Three Dollars

Gossips said that President Roosevelt was suffering from sinus trouble, but the President described the ailment which confined him to his four-poster bed for two days last week as "sniffles." Attired in striped flannel pajamas and an old white sweater, the President played with his many varieties of U. S. stamps and his three varieties of U. S. dollars: world, R.F.C.-gold and commodity-value.

Inaugurating his new monetary policy (TIME, Oct. 30), President Roosevelt watched Reconstruction Finance Corp. first offer to U. S. gold producers $31.36 an oz. for their product. Later in the week the R.F.C. bid as high as $31.96. Theoretically, the dollar should have fallen to 64.96-c-. Actually, on the world market, it only fell to 67.78-c-, which to the President & advisers was disconcerting. Worst of all, from the standpoint of an inflating President, the dollar's commodity value, as revealed by the Department of Labor's wholesale price index, was way up at $1.42, a rise of 1 1/2-c- from the week before. To squash the dollar down toward the 1926 commodity value of 100-c-, President Roosevelt called in his ten-man monetary team. They decided, without much real knowledge of how soon it would affect the dollar's commodity value, to wrestle the gold dollar out in the world arena (see p. 51). P:His preoccupation with his dollars made it fruitless for the President to talk War Debts with Britain's emissary. Sir Frederick Leith-Ross. Undersecretary Acheson and Governor Black of the Federal Reserve Board talked for two hours with Sir Frederick. Result: rumors of a monetary truce between Great Britain and the U. S. whereby dollar and pound would be "loosely" pegged while the U. S. pursued its gold-buying program. As for War debts, observers predicted that Sir Frederick would soon go home without anything having been settled except another "token payment" by Britain in December, signifying that her debt ($4,500,000,000) still stands and will be paid, in part, whenever the U. S. decides how many of what kind of dollars it will accept. Looming on the President's list of callers and obstructing Sir Frederick's visit further was Comrade Maxim Maximovich Litvinov, coming from Moscow this week to discuss Russian Recognition (see p. 24).

P:After two more conferences, President Roosevelt persuaded the "captive" coal mine owners of Pennsylvania to grant their employes the check-off system, whereby the company pays a miner's union dues for him out of his wages. This concession was expected to end the long-lived captive mine strike. Same day the President mediated the price of rails whose purchase the Government was to finance for railroads (see p. 52). The four U. S. railmakers had entered identical bids on the 844,000-ton order: $37.75 a ton. Railroad Co-Ordinator Eastman, who had cried "Collusion!" at the offer, thought a fair price would be $35. The President split the difference. Agreed price: $36.37 1/2. P:The President appointed Joseph B. Keenan of Cleveland, special prosecutor in the Urschel kidnapping case, to be Assistant Attorney General, filling the vacancy left by resigning Pat Malloy.

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