THE PRESIDENCY: Spirit of Warm Springs

Franklin Roosevelt lays great store by what he calls “the spirit of Warm Springs.” This spirit is a very tangible, carefully cultivated attitude of cheerfulness, confidence, determination. It is designed to fortify the resort’s paralysis patients, put heart into their fight for recovery. When he goes to Warm Springs, Franklin Roosevelt steeps himself in this spirit quite as purposefully as he exercises in its waters. Easter afternoon, when he went to the train which was to take him back to Washington after a ten-day rest, his smile and bearing clearly reflected the spirit of Warm Springs.

At the station the President handshook his friend Fred Botts, “dean” of the Warm Springs Foundation. “I’ll be back for Thanksgiving,” he said, “with provisos.” He went up the ramp to the platform of his private car. The send-off crowd hushed itself, to hear his words of farewell. Franklin Roosevelt grinned his broadest and said: “I’ll be back in the fall—if we don’t have a war.”

The crowd waited motionless, expecting more. No more came. The President, still smiling, turned away and entered his car on the arm of Military Aide “Pa” Watson. On the face of a smiling Marine captain, holding his small son aloft to wave goodby, the smile froze.

While the country waited to hear an elaboration of the most ominous remark yet by its Chief Executive, Congress pondered that word: War. The conduct of foreign relations is a duty solemnly imposed upon the President by the Constitution. The power to declare war rests solely with the Congress, but the conduct of foreign relations, the thinking and acting that preserves peace or leads up to war, are the President’s lawful and awful responsibility. Last week the senior house of Congress began discussion of that specific legal harness for the President which is called the Neutrality Act: whether to extend, revise, or scrap it (see p. 18). But everyone knew that, Neutrality Act or no Neutrality Act, the nation’s predominant emotions and judgment would in the end determine its international course. By last week two opposed bodies of thought and emotion, both based on the premise that “no one wants war,” were discernible in the U. S. Franklin Roosevelt was, of course, leader of one of them.

Ever since his “quarantine the aggressor nations” speech at Chicago in 1937, Franklin Roosevelt has openly led the party which believes not only that the totalitarian dictators deny the democratic U. S. way of life but that they threaten it, that something must be done to curb them. Doing something about things that look wrong to him is a prime characteristic of Franklin Roosevelt and, fortified by the Warm Springs spirit, the tougher the going gets the better he likes it.

In his message to Congress last January, and subsequently, Mr. Roosevelt developed his thinking about defense of the democracies to a point just short of economic intervention. His announcement of tariff penalties to be imposed upon German imports after April 22 was a first step in actual economic punishment. Last week at Warm Springs, after much long-distance telephoning to Secretary of State Hull and his ambassadors abroad, the President prepared his following to take another, longer step. On Mussolini’s Albanian grab (see p. 29), instead of just bitterly deploring and vaguely warning, this time the official statement said:

“The inevitable effect of this incident . . . is further to destroy confidence and to undermine economic stability in every country in the world, thus affecting our own welfare.” The seizure of tiny Albania, to which the U. S. sold only $275,180 worth of goods in 1938, obviously dealt no great blow to U. S. economy. But U. S. investors knew instantly what Franklin Roosevelt meant. In Manhattan, the stockmarket slumped sickeningly on the news from Brindisi and Durazzo.

While Secretary Hull gave out the formal statement in Washington, “a source close to the President” at Warm Springs followed up this new line of unpopularizing the Dictators, and preparing the U. S. people to curb them, with a long exposition which said in effect:

Each small nation that the Dictators swallow up is a bite out of U. S. prosperity. Economic domination, by barter trade, is the intended aftermath of the Dictators’ military marches. Unless the U. S. is to retire behind a “Chinese wall” of tariffs and surrender world markets to the Dictators, it must prepare to compete in one of two ways: 1) cut wages and lengthen hours to bring down U. S. export prices, or 2) subsidize exports and pay the subsidies out of jacked-up taxes.

United against the President in any effort he may make to put a spoke into the aggression of the Dictator countries, are not only those who fear foreign entanglements but those who fear and distrust Franklin Roosevelt. Herbert Hoover, who may fairly be called, even ahead of Senators Borah and Johnson, the leader of those who would have the U. S. sit tight and save civilization by tending its own home business, last week spoke for all such:

“No war can be won by economic methods, and once we are in the controversy, we have to win, and only military force will win. . . . If the American people are to keep out, the Congress had better take such a course of action as will prevent us [i.e. Franklin Roosevelt] engaging in European power politics or engaging in any warlike acts of the economic type, without the approval of Congress. Otherwise the Congress may wake up to find that its sole power to take the United States into war has become a mere formality.

“What this country needs is not war but a united effort to get 12,000,000 unemployed men back to work.”

In Liberty, Herbert Hoover further said: 1) Britain and France can take care of themselves; 2) Germany (and Russia) will collapse without pushing by the U. S.

> The President celebrated Army Day by eating beans with his Marine Guard in their Warm Springs mess hall.

> Secretary Hull boarded the President’s train as soon as it halted in Washington’s Union Station, motored with his chief to the White House. There Franklin Roosevelt’s first act was to go out to the south portico with his wife, set off their seventh annual Easter Monday egg-roll. To thousands of cheering children, he said: “It is a wonderful day. . . . I wish I could be down there with you.”

> Next day, Senator James Byrnes of South Carolina hatched a handy little plan which even arch-isolationists were said to have approved and which the State Department immediately endorsed. “Within the next few days,” said Senator Byrnes, the State Department would open negotiations for barter trade with Great Britain, Holland, and Belgium, swapping raw materials such as U. S. surplus cotton (TIME, April 10) to lay in “emergency stocks” of strategic materials (rubber, tin) in which those nations hold the world monopoly.