Business: Millionaires’ Talk

In Boston with their ladies for their annual Northern meeting last week were most of the members of Miami Beach’s famed “Committee of 100,” a group of winter residents which the Press with good reason calls the “Millionaires Club.” Founded after the 1926 hurricane as a civic body to revive Miami morale, the Committee is now primarily a social organization with about 400 members, meeting occasionally at a member’s mansion in the winter and, for the past few years, once each autumn in the North. Three years ago Joseph Early Widener entertained his fellow Miamians at Lynnewood Hall, his estate near Philadelphia. Host last year was Publisher Frank Gannett in Rochester, N. Y.

Last week the assembled millionaires were greeted officially by Founder-Presi-dent Clayton Sedgwick Cooper but the bill for the banquet at Boston’s Hotel Copley-Plaza was footed by the Committee’s New England members, including Speculator William (“Big Bad Bill”) Danforth; Colonel Edward Howland Robinson Green, Hetty Green’s son; Vice President & Treasurer Charles G. Bancroft of United Shoe Machinery; J. A. Turrell, retired Woolworth executive. One day some of the members went to Leslie Buswell’s home in Gloucester, Mass., then for luncheon at the nearby showplace of John Hays Hammond, who was ill abed, finally rejoining their ladies at Swampscott for a dance and clam bake.

With continual talk of politics and business drifting through the blue haze of Corona-Coronas, Committee of 100 meetings are not free from suspicions of babbittry.Last week the members heard Governor Scholtz extol Florida and Governor Brann extol Maine. Then, as representatives of a sizable slice of the nation’s total un-redistributed wealth, they settled down to grumbling about the New Deal. Sample sentiments:

¶Board Chairman Mark C. Honeywell of Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Co. (thermostats) announced that he would temporarily retire next year to labor for a Roosevelt defeat, trumpeting: “So many businessmen have been so deeply engrossed in their private businesses that they have permitted half-wits to seize the Government. … I believe businessmen everywhere should follow my example!”

¶Tireman Frank A. Seiberling groused about “a good volume of business but poor profit,” blamed “the savagery of competition.”

¶ Tireman Harvey Firestone: “Business is good all over the country. But is it going to keep on? Are we fundamentally sound? I don’t know. I can’t subscribe to some of the principles being put into effect.”

¶Banker Claude Ashbrook of Miami declared that President Roosevelt’s promise to keep the U. S. out of the war was worthless, “like all his other promises.”

¶Frank Bornn, Brooklyn distiller, predicted that “unless the Government does something drastic about it,” bootleggers would force legitimate liquor concerns to the wall. “Just another example of how the Roosevelt Administration has fallen down on the job,” said Mr. Bornn.

¶President George A. Hughes of Chicago’s Edison General Electric Appliance Co., which just electrified the White House kitchen, reported business 100% better, denied that the New Deal was in any way responsible, predicted a Roosevelt defeat in the 1936 campaign.

¶Republican George H. Moses, onetime New Hampshire Senator, tartly remarked that the country was “going to hell in a hack,” that the “sons of the wild jackass are multiplying like jack-rabbits,” that “this country cannot continue to exist half Roosevelt, half Frankfurter.”

New Deal defenders were scarce, but their voices were heard. Publisher Frank B. Shutts of the Miami Herald flayed Roosevelt critics as shortsighted, short-memoried ingrates. William Taradash, retired Chicago garment maker, heartily approved Mr. Honeywell’s suggestion that businessmen retire to politics next year-not to defeat Roosevelt but to re-elect him.