40-Hour Steel

Did Franklin Roosevelt still hold the job he held 20 years ago, he would last week have had a problem on his hands. Instead that problem was on the hands of Charles Edison, son of the late great Thomas, but the change made little difference. Mr. Edison as Assistant Secretary of the Navy took his problem to the White House where he and his predecessor pored over it together. The elements of this problem were:

1) The Walsh-Healy Act, which requires all manufacturers who contract to supply the Federal Government with $10,000 or more of goods to certify that such goods are produced under a 40-hour week.

2) The fact that the steel industry, operating on a 44-hour week and 82% of capacity, has so far offered bids for only 7,000,000 lb. out of a total of 25,000,000 lb. of steel required by the Navy for warship construction.

3) An unpleasant choice between stopping construction of six destroyers and three submarines in Government Navy yards, or of having Madam Secretary of Labor Perkins (charged with enforcement of the Walsh-Healy Act) declare an emergency and permit the steel companies to supply steel manufactured by 44-hour-a-week workers--thus offending Organized Labor.

A similar problem, about how to get the Navy 2,600,000 lb. of copper developed last December, was solved by finding a loophole in the law: buying copper which had been refined before the law was passed. Navy Men Roosevelt and Edison were also worried, not only because Britain had launched a $7,500,000,000 naval building program but because it was quite possible that Britain might buy 44-hour steel from the U. S. while the U. S. Navy could get no steel. The President had no solution to offer, and next day he put pressure on the steel industry by announcing at his press conference that something must be done to end the deadlock. Mr. Edison consulted Assistant Secretary of Labor Edward McGrady. got a ray of hope when Mr. McGrady called him back to say that TVA had just succeeded in buying $30,000 worth of 40-hour steel from Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corp.--perhaps the steel industry was weakening.

P: From Knoxville to Washington came William Andrew Johnson, 79, in the charge of secret service men. No prisoner was William Andrew but an honored guest, sent for by the President who had read in the newspapers that he was a onetime slave of President Andrew Johnson and his ambition was to meet President Franklin Roosevelt. Hobbling into the White House on an old cane, he hobbled out an hour later with two canes, one of them silver-headed, inscribed "Franklin D. Roosevelt." Said William Andrew to the press: "They let me in and the President had me sit down. I told him about when President Johnson died. I slept with him six days and six nights in Tennessee after he had a stroke. I was only 18 or 19 when he died, but in them days, you know, boys were just like men. . . . President Roosevelt is my kind of white folks. You don't get nervous with a man like that. He's just like Andrew Johnson."

P: "Dear Gill. . . . After what I hope will be a short period of time I count on your returning to national public service." So wrote Franklin Roosevelt last week consenting to the retirement of John Gilbert Winant, chairman of the Social Security Board. At the same time he boosted Board Member Arthur J. Altmeyer to Mr. Winant's job, appointed Murray W. Latimer, now chairman of the Railroad Retirement Board to the vacant place on Social Security.

P: All dressed up along with 1,700 other citizens, President & Mrs. Roosevelt went out to dine in the grand banquet hall of the Mayflower Hotel. It was a testimonial dinner in honor of Postmaster General James Aloysius Farley. The President's personal tribute was an address in which he said: ''History . . . may even add his name to the distinguished list of major prophets. Even as the name of William Jennings Bryan sometimes suggests the arithmetic of 16 to 1, so perhaps the name of Jim Farley will suggest the more modern arithmetic of 46 to 2." Mr. Farley blushed, departed next day for Miami Beach to rest.

P: One afternoon Mrs. Roosevelt stole into the President's regular semiweekly press conference to say good-by to her husband before she motored to Ithaca, N. Y. to attend Cornell University's annual Home & Farm Week. The President looked out of the window at snow falling and told her to telephone if she got caught in a ditch. "All right," said she, "I'll telephone you from the snow drift." "And she would, too," said the President after the door closed. She did not telephone, however. She and Mrs. Henry Morgenthau Jr. drove to Ithaca with a good chauffeur and there she marched in a fashion parade for the benefit of the Home & Farm Weekers, modeling her inauguration gowns (see cut).

P: Following the example of Senator Ashurst who recanted his opposition to increasing the membership of the Supreme Court (see p. 10), the President's eldest son James, now a member of the White House secretariat, traveled to Gardner, Mass. There with voice and delivery startlingly like that of his father (including pronunciation of the "t" in "often"), he publicly urged that Massachusetts ratify the Child Labor Amendment, reversing his stand of two years ago.

P: Son Franklin Jr. after five weeks in Florida recuperating from sinus infection which invalided him last November, returned to the White House cured, bringing his fiancee Ethel du Pont. No sooner had they arrived than Fiancee Ethel came down with acute appendicitis. The Roosevelts, after telephoning her family in Wilmington, called a naval ambulance, shot her into Emergency Hospital a block from the White House where she was successfully operated on by Commander Morton Willcutts.

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