The Roosevelt Week

President Roosevelt, who can still find time to enjoy the pleasures and pastimes of the rich, last week boarded Vincent Astor's yacht Nourmahal at Poughkeepsie, steamed down the Hudson and up Long Island Sound to Newport. There, in the midst of a flotilla of pleasure craft valued at a billion dollars, the President planned to remain four days to witness the America's Cup races between British Challenger Endeavour and U. S. Defender Rainbow (see p. 38).

With Secretary of War Bern ashore to observe and report on Rhode Island textile troubles (see p. 22), the President declared a week-end holiday from official business. On Sunday he invited Challenger Thomas Octave Murdoch Sopwith and Defender Harold Stirling Vanderbilt to tea aboard the Nourmahal, chatted about the disappointment of seeing the first race called for time, wished both sides the best of luck and better racing weather the coming week.

P: The Society of Mayflower Descendants of the State of New York bestowed upon President Roosevelt its first annual gold medal for being the "most outstanding Mayflower descendant residing in New York in 1933." More famed for his Dutch ancestry, the President can claim Mayflower descent in 16 lines from no less than ten passengers: Richard Warren, Francis Cook, John Cook, Mr. & Mrs. John Tilley and Elizabeth Tilley, John Howland, Mr. & Mrs. Isaac Allerton and Mary Allerton.

P: At Hyde Park a stream of visitors poured in & out of the President's mother's comfortable country seat: Chairman Pat Harrison of the Senate Finance Committee, who thought that additional taxation could be avoided next year; Utah's Senator King, who wanted the Government to buy more silver; NRAdministrator Johnson, who talked until midnight with the President about pulling NRA off the rocks. Tentative plan: to decentralize NRA's high command into three branches, executive, judicial, legislative.

P: In an all-afternoon chat with Postmaster General Farley, the President learned that state Democratic leaders were complaining because in some Republican districts G. O. P. officials were playing politics with Federal relief money. To the Press the President frankly remarked that the Democrats were equally guilty with the Republicans.

A case in point, Republicans promptly and bitterly complained, was Maine. Final returns from last fortnight's election there were heralded by Postmaster Farley as "proof ample that the New Deal meets with the majority of the people." In winning the first re-election of a Democratic Governor since the Civil War, Louis J. Brann had not let Maine's electorate forget that in the past two years $108,000,000 of Federal money had been pumped into the State, which was five times the Government largess given Republican New Hampshire. The arch-Republican New York Herald Tribune editorialized: "Maine Votes For Santa Claus."

P: Fortnight ago President Roosevelt offered George Akerson, President Hoover's first secretary, a $6,000 job as a member of the Board of Veterans' Appeals (TIME, Sept. 17). Last week Mr. Akerson turned it down because he had obtained another job with "much greater security for my family's future."

P: Wrote Walter Winchell in his "On Broadway" column in the New York Mirror: "They're making, the postage stamps bigger so that when the time comes to put President Roosevelt on it--there'll be room enough for his heart."

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