The Press: du Ponts’ Pleasure

As political cartoonist for Julius David Stern’s rampantly pro-New Deal Philadelphia Record, spectacled Gerald Aloysius (“Jerry”) Doyle flays the Big Interests daily for the edification of some 328,222 readers. Last week one Doyle drawing particularly tickled none other than Eugene (Liberty League) du Pont, millionaire munitions manufacturer of nearby Wilmington, Del., whose daughter Ethel is to marry Franklin Roosevelt Jr. in June. The cartoon that delighted Mr. du Pont showed young Roosevelt as Romeo beneath a balcony festooned with elephant-cupids on which a “Juliet du Pont” (see cut) declaimed: “Tis but thy name that is my enemy. . . . What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Mr. du Pont hurried to a telephone, called up the cartoonist at the Record of fice, asked for the original. Canny Cartoonist Doyle, whose pictorial presentations of the du Fonts have hitherto been distinctly unflattering, assumed that he was talking to a prankster, glibly promised to mail the drawing, did nothing about it. Next morning he read in his paper that Mr. du Pont had actually made the request, hastened to send off the cartoon, with his compliments, for the du Fonts’ pleasure. Mr. du Pont will frame the picture, give it to his daughter & son-in-law for a wedding present.