Roosevelt Week

"The revival will not take place," wrote Columnist Walter Lippmann last week in the New York Herald Tribune, "just because Mr. Krock of the New York Times is able to imply that Mr. Joseph Kennedy and Mr. Jesse Jones are seeing the President rather more often these days than Messrs. Corcoran and Cohen.'' What Mr. Lippmann apparently wanted the President to do and what the National Association of Manufacturers (see p. 11) certainly wanted him to do was to make unmistakably clear the New Deal's willingness, now and henceforth to cooperate with Business. Franklin Delano Roosevelt last week did nothing so extreme.

While Congress did precious little (see col. 2). while many another member of his Administration grew jittery about depression, the President exhibited his peculiar capacity for being comforted by crises. At press conference Correspondent Raymond ("Pete") Brandt of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch asked what the President meant to do about recession now that it was growing worse. Said the President, "It is an assumption. Pete, don't tie my hands."

On the day that Mr. Lippmann's tart comment appeared, it became apparent also that Joe Kennedy's calls at the White House would henceforth be less frequent, since he had been given the job of Ambassador to England (see p. 10). By week's end. neither the N. A. M. meeting nor a Gallup poll in which 58% of the replies held the New Deal wholly or partly responsible for the depression, drew a response from the White House. By way of a moderate gesture of encouragement to Business, the President, however, told a press conference that he was against Government control of railroads (seep. 54).

P: Day after Japanese planes sank the U. S. gunboat Panay in the Yangtze River, Franklin Roosevelt summoned Secretary of State Cordell Hull to the White House, asked in no uncertain terms to have Japan's sacred Son of Heaven informed of the feelings of the President of the U. S. C. Major social event of the Presidential week was the Gridiron Club Banquet, at which the President's remarks are, by strict rule, completely off the record. Sharpest of the six skits written by Washington newspapermen concerned Associate Justice Hugo LaFayette Black of the Supreme Court who, unlike Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, Associate Justices James C. McReynolds and Harlan Fiske Stone, did not attend. Excerpt:

K-K-K-Klansman,

Beautiful Klansman,

You're the same old K-K-K-Klux I knew before;

When the m-m-m-moon shines

Over the White House,

We'll be watching at the K-K-K-Kourt-house door!

P: To the Senate the President sent the nomination of Indiana's Walter Emanuel Treanor as a Justice of the Seventh Circuit Court (Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin), of the United States Court of Appeals.

P: Visiting Washington for the Gridiron Dinner, Kansas' onetime Governor Alfred M. Landon called at the White House, later retailed to the press a story he had told his 1936 rival:

Said a friend who found Alf Landon in his barn currying a horse: "Guess you're having a better time than if you had got the big job." Said Alf Landon: '"Yes, if I had won I wouldn't have had a chance to curry my horse."

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