THE PRESIDENCY: Mr. Bunyan

“There was an old mythologist who was supposed, every time his feet touched the ground, to redouble his strength. When I go about the country … I feel that I regain my strength by just meeting the American people.”

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt made this statement at Boise, Idaho, last week the “mythologist” to whom he referred was presumably the giant, Antaeus, whom Hercules defeated by lifting him off the ground and strangling him. Even more justifiably, he might have compared himself to a mythical hero with whom his listeners in the Northwest would have been more familiar—the lumberjack giant, Paul Bunyan, who spanned the Rocky Mountains in one stride, left lakes in his footprints and lit his pipe with fir trees.

The President spent a week roving through the vast forests and high mountains of the most heroic terrain in the U. S. as though he had on Bunyan’s boots. Bonneville Dam, 170 ft. high, 1,250 ft. long is being built by War Department engineers complete with staircases as well as two electric elevators for traveling salmon.

At this appropriate place, making the major speech of his tour, the President declared that Federal projects like Bonneville make for decentralization of government, enlarged on the merits of “planning from the bottom up.” Said he: “Under our laws the President submits to the Congress an annual budget—a budget which, by the way, we expect to have definitely balanced by the next fiscal year. . . . Instead of spending, as some nations do, half their national income in piling up armaments … we in America are wiser in using our wealth on projects like this which will give us more wealth, better living and greater happiness for our children.” He ended his address by saying: “I’m going to press a button and that will set everything going.” He pressed, flood-lamps lighted on the speaker’s stand. Bonneville’s first power unit was in operation.

¶ In Seattle he lingered two nights and a day at the unpretentious house of his son-in-law, John Boettiger, publisher of William Randolph Hearst’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer, played with his grandchildren Curtis and Eleanor Dall, and their Irish setters, Jack and Jill. Next day, his seven-league footsteps began again.

¶ In Victoria, B. C. the President received a 21 gun salute, lunch at Government House, cheers from a crowd of 20,000.

¶ Near Tacoma he inspected Fort Lewis.

¶ Back on the special train, he stopped at Grand Coulee Dam, which will eventually be 550 ft. high, 4,300 ft. long, will cost $181,101,000, (not counting $208,500,000 for irrigation canals),will impound a reservoir almost big enough for Paul Bunyan to bathe in. Said the President: ”My head is full of figures and the easiest way to describe the figures is that this is the largest structure so far as anyone knows that has ever been undertaken by man.”

¶ In Montana, Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler who helped wreck the President’s Court Plan last winter, unlike Wyoming’s Anti-Court Plan Democratic Senator Joseph C. O’Mahoney (TIME, Oct. 4), did not race to board the Presidential special. Instead, from California, he telegraphed his regret that he could not be on hand to welcome the President to his State. At Fort Peck, largest earth dam in the world as Grand Coulee is the largest concrete—the President amiably gave credit to Senator James E. Murray and Representative James F. O’Connor and Jerry J. O’Connell for helping to develop Montana’s water-resources, but Senator Wheeler was not mentioned.

¶ As the Presidential train rolled into Minnesota a five-foot fiery KKK cross blazed near the railroad tracks.

¶ In St. Paul Mr. Roosevelt aimed a punch at the pre-Black Supreme Court because it “knocked out” AAA and NRA. Said he: “You, the people of Minnesota . . . are not wild-eyed radicals. You believe in a constitutional democracy as I do.”