National Affairs: Balls

The White House birthday party began with a clam cocktail, ended with a modest fruit cake with 21 candles. “In our family,” grinned Mrs. Roosevelt, “they never go beyond 21.” With only a few of the family present—Elliott and his second wife and Anna Roosevelt Boettiger— President Franklin D. Roosevelt thus unostentatiously observed the end of his 53rd year of life. But out in the night over every horizon, wherever the U. S. flag flew, 4,000,000 of the President’s fellow-citizens were marking his birthday with a huge celebration. Communities staged over 7,000 Birthday Balls, twice as many as last year when $1,000,000 was raised for Georgia Warm Springs Foundation. This year’s proceeds were to be split between local infantile paralysis relief (70%) and poliomyelitis research (30%).

In Little America, Admiral Byrd blasted a greeting on the Jacob Ruppert’s whistle. Five hundred celebrants at Ketchikan, Alaska waded through snowdrifts for a dance. Fun-loving Puerto Ricans decided to regard the occasion as a saint’s festival, knocked off for a whole week. Convicts at the Illinois State penitentiary in Joliet had their work day reduced from eight hours to two.

In Miami the guest of honor was Carpenter Thomas Armour, who grappled for Assassin Guiseppe Zangara’s revolver in Bay Front Park two years ago. Price of admission to the ball held at Kealakekua, Territory of Hawaii, was $1. A ringside table at the Colony Club celebration in Tampa cost $250. A feature of the holiday at Mt. Carmel, Ill. was a contest to decide who was the town’s most unpopular citizen. A triple wedding was solemnized at the Monroe, Wis. affair.

Chicago turned out the greatest number of ballgoers at a single celebration: 35,000 at the International Amphitheater of the Union Stock Yards. New York’s celebration was high in the matter of pageantry and heterogeneity of attendance. Park Avenue rubbed elbows with Avenue A when 15,000 debutantes, ward heelers, American Legionaries, professional party-trotters, bearded Henry Latham Doherty, head of the national Ball Committee, and Mrs. Sarah Delano Roosevelt mingled in the five ballrooms of the Waldorf-Astoria. A “Pageant of America,” staged by Ned Wayburn, began with Actress Selena Royle as the Atlantic Ocean, attended by Miss Lorraine Fielding as “Seaweed.” They were followed by Dancer Ruth St. Denis as “Cotton,” Actress Peggy (“I Love Brooklyn”) Wood as “Grapes,” and Mary Virginia Sinclair, daughter of Harry Ford Sinclair, as “Oil.”

“If any one had any doubts of the continued personal popularity of President Roosevelt,” generously admitted the Republican New York Herald Tribune, “the enthusiastic nation-wide celebration of his 53rd birthday ought to end them.”

The resourceful young men of Carl Byoir & Associates of Manhattan were pleased with this crowning accolade. They tottered wearily home to sleep the clock around after one of the greatest mass promotion jobs since the War. Day & night for two months the Byoir publicity agency had plugged the President’s Ball stunt. Almost every newspaper publisher in the nation had been asked to whoop up the affair in his community. Placards had been stuck in store windows from coast-to-coast, commercial radio programs had donated precious moments, newsreels had done more than their bit. Neatest trick of all was effected by Western Union and Postal Telegraph. Thousands of people went to telegraph offices, paid 25¢ to have their names added to the huge roll at the bottom of a gigantic birthday greeting sent to the President. Western Union and Postal sent the names along free, turned every penny received over to the ball fund.