The Roosevelt Week

Like many a clerk who was auditing his firm's books at the year's end, President Roosevelt spent much of last week studying budget figures scrawled across sheets of paper in his flowing, clerical handwriting. Base figure was $2,600,000,000 for normal Governmental expenditure. He reckoned total Federal income at $3,400,000,000?. What he would do with the marginal billion, whether or not he would ask Congress to appropriate more for relief or recovery projects would remain the President s secret until he delivered his budget speech to Congress this week.

P: By cancelling the annual New Year's reception to the public, the President spared himself an ordeal and gained valuable working time. Only holiday function at the White House was a supper dance given by Mrs. Roosevelt for 300 youngsters and her children night before New Year's Eve.

P: "I deplore the landing of U. S. Marines in Nicaragua, the U. S. military occupation of Haiti. I will not send troops to Cuba under any circumstances, believing that the responsibility for preserving law and order in Cuba should be shared by all American Governments alike. I invite them to exert diplomatic pressure at once to settle the turbulent state of Cuban political affairs."

That was what President Roosevelt did not say in his broadcast address before the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Instead, in the approved circumlocution of diplomacy, the President worded his position on Latin American policy:

"I do not hesitate to say that if I had been engaged in a political campaign as a citizen of some other American Republic I might have been strongly tempted to play upon the fears of my compatriots of that Republic by charging the United States of North America with some form of imperialistic desire for selfish aggrandizement. ... It therefore has seemed clear to me as President that the time has come to supplement and to implement the [nonaggression] declaration of President Wilson by the further declaration that the definite policy of the United States is one opposed to armed intervention.

"The maintenance of Constitutional government in other nations is not a sacred obligation devolving upon the United States alone. The maintenance of law and the orderly processes of government in this hemisphere are the concern of each individual nation within its own borders first of all. It is only if and when the failure of orderly processes affects the other nations of the continent that it becomes their concern; and the point to stress is that in such event it becomes the joint concern of a whole continent in which we are all neighbors."

P: To Mrs. Grace Morrison Poole, president of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the President confidently wrote: "We enter upon the new year with a realization that we have crossed the threshold of a new era. We have the opportunity of improving conditions and making our country a better home, materially and spiritually, for more than 120,000,000 people."

P: To be Minister to the court of Queen Wilhelmina of The Netherlands, President Roosevelt appointed his onetime law partner, Grenville Temple Emmet of Manhattan, great-grandnephew of famed, executed Irish Patriot Robert Emmet.

P: Visitors of the week at the White House were wily little President Manuel L. Quezon of the Philippine Senate and a party of Filipino politicians. Their faction had defeated in the Philippine Legislature the first step toward independence under the Hawes-Cutting Bill. President Roosevelt entertained them at lunch, pleasantly offered to give his earnest attention to any independence plan they might formulate, when they got it written down.

P: A group which did not get to see the President was a crowd of 300 college youths, members of the National Student League and the League for Industrial Democracy, who marched to the White House protesting against war and R. O. T. C. training in schools. Secretary Louis McHenry Howe received their petition. Same day Mrs. Roosevelt received a bunch of roses from another, better-behaved group of 300 collegians. They, student government officers from all over the nation, arrived in busses.

P: After 136 years in business, Roosevelt & Son quit the security business.

P: The President learned that he had received 1,620,000 letters and parcels, 20,000 telegrams since March 4. In December they came in at the rate of 18,000 a day.

P: Last week President Roosevelt was pleased to hear about a luncheon in Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria at which President Bernard F. Gimbel of Gimbel Bros. department store announced the results of a merchandising survey of 40,000 women in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Milwaukee. Eighty-three per cent of the women think the U. S. is on the way out of Depression; over 5% believe they will be better off after the Depression than in their most prosperous years, chiefly because society will benefit from the ''bitter lesson of greed." Over 92% think that society has been benefited by the NRA, that consumers should buy from NRA firms only.

P: The first photograph of the President and his Cabinet, taken some two months ago, was tardily released last week just before it became obsolete. Pictured at President Roosevelt's left was beaming little William Woodin in cloth- topped high laced shoes. On New Year's Day the President with "great sorrow" accepted Secretary of the Treasury Woodin's second offer to resign his post. Near Tucson, Ariz., where none but his immediate family was admitted to his bedside, Mr. Woodin's throat ailment (reputedly cancer) had not sufficiently improved, he thought, to warrant a continuation of his leave of absence. In the White House Oval Room, where he had been sworn in as Undersecretary of the Treasury in November, Henry Morgenthau Jr., 42, was made a full-fledged Secretary of the Treasury in the presence of the Roosevelt and Morgenthau families.

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