Roosevelt's Tools

Several prominent Britons got around last week to saying in public what they have long said of President Roosevelt in private.

Despite his Cabinet rank with its implied duty of discretion, President of the

Board of Trade Walter Runciman, one of the Empire's greatest shipping and industrial tycoons, went out to bleak Penzance and told an audience of sturdy Cornish constituents that President Roosevelt's neglect thus far to stabilize the dollar has jeopardized his chances of succeeding with the NRA.

"In the United States," said Mr. Runciman, "President Roosevelt, the greatest autocrat in the world, has chosen to make a huge experiment. If the United States were a little world all its own it is conceivable that the experiment might succeed but she is also involved in foreign trade. . . . America could have made a great contribution toward world financial confidence had she stabilized her dollar in relation to the pound and the franc [which President Roosevelt refused to do at the time of the World Economic Conference]. I say without hesitation that before many months have passed the United States authorities will be anxious to see their dollar as stable as our own currency. . . . If the [NRA] experiment fails it means another period of depression in the United States and that cannot occur without hav ing its effect on us." Same night in London the Roosevelt experiment was sardonically described by Sir Josiah Stamp, rotund Board Chairman of the London, Midland & Scottish Railway, a Director of the Bank of England and a leading Empire economist often consulted by Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald. "They began by rattling President Roosevelt's new powers like a bag of tools," smiled Sir Josiah. "They hoped he might never have to use them, but he has had to take them out of the bag one after the other, and now they are get ting a bit scared about the more extreme instruments. . . . There is a suspicion that the NRA is putting up costs and not increasing purchasing power. ... In all countries except Russia the mainspring of employment is profit. Keep profits in sight and you go on. . . . Production in the United States has now fallen off, especially in the construction field. Some industries are showing no signs of improvement and there is a definite failure in the creation of public employment."

As for that "extreme instrument" in the Roosevelt tool bag, the Securities Act, Sir Josiah chuckled: "They designed it to protect investors but in their enthusiasm Congress so framed it as to make it impossible to draw up a prospectus so as to raise money at all!"

The best Sir Josiah could say of U. S. prospects was that "the United States may succeed, in spite of herself, because of her youth and vigor."

Just primed from a study of U. S. reactions to Rooseveltism in all parts of the country, Leonard J. Reid, Financial Editor of the London Daily Telegraph, gave Britons another picture: "Roosevelt is being criticized in the Eastern United States but he could speak to the whole country tomorrow and hold them in the hollow of his hand."

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