THE PRESIDENCY: Co-Operacy

If the number of businessmen calling at the White House could be considered a reliable index of depression, it would have appeared last week that the nation was in lamentable condition. During the first three weeks of 1937 when Boom was in the air President Roosevelt saw about a half dozen businessmen. Since the turn of this year he has talked with more than 100. The White House calling list may not be a very reliable index of business activity but it is—at the moment at least—a sensitive index of business sentiment. For the eagerness of businessmen to see the President, and more particularly the President’s willingness to see them, could reflect only profound concern over the business outlook—on both sides.

Last week’s procession of callers was headed by Secretary of Commerce Roper’s Business Advisory Council, 49 strong. For the Advisory Council a Presidential audience was a triumph in itself, since in four and a half years of existence it had been generally ridiculed or ignored by the Administration. Yet its hand-picked membership includes many a New Deal friend, including Glassman John D. Biggers, Camelman S. Clay Williams, Investment Banker Sidney J. Weinberg, Merchant Lincoln Filene, Mail Order Man Robert E. Wood. Only member absent last week was Shipman Kermit Roosevelt, son of the President’s fifth cousin.

As spokesman for the council, Union Pacific’s polo-playing Chairman W. Averell Harriman read the President a long statement, approving most of the New Deal’s aims, mildly criticizing a few and winding up: “Mr. President, we look to you to give us the leadership around which we can rally.” While Mr. Harriman was plowing through the statement the President jotted down a few notes. After an hour and a half the council trooped out, pronouncing the conference a great success.

Two days later the President received a delegation of motormakers and finance company executives, including Edsel Ford, General Motors’ William S. Knudsen, Chrysler Corp.’s K. T. Keller, Packard’s Alvan Macauley, Commercial Credit’s A. E. Duncan, Commercial Investment Trust’s Henry Ittleson. As in most of his co-operation conferences, the President complained about specific aspects of business, this time the evils of easy installment credit and the irregularity of automobile employment. With these points the callers had no quarrel, departed with high resolves.

To date the President’s business conferences have not, so far as anyone knows, produced a single concrete result save that a number of important people have been able to see with their own eyes that Franklin Roosevelt is not equipped with two horns and a tail. Washington was last week agreed that so far as meeting the problem of recession is concerned, the Administration is just as planless as it was two months ago.

Meantime, in his exuberant enthusiasm the President has put his foot in several hornets’ nests. A large part of his time last week was spent in explaining that he did not mean what he had said. He had to tell the Advisory Council not to take too seriously the trust-busting speeches of Harold Ickes and Robert Jackson. He had to explain that he had no intention of reviving NRA evenin a modified form. When his talk of a supercommittee on co-operacy aroused the jealousy of Congressmen and the suspicions of his liberal advisers, he countered with a White House invitation to little businessmen. But his most vigorous backtracking was on the subject of holding companies.

At a press conference last fortnight with a hundred reporters as witnesses he had asked: why have any holding companies? Since he mentioned banks as an example, this was naturally taken to mean all holding companies, not just utility holding companies. At his first press conference last week he remarked that he had not used the word in a dictionary sense. At his second, he dwelt on the fact that he had meant only utility and bank holding companies. And to the Advisory Council he retracted even to the point of admitting that “proper” utility holding companies are “advantages for the public good.”

¶ Over a coast-to-coast network James Roosevelt debated the Administration’s Executive Reorganization Plan with Indiana’s Congressman Samuel Pettengill, defending his father against charges of “dictatorship.” Said Son James: “The history of dictatorships in the modern world shows that they have not crept up inside the governments of democracies through the gradual increase of the powers of the executive branch.”

¶ Mrs. James Roosevelt, who went to hear her grandson defend her son told the Kiwanis Club of New York that Franklin Roosevelt was named not for prudent Ben Franklin but “after an English friend of his great-grandfather.”

¶ Chief Justice Hughes and all the rest of the White House guests at the Supreme Court dinner failed to notice that Eleanor Roosevelt had bobbed her hair. Her coiffure, designed and waved for her by Mme Muzet, U. S. representative of Antoine of Paris, is a conservative bob, confined tothe sides. Thus she became the first President’s wife to cut off her hair.*

*Grace Coolidge wanted to cut off her hair, obtained Husband Calvin’s permission, failed to get that of Son John.