering committee to hold off until next day. What was the U. S. Delegation to do? The President pondered an answer.

In London meanwhile his great good wisher News Pundit Walter Lippmann was publicly giving him this free advice: "The Conference Should Adjourn. . . . The essential facts are quite clear. The United States will not stabilize its currency until a sufficient rise in prices has been achieved. The gold countries will not consider a, devaluation of their currencies or an inflationary policy. The British Government are unable to take a decisive position. . . . To safeguard his [domestic] program the President has wisely rejected all proposals which would interfere with it. He has not been afraid to deadlock the Conference. Why should he be afraid to propose that it adjourn?"

Cheerily independent, President Roosevelt queried Secretary Hull as to whether a ten-day recess of the Conference might do some good. By this time Conference stenographers and pages had been warned by the Secretariat that their jobs might not outlast the week. Mr. Hull made clear that a brief adjournment would not do. The Conference must either close up tight or go definitely on. The President, still without consulting his Brain Trust, began to draft in the White House a second message to the Conference. Amid his labors he called up Secretary Hull for an extra secret talk. In London, when U . S. Banker-expert James P. Warburg entered the room in which Mr. Hull was telephoning, a meaning jerk of the Secretary of State's head caused him hastily to withdraw. Tension meanwhile was slackening. "I will lunch with the U. S. Delegation tomorrow," said French Finance Minister Bonnet. "We must not destroy all signs of confidence."

Commodity Dollar. That night Secretary Hull was able to read to the Conference a second Roosevelt pronouncement so courteous in tone that the Continentals, whose feathers had been badly ruffled by what they considered the President's rude language and dictatorial air in his first message, were perceptibly smoothed down. Not retreating one inch. Mr. Roosevelt again refused gold stabilization between currencies but in effect persuasively invited the world to join the U. S. on a standard of managed currency and commodity money. "Revaluation of the dollar in terms of American commodities," he wrote, "is an end from which the Government and people of the United States cannot be diverted. . . . The exchange value of the dollar will ultimately depend upon the success of other nations in raising the prices of their own commodities in terms of their national money. . . .

"The first task is to restore prices to a level at which industry and above all, agriculture, can function profitably and efficiently.

"The second task is to preserve the stability of this adjustment, once achieved.

"The part which gold and silver should play after adjustment has been secured would seem a further subject for consideration by the Conference.

"We conceive, therefore, that the great problems which justify the assembling of nations are as present today and as deserving of exploration as was the case a few weeks ago." In other words: the Conference must go on!

Next day two statesmen from the American continent--Tennessee's fervent Cordell Hull and Canada's vehement Premier Richard Bedford Bennett--joined forces to put President Roosevelt's thesis across. For several days the British dominions, all far more radical than the Mother Country, had been warming up to the special Roosevelt brand of "price raising." All speeches made were kept secret, but at one point Secretary Hull brandished under the knifelike nose of French Finance Minister Bonnet a copy of that thick pamphlet, the Conference agenda, asking with passionate emphasis whether there were not scores of subjects left which the Conference could discuss. The Frenchman admitted that there were. Japan's frail old Viscount Ishii voiced his shrill support of Mr. Hull. Premier Bennett declared that the Conference had only scratched the surface of its tasks. Grudgingly, after three hours of debate, the Conference Bureau (steering committee) instructed all subcommittees to report this week what subjects can still be profitably dealt with.* Thus officially the Conference was "saved" but it badly needed fresh ideas and a program.

Secretary Hull, after fresh talks with President Roosevelt, tried to inject an idea that the Conference should grapple with "price levels, credit policy, innumerable prohibitions and restrictions strangling mutually profitable trade transactions, retaliation and countless other war-breeding trade practices and methods." The steering committee, cold to this proposal, began to discuss adjourning the Conference on July 26 "for at least two months" but were halted by a fresh emotional plea from Mr. Hull. "I do not see," cried he to correspondents, "how the Conference statesmen can go home to their starving people and admit they have failed to achieve anything!"

That night he was supported by Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain who made a long speech to the House of Commons urging the Conference to go on & on. "Let us keep contact with all other countries pleaded gaunt, earnest Mr. Chamberlain. "Let us not despair, even now, of achieving results of solid, practical value from the Conference!"

