THE PRESIDENCY: Death of Howe

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

One evening last week three candidates for President, Franklin Roosevelt, Publisher Frank Knox and Senator Arthur Vandenberg. sat down with many another bigwig of Politics. Business and Press. They laughed until their sides ached at the political slapstick of the Gridiron Club’s spring dinner. When the fun was over at a late hour. President Roosevelt, feeling all warm and good inside, went back to the White House. There he found waiting him a message from the Naval Hospital: Louis McHenry Howe, his No. 1 secretary, was dead. Mrs. Roosevelt was already telephoning the news to Mrs. Howe in Boston.

Little gnome-like Louis Howe had struggled for years with a decrepit constitution. His life was despaired of in March 1935, during an attack of bronchitis. From the White House he was moved to the Naval Hospital where he astounded his doctors by remaining alive. On the night of last week’s Gridiron dinner he had gone to sleep and, for no particular reason, his tired heart stopped beating.

Franklin Roosevelt could not go to bed gaily that night. Admirers he had by the millions, acquaintances by the thousands, advisers by the hundreds, friends by the score, but of intimates such as Louis Howe he had only one. On election night 1932, in the first hour of his triumph, he gave credit to those to whom he was most indebted: “There are two people in the United States, more than anybody else, who are responsible for the great victory. One is my old friend and associate, Colonel Louis McHenry Howe, and the other is that splendid American, Jim Farley.”

Franklin Roosevelt may also have realized in part last week the extent of his political loss in the death of Howe. During the last year, for the sake of Louis Howe’s touchy feelings, he did not refill Howe’s official post as Secretary to the President. Now he has no man of Howe’s political acumen with whom to fill it. To many an observer, the course of political events in the last year already shows the gap left by the loss of Howe.

The opponents of Warren Harding had no high opinion of that President. The opponents of Calvin Coolidge were scornful of his intellect. The opponents of Herbert Hoover despised his political bungling, sneered at his false prophecies. But the outstanding development of the last year is that Franklin Roosevelt’s opponents now hate him with profound passion. The depth of this bitterness is shown by the excesses of the Liberty League and its allies, by the vast number of wholly malicious rumors attacking the President, by the flood of crank letters which go to the White House. The actual number of these letters is not of public record but the best evidence that it has gone beyond all previous highs is the precaution, wholly unequalled in other administrations, which the Secret Service takes to protect the President on all occasions. Certainly no President in recent times has so bitterly aroused the enmity of a whole class as Franklin Roosevelt has aroused the economically substantial element of the U. S. Regardless of party and regardless of region, today, with few exceptions, members of the so-called Upper Class frankly hate Franklin Roosevelt.

The cause of the active hatred that he has aroused may be the ill-timed smile which accompanies his caustic criticisms of the motives and morals of men who consider themselves upright citizens. Or it may be that loose talk of reform and reorganization of society has deprived a class of U. S. citizens, who had some social security, of their feeling of security. However it has been—while business has profited well under the New Deal and the President’s steps have done little physical damage to anyone—somehow, since the summer of 1934 when Louis Howe’s health began seriously to fail. Franklin Roosevelt has stirred up burning bitterness against himself that was quite unnecessary. Whether Louis Howe might have prevented needless antagonism no man will ever know, for, when the President got into bed after the Gridiron dinner, Louis Howe was gone forever.