THE PRESIDENCY: Stags in June

One day last week several score plump, giggling ladies of a certain age risked their lives riding across the ruffled waters of Chesapeake Bay aboard a small tender. The Senate Ladies Club and a collection of wives of the Cabinet and of ex-officials (among them Widow Woodrow Wilson), were off on a jaunt to that sanctum of male Democratic leisure, the Jefferson Islands Club some 20 miles southeast of Annapolis. They had a look through the rambling clubhouse, traipsed over the 34-acre island on which it stands and viewed the Club’s 136-acre duck-hunting preserve. After a jolly luncheon at the clubhouse, they returned to Annapolis with a solid first-hand knowledge of the place where most of their husbands will spend this week end, for Franklin Roosevelt last week made an extraordinary decision.

Officials of the select club called on the President, who has been a member since its foundation eight years ago, to ask whether he would not like to go down there for a weekend of political conferences as he has before (TIME, July 22, 1935 et ante). And if so, what Party leaders would he like invited? The President beamed. Every Democrat in Congress is a Party leader, let all (407) be invited, including the nine male members of the Cabinet. That would be a big party, but they could manage it by holding a three-day week end. There are only 21 beds including the President’s in the clubhouse, but they could be reserved for the leaders among leaders. The garden variety of Congressmen could go out in batches of 130 or so a day, have a good time baking in the sun, trapshooting, fishing, swimming, relaxing in the julep room and basking in the Roosevelt smile.

No effort was made to conceal the fact that this mass outing had any other than one principal purpose: to bring back to Washington a Party more united in support of Franklin D. Roosevelt. For by last week the President himself had registered the fact which observers had noted: that although he has not quarreled with his Party leaders, a rift has opened between them. First major cause of that rift was his Supreme Court enlargement proposal, which many did not like. Last week Washington was still shaking its head over the sharp words of the report with which the majority of the Senate Judiciary Committee, shaped by seven Democratic Senators, rebuffed him and his bill. Second major Congressional grievance against the President was his failure to use his official prestige against sit-down strikes, and his acquiescence in the development of the present strike situation. Behind these were older grievances, such as his planning his legislative program without so much as a by-your-leave to his Congressional leaders.

But last week it became obvious that someone had finally had the nerve to tell him of the blunt talk going on in the cloakrooms at the Capitol, of followers who accused him of everything from aspirations for a third term, to a desire to promote Son James for President. He needed no eyeglasses to see for himself how his own majority leader, Senator Joseph T. Robinson (president of the Jefferson Islands Club), was on a rampage over the relief bill (see below). With his three-day propinquity and personality he hoped to close the political gap before it was too late, and all Washington was on its toes to see how successful he would be.

¶ “To understand a man best one must talk to his most recently divorced wife. I hope Mrs. Roosevelt won’t misunderstand that. And so I shall talk to some men, ‘Brain Trusters’ perhaps, who were associated with him until recently.” So said self-exiled German Author Emil Ludwig as he arrived in Manhattan and announced that, just as he had written a life of Napoleon “without battles,” he intended to write a biography of Franklin Roosevelt “without taxes.” Said he further: “It is difficult to write about such a great character who is leading silent revolution. He is the most loved and most hated man in the U. S. It will be the most dangerous book I have ever written.”

¶ To a Federal District judgeship in northern Ohio, the President appointed Frank Le Blond Kloeb, Congressman from Celina, Ohio for the last four years. Only 47, Judge Kloeb will fit the President’s plan for rejuvenating the Judiciary. But Judge Kloeb happens to be a declared opponent of the President’s Supreme Court Plan.

¶ At press conference the President, still stepping warily around labor questions, finally deemed it time to say something. He said he thought that common sense dictates that a man making a contract verbally should be willing to put his name to it. That was just plain common sense, not a law. But even this cautious statement of his views proved an embarrassment to the special steel strike board appointed by Madam Secretary Perkins (see p. 11).

¶ Getting in practice for this week’s three-day stag party, the President motored out one evening to attend an almost-stag party at Oxon Hill Manor, the Maryland home of Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles. Only woman present was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (in charge of Public Health) Josephine Roche. The other diners were 24 members of his sub-Cabinet, Assistant and Under Secretaries of all the Departments who tendered him their annual dinner.