THE PRESIDENCY: Wonderful Turnout

Brigadier General Maxwell Murray, commander of the Washington Provisional Brigade, ascended to the dome of the Capitol one day last week and trained a pair of high-powered binoculars down on Pennsylvania Avenue. Lining the street on both sides, all the way to the White House, was a solid wall of U. S. soldiers and marines. Behind the walls massed the Washington populace, patrolled by 751 policemen, 400 firemen. Overhead roared nine flying fortresses, 42 Army pursuit ships. Drawn up from the Capitol to Union Station were more soldiers, and filling the station plaza were cavalry, 30 tanks, a battery of artillery. General Murray looked at all these preparations, for which he was responsible, with anxious, critical eye.

Up to the station in cutaway & silk hat drove Franklin Roosevelt, beaming. “It’s wonderful!” said he to Major Ernest Brown. Washington’s police superintendent. “It’s a great turnout and I am so pleased!”

Pleased too was the swart, chunky gentleman for whom this swankest military State reception in Washington history had been staged by Franklin Roosevelt, He was only General Anastasio Somoza, President of little Nicaragua (pop. 1,133,000), but this show for him was in all details precisely the reception planned for King George & Queen Elizabeth of mighty Great Britain next month. Fact that it was a dress rehearsal for that occasion did not diminish the fact that it came first, that it was as handsome a performance as any Latin-American heart could desire, that it was a gesture intended to honor all the Good Neighbors as well as Nicaragua.

Mrs. Roosevelt, Vice President & Mrs. Garner, the Cabinet (with only two absent), Chief Justice Hughes all followed Franklin Roosevelt in handshaking General Somoza & wife at the station. The artillery banged a 21-gun salute. With 15 tanks in front, 15 behind, the Presidential car led a parade up to the Capitol, around its plaza, down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. Franklin Roosevelt had assured the presence of throngs by having all Federal employes excused from work from 11 a.m. to 1 p. m. Military strictness prevailed. Officers wore their medals & decorations. The only two pressmen (one reporter, one cameraman) permitted in the parade had to wear Army uniforms (sergeants). A spectator caught doing the manual of arms with a marine’s rifle was instantly arrested.

Anastasio Somoza visited the U. S. 22 years ago, to enroll in a Philadelphia night school to study accounting. When President Coolidge sent the marines to Nicaragua to suppress revolutionary Augusto

Sandino and train a native national guard, young Somoza got on so well with the visitors that he was nicknamed “El Yanqui.” In 1933 when the Marines left, Anastasio Somoza, then 38 and his country’s Foreign Minister, became commandant of the Marine-trained Army. Three years later he used it to run his wife’s uncle, President Juan Bautista Sacasa, out of the country. He had himself elected President in due constitutional style, then resigned, rewrote the constitution, got re-elected in new style for an eight-year term. Thus neatly sidestepped were all objections from such good neighbors as the U. S. and the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza was brought about just as politely as, for example, that of General Jorge Ubico in Guatemala.

Night Scholar Somoza became proficient at accounting. Last week he could authoritatively state that his country needs only about $9,000,000 from the U. S. to build improvements and, to improve her trade with the U. S., an arrangement like the one wangled for Brazil in March by Foreign Minister Aranha. In addition, Dictator Somoza discussed with Franklin Roosevelt, whose guests* he and Señora Somoza were their first night in Washington, his new constitution (now formally blessed by the U. S.), the canal Nicaragua wants the U. S. to pay for across her.t and hemisphere solidarity. On the latter subject. General Somoza is handsomely outspoken. Says he: “I consider every Nicaraguan aviator and soldier as a potential fighting man for the United States.”

Later Anastasio Somoza addressed Congress, blandly asked it to authorize construction of his canal as a continental defense measure. General Somoza found Congress in a grumpier mood than the

President (see col. 2), heard himself denounced by Representative Hohn Shafer (R., Wis.) as “a South American dictator.”

> Aside from his military display for Dictator Somoza, Franklin Roosevelt let the week pass without making any further reply to Dictator Hitler’s sarcastigation of last fortnight. But young Adolf A. Berle Jr., his European sharpshooter at the State Department, was permitted to sound off in Manhattan before the Academy of Political Science. He declared that the American nations meant what they said last winter at Lima: Dictators keep out.

> From Chile over the Andes to Argentina the President last week shifted Ambassador Norman Armour, 51, famed as the State Department’s smoothest French-speaker, whose wife is a Russian princess. To be Government Secretary for the Virgin Islands he named Robert Morss Lovett, 68, distinguished left-wing belles-lettrist, Emeritus Professor of English of the University of Chicago, persistent civil libertarian.

> Justices of the U. S. Supreme Court do not, by tradition, hobnob with the President of the U. S. William Orville (“Bill”) Douglas is different. He is only 40; had never been any kind of judge; until only six weeks ago, when Franklin Roosevelt elevated him, he was chairman of SEC. Last week end he cruised with Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins on the Potomac. Chief conversational topic: the current state of U. S. business. When Harry Hopkins got back to his desk he expressed what was doubtless the trio’s consensus: that to read the latest resolutions of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce (seep. 67), “it would seem that apparently, some of them don’t believe in this economic system.”

*The U. S. people pay the Somoza expenses during the visit, from New Orleans to Washington to the New York World’s Fair & back. f Senor Somoza’s presents to Sefior Roosevelt: a complete issue of Nicaraguan stamps; an 8-ft. table inlaid with Nicaraguan hardwoods and gold, showing Roosevelt I and a map of the Panama Canal, Roosevelt II and a much bigger map of Nicaragua and the proposed canal.