Return to Trouble

The band played the "Star Spangled Banner," a few strains from "Aloha Oe," some of "Auld Lang Syne." Franklin Roosevelt took off his Panama to the officers and men of the U. S. S. Houston as he left the cruiser that had been his home for 33 days, 12,000 miles. On the Portland dock welcoming crowds saw him give a confident toss of the head, watched his well-tanned face glow with self-assured smiles. A few drops of rain fell from a threatening sky upon him in his open car.

That drizzly August noon was not such a day for a homecoming as the President had had a month earlier when he drove through the green fields of Maryland to Annapolis to board his ship for a vacation in Haiti, Puerto Rico, Colombia, the Canal Zone and Hawaii. When he departed he needed rest--and he got it. He hoped that, with the spotlight turned off Washington, the country would get a rest, too. But when he landed in Portland last week and was met by an anxious conclave including two members of his Cabinet and two of his White House secretariat, the President did not have to be told that the kind of "resting" the country had been doing during the last 30 days was anything but wholesome. The U. S. was calm--but it was the calm of economic stagnation. The month of Presidential vacationing had not been a month of national happiness.

The President's one budget of unqualifiedly good news came from the smiling faces of Roosevelts, of his son James who had flown to meet him, of his wife Eleanor who had just completed several weeks of incognito motoring through the Pacific States. She had secretly spent five days at Pyramid Lake, Nev. and was able to report that Daughter Anna was well, had successfully got her divorce with a minimum of publicity, that his grandchildren, "Sistie" and "Buzzie", were happily seeing the Chicago Fair with "Popsie" Dall.

Once ashore, President Roosevelt plunged into the business of pointing the finger of publicity at the concrete results of New Deal spending: the $31,000,000 hydroelectric and navigation dam at Bonneville on the Columbia River 40 miles above Portland; the $63,000,000 hydro-electric Grand Coulee Dam where the Columbia flows through the barren hills of central Washington; the $62,000,000 flood control dam at Fort Peck in Montana on the upper Missouri; the $65,000,000 dam at Devils Lake in North Dakota. By word and deed the President was determined to make the nation "dam-minded."

At the first two dams he poured out his unaffected enthusiasm for electric power: "I always believed in that old saying of 'More power to you'. . . . This country, which is looking pretty bare today, is going to be filled with the homes of men, women and children who will be making an honest livelihood. . . ."

Then his air-cooled train rolled him off to Glacier National Park in northern Montana where he spent six hours seeing the sights. That night he paused to address all his constituents by radio. A worried country listened intently for some declaration of economic policy, some inkling of what the New Deal would deal next, some idea of what was in store for business. But of these things, the President was in no mood to talk. Instead, he gave high words to the beauties of nature.

"I wish every American, old and young, could have been with me today," he exclaimed. ". . . There is nothing so American as our national parks. ... I express to you the hope that each and every one of you who can possibly find the means . . . will visit our national parks. . . .

"We are definitely in an era of building, the best kind of building--the building of great public projects for the benefit of the public and with the definite objective of building human happiness."

Next day the Chicago Daily News charged the President with failing to deal "with the realities which a grim-faced people are confronting everywhere. "And as much as he might toss his head and laugh he could not miss grim realities that were unrolled as his train sped him East. His wife and three sons, his 50 following newshawks occupied but a small part of his ten-car special. The rest was filled by Governors, Senators, Congressmen, local politicians, secretaries, documents--all reporting grave problems:

P:Indices of industrial production showed a steady decline. No autumn upturn was yet visible on the horizon. Factories were slowing down, discharging surplus workers. U. S. Business was lifeless.

P:Ten million men were still unemployed. William Green was pointing a monitory finger at social unrest.

P: Eight hundred thousand farmers were on drought relief. Lawrence Westbrook, assistant to Emergency Relief Administrator Harry L. Hopkins, boarded the Presidential special at Glacier, Mont, to report that drought damage to date footed up to $5.000,000,000.

P: NRA was in a state of suspended animation, its own officials at loggerheads. Louder and louder grew the complaint that codes were responsible for rising prices.

P:The home modernization-and-building program, hastily and hopefully put together before Congress adjourned, had bogged down over the details of organization, the difficulty of lowering building costs. As a Pulmotor for heavy industries it had so far failed to have any effect.

P:Labor was as restless as ever. For every strike settled, another sprang up.

P:Business men were deeply troubled, afraid to go forward, afraid to go back. They felt NIRA's Section 7 (a) was inciting strikes. What they dreaded most was the inflation that was sure to follow if the Government went on spending at its present rate without increasing revenues.

P:The Treasury was at work on a new tax program which would certainly prove highly unpopular with the country.

Franklin Roosevelt returned from his vacation blithe, rested, confident. Once back in the White House he was counted on by the country at large to perform one more miracle and lift the economic gloom that had settled over the nation in his absence.

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