First Problems

To the delicate problem of jockeying a Congress no longer his to ride, Franklin Roosevelt last week addressed himself with characteristic adroitness. He delivered to it a stirring Annual Message which made national defense the paramount purpose of the day. He followed his request for a major controversial item of expense--Relief--with a Budget Message which contained an uncontroversial new national defense figure--only $500,000,000 extra instead of the billion many observers had expected. This brought him to his first two problems.

He faced his first issue with Congress over Relief. In asking for a Relief appropriation far larger than expected ($875,000,000 instead of some $600,000,000), he took pains to remind the Congress that this sum was only to keep WPA going as is until June 30. Let Congress appropriate that, he urged, and apply any alterations it may want to make in Relief procedure, to fiscal 1940. Said he: "The hasty adoption of legislative provisions, to be immediately effective, which radically change the present method . . . would greatly complicate the administration of the program in the coming months."

Net effect of this bracketing of shots was to make Congress responsible not only for national defense and for Relief in its name, but for the welfare of reliefers after mid-February, when present appropriations will be gone, with about five winter weeks still to come.

A second Congressional problem faced the President hard upon the first: the major threat to his Administration which Chairman Martin Dies of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities seemed to be rapidly becoming. Mr. Dies put out last week a report which loudly attacked Secretary of Labor Perkins for "unbelievable laxity" in handling alien agitators, Secretary of the Interior Ickes for baiting the Committee, Secretary of Commerce Hopkins for harboring Communists in WPA. Mr. Dies demanded $150,000 to continue his investigation, and the President learned that many another Congressman's mail was filled with warnings that Mr. Dies's request must not be refused.

This confronted the President with a formidable threat to his Cabinet. He had an answer to it at press conference last week. His answer was to announce with gusto that his new Attorney General, Frank Murphy--the man whom Mr. Dies last fall accused of being too soft on communistic sitdowners--would have Department of Justice agents investigate all charges of subversive activities made by Mr. Dies. Meanwhile, to keep from casting fuel on flames, Secretary Ickes was restrained from delivering an oratorical blast entitled "Loaded Dies."

>President Roosevelt again exhibited his determination to "liberalize" U. S. institutions as much as he can by nominating Law Professor Felix Frankfurter of Harvard University to the vacancy on the Supreme Court, and James Pinckney Pope, New Deal Senator from Idaho defeated for renomination, to the place of ousted Dr. Arthur Morgan on the board of TVA. Conspicuously absent from a long list of other appointments for Federal judgeships and executive posts was the name of Donald Wakefield Smith, to whom Mr. Roosevelt gave an interim re-appointment to NLRB five months ago over vigorous protests by the A. F. of L. and others. Explanation was that John L. Lewis of C. I. O., anticipating Mr. Smith's rejection by the Senate, had withdrawn his insistent support, was casting about with the President for a stronger "liberal" appointee.

>At last year's White House reception for the judiciary, Associate Justice & Mrs. Hugo Black arrived too late to go down the receiving line. At last week's repetition of the function, Associate Justice & Mrs. Black were the first of 953 guests to arrive. But they had to wait. The new Attorney General, Michigan's Frank Murphy, was 15 minutes late.

>In the Monroe Drawing Room of the White House, Franklin Delano Roosevelt III, aged six months, was christened in the presence of his paternal grandfather & grandmother and great-grandmother, who hung around his neck the charm which all Roosevelts since Franklin Delano I have worn at baptism. Absent from the ceremony: Grandfather & Grandmother du Pont.

>To 1,200 party faithful who paid $100 a plate in Washington, and thousands more in other cities likewise helping to eat the Democratic Party out of the red, Franklin Roosevelt last week addressed a Jackson Day speech of which the punch line was: "If we Democrats lay for each other now, we can be sure that 1940 is the corner where the American people will be laying for us."

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