Roosevelt on Roosevelt

Roosevelt on Roosevelt

Where would Theodore Roosevelt stand today on the New Deal? Those of his children who are politically articulate and most of his Republican followers have no doubt that he would have stood militantly against it. His fifth cousin Franklin, for whom many a backcountryman was said to have voted in 1932 under the impression that he was again voting for T. R., last week indicated his belief that the 26th President of the U. S. would today be supporting the 32nd President.

The occasion was the dedication of a $3,500,000 Theodore Roosevelt Memorial, a new granite wing to the American Museum of Natural History opposite Manhattan's Central Park. Erected to commemorate Roosevelt the explorer and Roosevelt the naturalist, the man who rode the plains of the West, penetrated the River of Doubt, hunted through the African jungle, the new and still empty museum heard more at its dedication of Roosevelt the statesman. Franklin Roosevelt filled his address with T. R. quotations, most of which needed little stretching to apply to the New Deal. In his first message to Congress Roosevelt I had written:

"The most vital problem with which this country, and, for that matter, the whole civilized world, has to deal, is the problem which has for one side the betterment of social conditions, moral and physical, in large cities, and for the other side the effort to deal with that tangle of far-reaching questions which we group together when we speak of 'labor.' . . ."

"We still remember," declared Roosevelt II last week, "how these whom he denounced with righteous wrath winced under the stigma of such flashing epithets as 'malefactors of great wealth,' 'the wealthy criminal class' and the 'lunatic fringe.' He had a gift for pungent phrases. . . ."

Two other speakers, New York's Governor Lehman and New York City's Mayor LaGuardia, New Dealers both, piled quotation on quotation, leaving no doubt whatever that Roosevelt I, like a Christian before Christ, had blessed the New Deal 20 years before its birth. Listening in silence on the platform and in reserved seats below, sat a phalanx of Roosevelt I's descendants, good Republicans all. including Alice Longworth. But the only rebuke offered by the children of Roosevelt I to Roosevelt II was made by Theodore Roosevelt Jr. who, in the course of personal anecdotes, smilingly remarked that those who had just said such kind things of his father "were not on the same side of the fence with him when he was alive.''

P: On his way to Manhattan, the President stopped at Newark to sit in a meeting of New Jersey's National Emergency Council presided over by Charles Edison, son of the late great inventor. Said the President in an informal speech: "I want to say just one word about the usefulness of what we are doing. There is a grand word that is going around, 'Boondoggling.' It is a pretty good word. If we can boondoggle ourselves out of this Depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the American people for years to come."

P: From conferences whose aim was to find a way out of the muddle left by the abolition of AAA, President Roosevelt took time out for two gracious acts. He dropped in unexpectedly to chat with the directors of the General Federation of Women's Clubs who were having tea with his wife at the White House. He sent to Congress a special message urging the appropriation of $500 as compensation for personal injuries suffered year ago by "Mrs. M. N. Shwamberg, nationality indeterminable ... as a result of a collision between a public jinrikisha in which she was riding and a U. S. Marine Corps Ambulance on Seymour Road, Shanghai, China."

P:Final results of the Literary Digest poll (62.6% against the policies of the New Deal) left Franklin Roosevelt smiling. Of one thing he was confident: that he would be reelected.

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