After Roosevelt, the Rain

Not the thousand eager people roped off in Washington's Union Station, not the small boys who climbed the iron fence, not the trainmen perched on the roof of the train shed, not the photographers and newsreel men nor the assemblage of notables who climbed the gangplank to his private car in order of precedence made President Roosevelt's homecoming a thing of triumph. That triumph was written large across the land in a series of popular welcomes which reduced Washington's reception to peewee proportions.

Wherever any President goes a curious crowd congregates; wherever a politician speaks a good campaign manager can drum up an enthusiastic audience. But the newshawks who followed Franklin Roosevelt across the country had never seen such crowds, had never heard such cheers as greeted him. Through Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois--at every city and hamlet there were people by the railroad tracks. Uninvited thousands drove hundreds of miles across the blistering plains to the places where he was to speak. At night by the lights of desolate country railroad stations, around bonfires in dusty fields beside the tracks, other thousands waited for nothing more than a chance to cheer as ten air-conditioned cars--one of them bearing the sleeping hero--hurtled out of the darkness from the west.

vanished into the darkness to the east. Newshawks playing small-hour poker in the club car heard, and realized that what they heard was not political enthusiasm but hero worship.

How conquering herdes, ancient or modern, feel on their return is seldom a matter of record, but the crowd who saw Franklin Roosevelt's face as he reached Washington might give testimony. He was bronzed and he was smiling--that was a foregone conclusion--but he did not look as he had looked on other occasions, ready to turn figurative handsprings out of sheer exuberance. He did not sparkle. For that there were reasons.

One was heat. When he left his air-cooled railroad car at Glasgow, Mont, to drive 30 dusty miles to the Fort Peck Dam and address 10,000 people, the thermometer stood at 112DEG in the sun. At Devils Lake, N. Dak., before 9 in the morning while the crowd waited for him to leave the train, three people fainted from the heat. Later in the day as he spoke to 25,000 people with a sultry thundercloud overhead, the perspiration ran in streams down his dusty cheeks. At Rochester, Minn., when he spoke at the presentation of a tablet to Drs. Charles and William Mayo, some of the spectators thought that the great Mayo Brothers were weeping. Those who stood closer saw that the rivulets upon their faces were not tears but sweat. Several dozen enthusiastic listeners were taken to the hospital with heat strokes, but the President went on to drive 90 miles to Winona under 110DEG sun.

Yet if heat was hard upon the flesh, drought was harder on the spirit. As he went into the "secondary" drought zone in Montana, Lawrence Westbrook, assist ant to Relief Administrator Harry Hop kins, boarded the train to give him figures: 24 States drought-devastated; 27,000,000 people drought-affected; 25% of the families in Montana and the Dakotas in need of transplanting to better lands; total damage to date $5,000,000,000. Next day in the deeper drought country, the President rode past fields where cattle were munching the last dry straws of a crop that would never be harvested, drove over roads silted with the drifting topsoil of neighboring farms, passed signs which read, "You gave us beer. Now give us water." And, on -the speakers' stand at Devils Lake, leaning forward with his hands braced on the table holding microphones, he said in slow and sombre syllables: "I cannot honestly say that my heart is happy today, because I have seen with my own eyes some of the things that I have been hearing and reading about. . . ." When he reached Washington he was to hear and read still more. The August crop report predicted a corn harvest only two-thirds of normal, 500,000,000 bu. smaller than estimated a month earlier.

There is little pleasure for a conquering hero to find his homeland turned into a half-Sahara. But even passing through the dull, dun, desiccated lands, he was a hero, for after him came RAIN. Within a few hours of his passing, showers followed along his route through Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota. Within three days the heat broke and rain fell, heavy rain, prolonged rain--from Colorado to Kentucky--sopping the dust, promising to save the remnant of this season's crops.

At Green Bay, Wis., President Roosevelt shifted from drought to politics. Even the guidance of his special train through Wisconsin was given over to politics. His conductor was Thomas J. O'Malley of the Chicago & North Western, 47 years in railroading and father of three Democratic sons, the eldest of whom sits in Congress as a Milwaukee representative. But not for that reason alone was the twinkling-eyed, 67-year-old conductor given the honor of punching tickets on the Presidential Special. That same November election in 1932 which sent Franklin Roosevelt to the White House and made Son O'Malley a Congressman, also made Father O'Malley an officeholder for the first time in his life. He was elected Lieutenant Governor of the sovereign and progressive State of Wisconsin. For the last 19 months Lieutenant Governor O'Malley has divided his time between punching tickets and pounding his gavel on the rostrum of Wisconsin's Senate. Last week he proved his willingness to do both for the New Deal.

When the President finally drove up to the White House with his daughter Anna and Louis McHenry Howe he did not return to the comfortable home which he had left. Before his departure he told the country that he had no fear that builders would erect "a replica of the Kremlin" on the White House grounds merely because he had given them authority to make modest alterations in the White House offices during his absence. When he returned there was nothing left standing save three of those offices' outer walls, and during his first night in the White House he slept to the tattoo of pneumatic drills demolishing one of the remaining walls. His desk was set in the Oval Room, where Abraham Lincoln's once stood. There he settled down to attack the great problem he had seen with his own eyes, the grim reality of Drought.

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