National Affairs: For Finland

Hollywood’s Gone With the Wind arrived in Washington last week. For the second night’s performance a mysterious, big-hearted donor bought out the Palace Theatre, resold the 2,357 seats at $3 to $10 each and turned over the $13,000 net profit to Herbert Hoover’s Finnish relief fund.

>In Manhattan, Mr. Hoover’s lieutenants announced total collections to date: $1,300,000.

>In Boston, Helen Hayes put on a Sunday-night benefit performance of her current starring vehicle, Ladies and Gentlemen.

The show business was agog with its latest, greatest cause. Special Finnish-benefit performances were announced for eleven Broadway hits, near-hits and near-flops. Stars and casts voted overwhelmingly to donate their talents, provide Mr. Hoover with more money to cable to Helsinki. Only the casts of Tobacco Road and a four-months something called See My Lawyer refused. Newspapers came through with oodles of publicity, especially Mr. Hearst’s Bolshevik-hating press.

One Manhattan producer, short, bespectacled, intellectual Herman Shumlin (Grand Hotel, The Children’s Hour), who wears a hat indoors, conceals his baldness, refused to let his production (The Little Foxes, Tallulah Bankhead’s first stage hit in six years) give a benefit performance. Lithe Miss Bankhead raged into the headlines, said she’d donate her own salary not for one performance but for a whole week ($1,000) to the Finns. Other pro-Finland stars and producers rushed to support Miss Bankhead, castigate Mr. Shumlin. Somebody pointed out that Herman Shumlin was the only Broadway producer advertising in the Communist Daily Worker. It seemed that Mr. Shumlin had almost no friends except Leftish Lillian Hellman, who writes some of the best plays he produces. John Golden, John Shubert, Eddie Dowling, other members of Herbert Hoover’s Amusement Division sneered: “The Communists in show business . . . are up to their old tricks. … So we have the nauseating spectacle of a house divided when as a matter of fact 99% of the people of the theatre are solidly behind this humanitarian cause.”

>In Congress, aid to Finland moved more slowly. The Senate Banking & Currency Committee passed, 18-to-2, a compromise bill which would let the Export-Import Bank lend Finland $20,000,000 in addition to the $10,000,000 in credits already furnished.* The bill then faced a perilous passage: the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, debate on the floor, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, debate in the House.

*Up to last week the Finns had placed orders for only $2,500,000, had actually disbursed only $500,000. First purchase: 77 tons of dried peas from Moscow, Idaho. No arms, ammunition or implements of war — things the Finns need most — may be sent.