THE PRESIDENCY: Birthday

John Roosevelt, the President’s youngest, sprinted into Memorial Hall one day last week to register along with 1,021 other Harvard freshmen. He took a quick look at his room in Mower Hall in the Yard, then told newshawks “I have to hurry,” before he climbed into a Hyde Park-bound plane.

Less precipitately, more than 60 other ”Hyde Park Roosevelts” were converging toward the family seat above the Hudson. All had one purpose: to be present at the 80th birthday of the matriarch of the clan, Sara Delano Roosevelt. At the birthday luncheon, from her seat beside her only child, she could see all her five grandchildren, three of her great grandchildren. Mr. & Mrs. Norman Hezekiah Davis, Mr. & Mrs. Henry Morgenthau Sr., Col. & Mrs. Edward Mandell House were also on hand to wish the smiling dowager happy birthday. The President presented her with a fur motor robe, proposed a toast and was given the first frosty wedge cut by his mother from her double-decker cake.

Said Mrs. Roosevelt to the Press: “It’s awfully nice to be 80 and I’m awfully glad to be so well and strong.”

¶ Before President Roosevelt left Newport and the America’s Cup races, he shouted over the rail of the Nourmahal to newshawks, who had had some rough sailing keeping up with him: “I hear some of you boys lost your vocabularies . . . .” Presidential laughter boomed out over the water as he added: “Never mind, I’ll try to find them for you on the way back.”

¶ At Hyde Park the President’s week was chiefly devoted to getting the textile strike settled (see p. 11). But he found time to listen to the woes of the executive committee of the U. S. Conference of Mayors which, led by New York’s LaGuardia, arrived with a plan for coordination of Federal and local relief expenditures during the coming winter.

¶ Each & every reporter at Hyde Park was aware that General Hugh Samuel Johnson had at last cooked his goose with the President. In his speech on the textile strike week before, NRA’s Johnson had denounced the strikers in such violent terms that Labor swore it would have the General’s scalp. In the same address General Johnson sealed his official doom, as far as the President was concerned, when he said: “During the whole intense [NRA] experience I have been in constant touch with that old counselor, Judge Louis Brandeis. As you know, he thinks that anything that is too big is bound to be wrong. He thinks NRA is too big, and I agree with him.”

Vastly displeased was the President with General Johnson’s public claim to intellectual kinship with Supreme Court Justice Brandeis, before whom the National Recovery Act must sooner or later come for adjudication.

¶ Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt on businesswomen, in her weekly Beautyrest broadcast: “Women might just as well make up their minds to keep their charm and womanly personalities for their homes and to disabuse the minds of their competitors of the old idea that women are only ‘ladies in business.’ “