Taxes, Spies & Frankfurters

After putting his foot in his mouth while speaking to the press during the Washington Disarmament Conference, President Warren Gamaliel Harding, to save diplomatic embarrassment, ordered that correspondents must put their questions to him in writing. Calvin Coolidge perfected this technique by inventing "a White House spokesman" to whom his words must be attributed. Last week when Franklin Roosevelt wanted to read U. S. Business and Labor a lecture on "sabre-rattling" (see p. 63), comparing them to the bad boys of European politics in a way that might have provoked protests from "friendly nations," the "spokesman" reappeared. He also touched on taxes. It was deliberate distortion, he said, for Administration critics to say that Federal taxes are heavier than they were two, three, five years ago.

Very next day, Mr. Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury officially reported on U. S. tax receipts for fiscal 1938. Final tabulation showed them to have been $5,659,000,000--an all-time high, topping even post-War 1920's record $5,408,000,000, soaring above 1929's $2,939,000,000, 1933's $1,620,000,000, 1937's $4,653,000,000.

> U. S. military circles were surprised and not entirely pleased when the President, after talking with U. S. District Attorney Lamar Hardy of Manhattan, suddenly cracked out on the subject of spies. The U. S., said the President, was woefully under-equipped for counterespionage--for tab-keeping on foreign agents in the U. S. (not for spying abroad, in which the U. S. never did specialize). The Army & Navy intelligence services must be strengthened, said the President. This announcement synchronized misleadingly with the State Department's deadline for the registration of commercial, legal and publicity agents for foreign powers within U.S. borders.

> This week the State Department made public a list of 106 registrants, mostly innocuous advertising and publicity agents hired for legitimate trade boosting. Examples: Batten, Barton, Durstine, & Osborn (Dunlop Tires), J. Walter Thompson (Guinness Stout), branch offices of European steamship lines. A Manhattan public relations specialist, Hamilton Wright, reported drawing $2,000 a month from Egypt, $1,000 from Czechoslovakia, $1,250 from Italy (some of his advertising had been placed through a firm in which Presidential Son Elliott had been a partner). Rev. Dr. Alexander Cairns of Bloomfield, N. J. deposed that in seven months he had delivered 138 lectures at $25 apiece on behalf of Japan, which also employed Washington Lawyer Frederick Moore at $500 a month. Piquant were the names of Spain's U. S. interpreters: for the Rightists. William S. Culbertson, onetime U. S. Ambassador to Chile and brother of Paul Culbertson, assistant chief of the State Department's Division of European Affairs; for the Loyalists, the New Republic's Contributing Editor William P. Mangold, who got a number of Congressmen in trouble with their constituents early this year by persuading them to sign a greeting to the Loyalist Cortes (TIME, Feb. 14).

> To Hyde Park went Professor & Mrs. Felix Frankfurter for a visit. Franklin Roosevelt warned the press not to go "out on a limb" by predicting Dr. Frankfurter's appointment to the Supreme Court: this was just the Frankfurters' "annual visit." Staying off the limb, some observers wondered whether Host Roosevelt was perhaps explaining to faithful (except on the Court Plan) Felix Frankfurter why he could not be appointed.

> ARCHITECTURAL FORUM published rough plans, which Franklin Roosevelt sketched and initialed last February and Architect Henry J. Toombs of Atlanta trued up, for a five-room, one-story ''dream house" on the President's lately purchased, 70-acre tract next to his mother's estate at Hyde Park. In his rendered perspective drawings, Architect Toombs respectfully subscribed himself only as an "associate" of Architect Roosevelt (unlicensed). Comparison of Mr. Roosevelt's sketches with Mr. Toombs's finished plans revealed a fairly high degree of competence in the amateur, only minor improvements by the professional. Mr. Roosevelt had placed his bedroom windows badly, had left little wall space for beds. Mr. Toombs corrected this, slightly increased the size and improved the shape of these two rooms (to 13 ft. by 14 ft. and 13 ft. by 19 ft). He took the icebox out of a remote kitchen corner, cut down a huge servant's bathroom to provide a servant's closet, enlarged the living room a trifle (to 20 ft. by 36 ft). Neither amateur nor professional provided more than one closet for two master bedrooms. Facing west over the Hudson toward Father Divine, the "dream house" may be ready for occupancy in time for Franklin Roosevelt to hear the election returns there, unless he outlaws from it radios as well as telephones.

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