THE PRESIDENCY: Button Shoes & Camisoles

The sharp eye of President Roosevelt last week focused upon women’s high button shoes. Along with rubbers, corsets, kimonos, camisoles, stockings, dresses, cotton drawers, aprons, bloomers, lingerie, hairpins, princess slips and plug tobacco, he found button shoes listed as an item used by the Department of Labor in calculating its periodic Cost-of-Living index. The President needed no style expert to inform him that such footwear was now an anachronism even in the back-country districts. Suspecting that Madam Secretary Perkins’ statisticians were behind the times on other articles in daily use, he ordered a complete revision and modernization of all the hundreds of items which go into the computation. This order was prime news for all Federal employes whose salaries rise and fall in direct ratio to the fluctuation of the Department of Labor’s index.

¶ A cold in the head and a touch of fever confined President Roosevelt to his bedroom and study in the White House.

¶ A stubborn Republican who was resisting President Roosevelt’s effort to turn him out of office was revealed last week in squat, bearded Federal Trade Commissioner William E. Humphrey. Appointed as a stand-patter by President Coolidge in 1925, Commissioner Humphrey was reappointed by President Hoover in 1931. President Roosevelt wrote him two months ago that his resignation would be acceptable in the make-over of the Government for the New Deal. Commissioner Humphrey replied that he had no idea of getting out, that no criticism had ever been made of his work, that the President had no right to tamper with independent government agencies. Even if he gets Commissioner Humphrey out, the President must by law appoint a Republican to the vacancy. Philip Fox La Follette, onetime Governor of Wisconsin. Insurgent young brother of Insurgent young Senator “Bob”‘ La Follette, was supposed to be in line for the job.

¶ President Roosevelt appointed William Walter McDowell, Montana politician and mine operator, to be Minister to the Irish Free State.