THE PRESIDENCY: Bachelor Hall

One morning last week Franklin Roosevelt was offered nothing more than cereal and coffee for breakfast. A small electric stove on the third floor of the White House was all that provided the President of the U. S. with hot food. Rated capacity of the stove was three modest meals at a time. Franklin Roosevelt was keeping bachelor hall. Mrs. Roosevelt had scampered off to Campobello Island in Canada. Left in the White House with the President were only his sick secretary, Louis McHenry Howe, Mrs. Howe and Personal Secretary Marguerite (“Missy”) Le Hand. Since neither the President nor ailing Mr. Howe could well go out to meals, it was up to the ladies to take turns dining out.

Reason for the comparative discomfort of bachelor hall was that the fixtures in the huge, antiquated kitchen in the basement were being removed to make way for modern electric equipment. A second operation even closer to the Roosevelt heart: an ancient “grotto:’ used as a cow barn by Andrew Jackson was being freshened up to serve as a storehouse for rare old hams and fine cheeses relished by the Squire of Hyde Park.

Caught flatfooted at the end of June by threat of a soft coal strike on July i, the President did not allow himself to be surprised a second time. Six days before the postponed strike was due again, he wrote to miners and operators asking them to postpone the strike a fourth time to Sept. 16. Graciously miners and operators accepted his “command,” hoping for passage in the meantime of the Guffey Coal bill.

To the White House Secretary Morgenthau brings his troubles. Last week he brought a proposal for the President’s approval: to mint copper half cents which have not been minted since 1857, and aluminum mills, which have, up to now, been a money of account found only in school books. Object: to enable citizens to pay fractional cents of sales taxes. Franklin Roosevelt thought it was a great idea to save people money, personally sketched a “doughnut” half cent and a square mill, visioned citizens getting bargains at $1,999, $4,875, $9,893.

Because charities fear that the President’s proposals for higher taxes on wealth will make philanthropists tighten their purse strings, charitarians descended on Congress with a counter proposition: let gifts to charity by corporations be specifically exempted from income tax. like charity gifts made by individuals. When newshawks put the proposition to the

President he emphatically vetoed it. What right, he asked, had corporations to buy goodwill by making contributions to charity? Why should corporations give to charities money which stockholders ought to have the right to contribute personally? When the President’s opinions were published charitarians were bitter. What difference, they asked, was there in a corporation giving it to the unemployed on behalf of its taxpayers? Said Alan Burns of the National Council of Community Chests: “Any conception of corporate responsibility that does not include an obligation to local private charities belongs to the horse and buggy days.”

Growing, perhaps, a little tired of successivegoodbys to Hugh Johnson, S. Clay Williams and Donald Richberg, the President last week bid farewell to James L. O’Neill, his fourth NRA head, who went back to his job as active vice president of Manhattan’s Guaranty Trust Co. leaving unimportant NRA temporarily without a chief.

At a directors’ meeting in Manhattan, Eugene Grace of Bethlehem Steel complained that the New Deal was mistreating the steel industry. Secretary Ickes had issued an order that on Public Works projects any purchase of $10,000 or more should , be made from foreigners if the foreign bid was 15% below any domestic bid. Knowing he had a good case, the President took five minutes out in a press conference to explain why the tariff-pampered steel industry had small ground for complaint. Obliged to bid 15% under domestic producers, to pay a tariff duty of roughly 25% ad valorem, to pay insurance and freight on shipments across the ocean, any foreigner who got PWA business would have to be satisfied with only about half of the fat prices demanded by U. S. producers.

To place two men in his sub-cabinet, Franklin Roosevelt last week had to tread on some good New Deal toes: 1) To the pain of trust-hating disciples of Felix Frankfurter, Assistant Secretary of Commerce John Dickinson, able young lawyer but no reckless reformer, became Assistant Attorney General, in charge of anti-trust prosecutions to bolster Attorney General Cummings’ shaky legal staff. 2) To the suppressed displeasure of Secretary Ickes, Charles West, Presidential contact-man with Congress, was made Undersecretary of the Interior.

From Alabama to Albania Hugh S. Grant, onetime secretary to Senator Hugh La Fayette Black, was last week boosted by the President to U. S. Envoy Extraordinary & Minister Plenipotentiary.

In Chicago westbound on his vacation, Postmaster General Farley paused to say akind word for the poor heat-bedeviled bachelor in the White House: “The President is in astonishingly good health but, like all the rest of us who have to endure the sodden heat of Washington, he isentitled to get peevish at times.”