Smiling Right

To keep the conservative lions from growling any louder than usual has been one of President Roosevelt's prime political purposes since the Congressional campaign throughout the land moved to the front page of the newspapers. Although a new tax program is well in the making at the Treasury, not a word has been officially said as to where the levies will fall. Although Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins is straining to perfect relief plans for the coming winter, nothing has been definitely revealed of how many billions he will spend or in what manner. Plans for NRA's reorganization are being pushed forward--in official obscurity. Brain Truster Rexford Guy Tugwell had been discreetly sent on a junket to Rome (see p. 16); he is not due back in the U. S. until a week after Election Day. Voters everywhere were hearing a great deal about the Administration's past record but as little as possible about its future plans.

Last week President Roosevelt took more positive steps to placate conservative opinion up to Nov. 6. In one day he smiled thrice in a way to captivate the gentlemen of the Right: 1) He denied that he had ever given Upton Sinclair. Mahatma of the West Coast millennium, a promise of any statement in his support (see p. 11). 2) He declared that he was giving no consideration to plans for substituting a central bank for the Federal Reserve System. 3) He went before the American Bankers Association and. after listening to a conciliatory speech by Manhattan Banker Jackson Eli Reynolds (delivered, according to report, by White House request), said some nice things about the profit system (see p. 55) and some day letting the lending business return to the bankers.

Two days later a potent delegation of bankers accompanied by Francis M. Law, retiring ABA president, went to the White House to thank the President for his kind words. Banker Law. arriving by taxi, found that he had no money in his pocket. A correspondent of the Wall Street Journal lent him 25-c- and impishly put an account of the transaction on the Dow-Jones news ticker. Before the delegation was ushered into the Presidential office Mr. Roosevelt had got the news from his ticker. He met Banker Law grinning. The New York Herald Tribune solemnly quoted the President of the United States as saying: "I hear you are broke and are begging on the White House doorstep." That noon, having smiled warmly upon the Right, President Roosevelt quietly had his old friend and close adviser, Professor Felix Frankfurter, to lunch at the White House. They discussed "general" questions.

P: At No. 49 East 65th St., Manhattan, where painters were freshening the iron fence and balconies of Franklin Roosevelt's town house,* a sign was last week hung out reading "For Rent, Alfred E. Schermerhorn, Inc." An enterprising reporter, posing as a possible tenant, had the real estate agent take him through the building's 14 rooms and five baths, was told that the rental asked was $6,000 a year, that the oil burning furnace in the basement would not cost more than $800 a year to operate, that the electricity bill would not run over $25 a month, that he could have a three-and-one-half-year lease or longer--running until well after the 1936 election.

P: A large audience including Chief Justice Hughes sat in the inner court of the new $11,000,000 Department of Justice building and waited 15 minutes until President Roosevelt and Postmaster General Farley drove up. Then the building was dedicated. The President lent an attentive ear while Attorney General Cummings declared:

"In saluting this magnificent edifice, let us indulge the hope that it may always house what is truly a Department of Justice, and be a temple in which judgment, compassion and understanding may ever find habitation and in which that fire which burns at the heart of the world and whose name is Justice may never die."

P: Hervey Allen (Anthony Adverse), Pearl Buck (The Good Earth), Frederick Lewis Allen (Only Yesterday), Frederic G. Melcher (The Publishers' Weekly), William Warder Norton (National Association of Book Publishers), and E. S. McCawley (American Booksellers Association) last week went to the White House bearing gifts: 200 books published in the past four years, an addition to the 500 volumes with which the publishers started a White House library four years ago (TIME, April 7, 1930). Mrs. Roosevelt entertained the delegation at luncheon. Later all went to the President's office where the books were laid out on a table and the President had Mrs. Buck and Messrs. Allen and Allen autograph their contributions. Said Hervey Allen: "I always wondered what became of the old postoffice pens--they come back to the White House."

Some of the books offered by the publishers for Presidential reading: biographies of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Richelieu, Andrew Jackson, Queen Elizabeth, Grover Cleveland. Theodore Roosevelt, Marie Antoinette; autobiographies of Clarence Darrow, Lincoln Steffens, Alice B. Toklas; Beveridge and the Progressive Era, The War of Independence, The Grain Race, Stars Fell on Alabama, Of Thee I Sing, poems of Archibald MacLeish, Diego Rivera's Portrait of America, The New Dealers, Farewell to Reform, Vols. 3, 4 & 5 of Mark Sullivan's Our Times, Yachts Under Sail, Tobacco Road, Obscure Destinies, Union Square, One More Spring, Rabble in Arms, Road to Nowhere, Christmas Tree in the Woods.

* The property is owned by his mother whose own town house, No. 47 East 65th St., adjoins. A sliding mirror in the President's upstairs living room connects the two houses.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.