THE PRESIDENCY: Legend

¶Into Lake Superior fled a deer. At it Winnebijou flung stones. Stones missed deer, but up sprang some islands, which centuries later White Man named Apostle Islands. The President was said to have discussed, last week, with Mrs. Coolidge the pros and cons of visiting the scene of this Chippewa legend.¶With newsmen, the President’s only weighty discussion concerned the Kellogg multilateral treaty. While no longer permitting newsmen to speak of him as a mere “spokesman” for himself, the President still refuses to be quoted directly, thus making it easier for him to deny anything which newsmen might have thought they heard him say. Nonetheless, the ablest newsmen of the U. S. last week were certain they understood Mr. Coolidge’s views on the treaty. This is what the President thinks: the treaty is good, but does not in any sense whatsoever constitute any reason whatsoever for the curtailment of U. S. arms in any degree or respect whatsoever. U. S. soldiers, sailors, marines, guns, battleships, mules, rifles, submarines, forts, gas, are purely defensive. The Kellogg treaty in no way invades a nation’s right to defend itself or to prepare to defend itself as much as it may please. “Big Navy” men were relieved. British newspapers expressed more hotly than ever their belief that the treaty was conceived in partisan politics and baptised with U. S. hypocrisy.¶Mrs. Coolidge shopped in Superior for a pair of bedroom slippers. One of her red ones had been chewed up by Rob Roy.* That old collie had inadvertently been left in the Brule bedroom while the Coolidge family watched a cinema on the dining room porch. Mrs. Coolidge, kind, told reporters how she had later caught Rob Roy under the bed, but had lacked the heart to chastise him with the un-chewed red slipper.

* A month ago Columnist Heywood Broun summed up his political emotion in the sentence: “Anything to get that collie out of the White House.”