THE PRESIDENCY: The President’s Week

While Adolf Hitler and Anthony Eden spent last week making history in Europe (see pp. 19, 22), Franklin Delano Roosevelt faced his own major problem,, Recession, by turning lecturer. Sitting in his office chair, directing a pointer at an easel covered with price charts, he expounded his Administration’s theory of price trends: That some are too high, some too low and the U. S. will not have prosperity till they are balanced (see p. 57).

¶ “The winning of one more battle for an underlying farm policy”—thus the President described the new Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 (TIME, Feb. 21), as he squiggled his signature making it law.

¶ To the White House for an unannounced conference went Secretaries Hull & Morgenthau, Vice President Garner, Chairman Pat Harrison of the Senate Finance Committee, Chairman Robert L. Doughton of the House Ways & Means Committee. Reluctantly, President Roosevelt later admitted that they had touched briefly on the subject of war debts. None of the conferees would say anything, but no political wiseman doubted the advice they had given the President: whatever plan was suggested Congress would not like it.

¶ Shaggy Steve Vasilakos, whose peanut stand at the corner of the White House grounds would long ago have been removed by the police had not Mrs. Roosevelt intervened, last week expressed his gratitude. He announced that after 28 years in the U. S. he had finally applied for citizenship.

¶ On Thursday, Franklin Roosevelt, onetime Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Woodrow Wilson, motored to St. John’s Church to attend funeral services for Rear Admiral Gary Travers Grayson, onetime personal physician of Woodrow Wilson.

¶ To succeed his great & good friend Joseph Kennedy, who was last week sworn in as Ambassador to the Court of St. James, the President named a new head of the Maritime Commission: Rear Admiral Emory S. (“Jerry”) Land—once a famed footballer at Annapolis, now 59—who has served on the Commission for one year, is an expert on naval construction and an air-minded (but distant) cousin of Charles Augustus Lindbergh.

¶ With pleasure Franklin Roosevelt put his signature on a bill to advance his No. 1 hobby: legalizing the reproductions of U. S. stamps (if they are considerably bigger or smaller) for the benefit of stamp collectors. Pictures of paper money are still illegal.

¶ At Miami Beach, Sir Charles Higham, Director of British Propaganda during the War, took it on himself to air his opinion of Franklin Roosevelt. His opinion: The President of the United States is “as bold, as ambitious, as demagogic and, had he the chance, would be as dictatorial as Hitler or Mussolini.”

¶ For the first time since he has been President, Franklin Roosevelt paid a winter visit to his mother’s house at Hyde Park. He spent a snowy Sunday driving about his farm.