Sure Symptoms

Scrofula, in the middle ages, was called the King's Evil, because the touch of a royal finger, generally accompanied by the gift of gold coin bearing an angel's likeness, was supposed to cure that disease. But no textbook on pathology describes the ailment which Washingtonians sometimes refer to as ''the disease of Presidents." Neither gold coins nor Presidential touch cures it, for it is something that Presidents themselves contract. Last week as newshawks filed into a White House press conference they found Franklin Roosevelt looking rather brighter-eyed than usual. He began to talk with vigor, paused to laugh sharply, taking a shrewd thrust at his critics, then continued, making his points vigorously. He was giving newshawks better copy than he had given them in months, but the head of more than one newshawk, bending over his note pad, shook slowly from side to side while its owner murmured. "He's got it, all right-- the disease of Presidents."

Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover both suffered severely from the disease of Presidents before they left the White House. Origin of the ailment is Presidential isolation from ordinary human contacts. It is aggravated by the fact that in order to get aids to carry out their policies, Presidents naturally surround themselves with advisers who admire them and sympathize with all their aims. Symptoms of the disease in the sufferer are 1) a growing impatience and resentment of criticism, 2) a feeling more or less openly expressed that he is being persecuted by men with unworthy motives, 3) a determination to believe what he wants to believe.

In recent months various newshawks have more than once thought they detected signs of the disease of Presidents in Franklin Roosevelt. Last week most of them were sure. The middling-sized businessmen who compose the rank & file of the Chamber of Commerce--who for more than a year have opposed many aspects of the New Deal, but who, for diplomatic reasons, have previously been kept by their tycoon leaders from expressing their feelings--had finally ridden roughshod over those who counseled them to speak softly, had passed a set of resolutions bluntly objecting to the Administration's banking, utilities and social security bills as well as AAA and Franklin Roosevelt's plan for extending NRA for two years (see p. 63). Franklin Roosevelt had already snubbed them by sending no message to their meeting. To his newshawks he now cut loose, rubbed the nose of the Chamber of Commerce in the dust, made it the butt of many a biting quip. His chief points:

1) So-called business organizations, such as the Chamber, were apt to misrepresent the businessmen they claim to speak for.

2) Businessmen can be pretty generally relied on to oppose any measure for social betterment--he remembered how some years ago after a fire in a New York factory, businessmen had lobbied in the New York legislature to prevent passage of a factory inspection law.

3) The most interesting thing to him, he said scathingly, was that the only feeling the Chamber showed for the hardships of the unemployed and the aged poor was expressed in a few passing generalities to the effect that Chambermen did not really enjoy seeing old people starve.

4) The tycoons of Secretary Roper's Business Advisory Council, who called on him to present a report, had, he said, pretty well approved the principles of his program, unlike the carping critics of the Chamber.

5) As evidence that the Chambermen had been meanly partisan and did not represent the opinion of businessmen he read with slow emphasis from a clipping in which Francis E. Powell, head of the American Chamber of Commerce in London, expressed astonishment that U. S. business should make a "stubborn fight" on the New Deal.

P: Chairman John Jackson McSwain of the House Military Affairs Committee also felt the sting of the President's fretfulness last week. In February, during executive hearings before the Committee, Brigadier General Charles Evans Kilbourne, then Chief of War Plans Division, advanced a plan for seven air defense centres, observing that the one near Canada could be "camouflaged" as an "intermediate station for transcontinental flights." Brigadier General Frank Maxwell Andrews, Chief of General Headquarters Air Force, had declared that in case of war, certain British islands off the U. S. might have to be seized. By a clerical blunder, these sub rosa military hypotheses were printed with testimony heard in open session, vastly to the interest of the Canadian Legation.

Curtly last week President Roosevelt informed Chairman McSwain that the Generals' views were neither his nor the nation's, that should the affair be repeated, he would pre-censor all army testimony before Congress. Mr. McSwain humbly apologized for the blunder.

P: After an informal dinner for 70, at which Senator Russell of Georgia and Governor Blanton Winship of Puerto Rico (also a Georgian) were guests, the President and his guests sat down to one of the movie shows which constitute frequent White House entertainment. It began with a newsreel. Suddenly a tousled man flashed on the screen. "The trouble with the people in Washington is that they have had common sense educated out of them," he cried. Senator Russell and Governor Winship began to laugh. Franklin Roosevelt let out a hearty roar: that Georgia's recalcitrant Governor Talmadge should tear the New Deal to shreds in the White House itself!

P: To the American Society of Orthodontists in Manhattan, Elizabeth McDowell, professor of speech at Columbia University, declared that Franklin Roosevelt's broadcasting was of unusual quality because his mouth is "built for sound"--wide jaw, low, wide, not too flat palatal arch, a tongue as wide as the arch. Miss McDowell declined to describe Mrs. Roosevelt's oral acoustics.

P: To White House cameramen, Press Secretary Steve Early announced that in future no candid camera pictures of the President would be permitted. Reason: at the opening of the baseball season the President had to take great pains not to let a cameraman catch him popping peanuts into his mouth, was caught nonetheless and for several days the White House was besieged with letters saying that it was not dignified for the President to eat peanuts.

P: Though the President does not like criticism from Business, observers credited him with taking pains not to give Business too much offense. Soon the new Federal Communications Commission will begin a $750,000 investigation, instigated by Montana's sharpshooting Senator Burton Kendall Wheeler, of huge American Telephone & Telegraph Co. Were a ruthless, inquisitorial Pecora hired as the Commission's special counsel, Business would have shuddered. Instead, former Governor Oliver Max Gardner of North Carolina, a conservative liberal who now has a rich corporate law practice, was persuaded by the President last week to take the job. With Max Gardner's name at the head lending an air of conservatism, a staff of sharp young legal assistants will dig into A. T. & T. looking for dirt.

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