President's Week

Biggest news in the White House week came in a casual press conference remark by President Roosevelt. Asked about reports that the Administration was considering setting a ceiling over all wages, as well as prices and profits, the President said crisply: The whole problem is under study. This was an old, familiar gambit: news veterans knew that the President was thus tipping them off that something was being planned about wage control; that he wanted lots of stories written about the subject, to take the surprise off his proposal when he has it ready.

Truth was that the President had finally bent a sympathetic ear, two years late, to Elder Statesman Bernard Baruch's idea of an overall freezing of wage levels, profit levels, price levels. Mr. Roosevelt talked it over with his Congressional leaders, with his family at the White House, with Price Boss Leon Henderson. Then he hinted at it to the press, with an ear cocked for the national reaction.

The great wartime solution, proposed occasionally for 20 years and passionately for two years by Baruch, was simply to proclaim at any random date that the price, wage and profit levels existing on that day constitute the final ceilings. Where these ceilings were unjust, adjustments would be made later. If such a level had been proclaimed two years ago, says Baruch, a billion arguments, frustrations, delays and inequities would have been saved the U.S.--not to mention billions of taxpayers' dollars in the rising costs of everything, from butter to guns.

The President confessed to a press conference his failure to get action, agreement, approval or anything else from his housing experts over a simple little idea of his own. Brooding over the problem of decently but inexpensively housing the thousands of Washington working girls, the President recalled how he had lived as a schoolboy at Groton--in cubicles with 8-ft. partitions, a bed, bureau, curtained cupboard, with a common washroom down the hall, with showers and toilets and 20 tin basins and 20 tooth-mugs in a row. This recollection looked good to the President. Said he: Why not build such dormitories smack on Washington's beautiful Mall, a 13-block-long stretch of greensward in the heart of town. Charge the girls, say, 50 cents a day.

His housing experts were horrified. What, no sitting rooms, no kitchenettes, no private baths? Besides, it would cost 72.3-c- a day, or maybe $1.11 a day, or something. Mr. Roosevelt sighed. At week's end, status of his personal housing program: nowhere.

> During the week he wrote the 48 State Governors asking them to conserve rubber by limiting maximum road speeds of all motor vehicles to 40 miles per hour, and to require frequent checking of tires for possible repair and retreading. Reason: the nation's tires on its 30,000,000 vehicles must last as long as possible.

> He lost a friend when the U.S.S. Houston went down in the great naval battle of the Java Sea: the sleek 10,000-ton heavy cruiser was a favorite; on her he had traveled 25,445 miles, taken four voyages.

> He gave OCDirector James M. Landis a fine lump on the head, by reading aloud a passage from an OCD order calling for the blackout of Government buildings: "Such preparations shall be made as will completely obscure all Federal buildings and nonFederal buildings occupied by the Federal Government during an air-raid for any period of time from visibility by reason of internal or external illumination. Such obscuration may be obtained either by blackout construction or by termination of the illumination."

The President grinned, told Steve Early to change this to Presidential English: Tell them that in buildings where they have to keep the work going, to put something across the window. In buildings where they can afford to let the work stop for awhile, turn out the lights.

> He urged Congress indirectly, through a letter to Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan, to empower him to repeal individual items in bills (a death blow to pork-barrel legislation). He went ahead with plans for manpower mobilization--under which the 26,500,000 men registered in the draft will be classified for work in war industries, if they cannot fight.

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