Parties & Men

Vice President & Mrs. John Nance ("Cactus Jack") Garner last week dined at the White House (he in white tie & tails). Contrary to report, Cactus Jack likes the party that the President gives him every year. He attended in 1934, 1935, 1937, 1938. Top members of Congress (Borah, Sheppard, McNary, Sabath, Rayburn, Boland, etc. etc.) were there. But local chit-chat artists were truly swamped two nights later when the Roosevelts entertained the 76th Congress, swamped by the new faces presented and their political implications. At the Congressional Reception, Jim Farley held court in a receiving line of his own.

Many of the Congressional guests were visiting the White House for the first time that night. Many of them were to give Franklin Roosevelt a rough reception the very next evening when the 76th Congress chopped $150,000,000 off their host's Relief Bill (see p. 11).

That chop was the beginning, perhaps, of an Economy Congress. Or perhaps it was the fall of a fresh, young, oat-feeling Congress into the trap of a master politician. Franklin Roosevelt certainly did not worry unduly, knowing that in this era of a Permanently Unbalanced Budget, Congress would have a hard time taking his dare to economize generally--on pensions, Social Security, national defense.

> As if to hammer home the irreducibility of big Government expenditures, the President handed on to Congress a report of the Social Security Board. Mr. Roosevelt warmly approved recommendations that old-age insurance payments be started in 1940 instead of 1942, that coverage be extended to some 16,000,000 uninsured workers. Though this liberalization of benefits would inevitably siphon off some of the eventual $47,000,000,000 reserve, as the Board intended it should, the President avoided direct mention of the reserve or of the Board's advice to stop hiking payroll taxes after 1940.

> The President told Congress that the Government's real-estate holdings (parks, forests, grazing lands) which constitute one-fifth of all the land in U. S., and were exempted from over $91,000,000 in taxes in 1937, would henceforth be supervised by a nine-man interdepartmental board.

> Son Elliott said by radio that: 1) a Texan ought to be elected President soon, and 2) Vice President John Nance Garner is a fine Texan.

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