THE PRESIDENCY: Money & Molar

Before he left Washington to go fishing off Florida last fortnight, Franklin Roosevelt completed two messages to Congress. In the first, he asked for amendments to the 1934 Housing Act, to stimulate the U. S. building industry by making it easier for prospective homebuilders to finance their houses (TIME, Dec. 6). In the second, he asked Congress for a $112,000,000 reduction in Federal appropriations for road building, as a step toward a balanced budget in 1939. While the President and his party cruised about the Gulf Stream last week, daily messages from a temporary White House in the Miami-Biltmore Hotel at Coral Gables, Fla. kept him informed about the repercussions of his messages in Washington.

Reception to the housing message was generally favorable. By week’s end, committees in both Houses were busy holding hearings on bills embodying the Administration’s plans. Reception to the slash in roads appropriations was exactly the reverse. Congress felt somewhat aggrieved in the first place at being left to wrestle with the nation’s business while the President went off on a holiday. A request to cut in half an appropriation for such a valuable vote-getting purpose as highway construction looked like advance preparation for blaming Congress, if it failed to approve the cut, in case the 1938-39 budget is not balanced. Nonetheless, by week’s end, it was rumored that the Bureau of the Budget was preparing still more drastic means of satisfying the President’s desire for a balanced budget. Biggest slash being considered—in anticipation of the President’s budget message to the regular session—was $500,000,000 from the $1,500,000,000 relief appropriation for the current fiscal year. Others were $100,000,000 from the PWA’s appropriation of $600,000,000, $75,000,000 from the Civilian Conservation Corps’s $275,000,000. With the addition of other minor cuts along the line, as well as the $112,000,000 asked by the President from its road-building largesse to the States, the total curtailment would be about $800,000,000—roughly what the Treasury estimates must be pared from last year’s total appropriations of $7,164,817,513 if next year’s are not to exceed the Federal income.

While Congress thought about money, it was doing very little about the four-point legislative program the President proposed for it last month. Consequently when, at week’s end, word arrived at the Miami base where Secretary Marvin Mclntyre was in charge, that the President had decided to come ashore a day earlier than originally planned, go direct to Washington instead of stopping off at Gainesville and Warm Springs, Ga., political reporters promptly began to draw conclusions. Reason given by the President was that his infected jaw—from which Commander Arthur H. Yando, White House dentist, extracted a diseased molar last fortnight— was not healing rapidly as it should have. Reason suggested by political reporters— who discarded a new crop of wild rumors that the President was seriously ill—was that the President felt obliged to crack the whip over Congress.

After a call at the Dry Tortugas, where the President stopped to inspect the gloomy ruins of Fort Jefferson, the Potomac steamed slowly up the Florida Coast. Disembarking at Miami, the President was tanned and cheerful but admitted that his jaw—still so sore that Dr. Mclntire thought it might be necessary to scrape the bone—had interfered with the pleasures of fishing. Prize catch of the last day—a 25-lb. barracuda—had gone to Assistant Attorney General Robert H. Jackson, who, with WPA Administrator Harry Hopkins, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, and Son James Roosevelt had made up the Presidential party. Late the next afternoon, the Presidential Special arrived in Washington. Franklin Roosevelt’s first White House visitor was Dentist Yando, who supervised an X-ray of the troublesome jaw.

¶In Manhattan soul-searching German Biographer Emil Ludwig (Napoleon, Lincoln, Cleopatra) was dined by his Publisher Bernarr Macfadden, to celebrate the first installment in Liberty of his Roosevelt—A Study in Fortune and Power. Biographer Ludwig revealed that in the course of a recent conversation at the White House he had asked his subject: “When you have to fight a whole day against Congress and the Supreme Court, in the evening are you not jealous of the dictators who can simply order what they wish?” Replied the President: “No, I would hate to be a dictator. I would be bored without opposition.”