Keynes Lunch. Candidly Scot MacDonald admits that he knows next to nothing about economics. Eager last week to find out what President Roosevelt meant by a ''commodity dollar" the Prime Minister invited to lunch the most eminent of Britain's more radical economists. Professor John Maynard Keynes.

Presumably they discussed the so-called "Keynes Plan." This proposes to devaluate all the world's currencies between 20 and 33%. (The dollar and pound were already in that range last week. ) By making the respective governments' gold holdings more valuable in terms of devaluated paper, such devaluation would permit more paper money to be issued against basic stores of gold and this money would be used to promote public works and cover treasury deficits.

An essential feature of the Keynes Plan is that monies should be "definitely devaluated." i. e. stabilized at their new low levels in terms of commodity prices. The sort of money which would be created under this "Keynes Plan" is similar to the "commodity dollar" of U. S. Professor Irving Fisher which President Roosevelt may well have had in mind last week. Both professors urge that governments methodically vary the gold parity of their paper money in such a way that it shall always have the same average commodity purchasing power, computed with reference to a broad commodity price index, as now kept by the U. S. Department of Labor.

Professor Keynes declared last week that President Roosevelt is "magnificently-right." called his message "a challenge to us to decide whether we propose to tread the old. unfortunate paths or to explore paths new to statesmen and to bankers."

Gold Lunch. So new and alarming to central bankers are these "new paths" that few days after the Keynes-MacDonald meal in London a vastly different lunch was given in Paris by Governor Clement Moret of the Bank of France. His guests were the heads of the central banks of Italy. Switzerland. Holland. Belgium. Poland--the World Conference "gold group." They had come to Paris to save the gold standard. With them lunched U. S. President Leon Fraser of Europe's Bank for International Settlements (B. I. S.). He promised to help. The sumptuous table was laid in the ornately gilded "Gold Room" of the Bank of France, directly above Europe's largest gold bullion vaults.

During their lunch the bankers worked out a system of day & night telephonic vigil between their offices to check speculative raids on their respective currencies. They observed with satisfaction that last week the speculative rush was away from all other world currencies, even sterling, and towards theirs. "It is an important fact." declared Governor Moret as the luncheon broke up. "that our six nations possess more than 40% of the world's gold." (The U. S. possesses about 38%.)

In Washington the President received a Hood ot congratulations on his stand against the "European bankers." Most authoritative was a statement by the Committee for the Nation on which figure such tycoons as Remington Rand's J. H. Rand and Sears. Roebuck's Lessing J. Rosenwald. They urged not Professor Keynes' 33% devaluation but a prompt cut in the gold content of the dollar by 42.8% "as necessary to restore the 1926 price level."

Actual Progress made at the World Conference last week was solely in the realm of wheat. The "Big Four" wheat exporting countries (U. S., Canada, Argentina, Australia) had been held up for a fortnight while Australia's dapper, grey-spatted Resident Minister in London. Stanley Melbourne Bruce, badgered his Government by cable at 40-c- per word to join the others in some sort of wheat acreage reduction pact (TIME, July 3). Last week, after a conference of Australia's State Premiers. Dominion Premier Lyons ("The Man from Tasmania") had good news for Mr. Bruce. Next day the "Big Four" announced themselves agreed on "a policy of temporary adjustment of production ... to world demand, with a view to improving the price of wheat and liquidating the surplus stacks now overhanging the market."

In concrete terms this was said to mean that the participating states would enforce a reduction of their wheat acreage by at least 15% for the next two years. They sought last week to obtain from France. Italy and other European wheat consuming states some lowering of their tariffs and embargoes against wheat. Informally Italian representatives at the Conference said that Premier Mussolini had given them "every assurance of full co-operation with the great wheat producing states." The French delegation raised the issue of wine. With repeal of the 18th Amendment in sight, the U. S.. they declared, could make a great international gesture by agreeing to permit Frenchmen to trade their surplus of wine for part of the U. S. surplus of wheat.

*Subcommittee 36 of the Economic Committee last week unanimously resolved to promote a study of diseases of the coconut palm. Equally unimportant to most delegates seemed the sailing from England last week of No. 1 Brain Trusty Raymond Moley, whose visit was a fizzle from the Conference viewpoint since it turned out that he, hailed on his arrival in London as "Moley, Moley, Moley, Lord God Almighty." did not in fact come empowered to speak with authority for President Roosevelt.

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