Fair and Fishing

"Let me tell you, Alf Landon, if you succeed me at the White House you ought to get a boat and try out the Potomac River for fishing. I have taken week-end trips and they have done me a lot of good."

A year ago last week, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt met Governor Landon, this was the genial advice which he gave his rival in the Presidential campaign. (Last week, President Roosevelt commemorated the occasion by going fishing himself--not in the river Potomac, because he had repaired to Hyde Park--but on the yacht Potomac, in Long Island Sound.

The week began with the Dutchess County Fair, at Rhinebeck, N. Y., a few miles up the Albany Post Road from Hyde Park. One visit to the Fair, for any Dutchess County squire, amounts almost to an obligation. Last week, the President made two. First afternoon, his car drew up under a canopy where the prize-winning cow and calf were brought over to be patted and he held the day's informal press conference. Next day Ambassador Robert W. Bingham, just back from London, lunched at Hyde Park. In the afternoon the President went to the Fair again, awarded a trophy, which he and Mrs. Roosevelt give each summer to the winner of the hunter championship, to Claredda Farm's handsome bay gelding Prince Charming II.

The fishing trip started late the next afternoon when the President boarded the Potomac at Poughkeepsie's wharf. Mrs. Roosevelt, White House attaches and a hundred or so neighbors were on hand to see him off. Aboard were WPAdministrator Harry L. Hopkins, who usually falls asleep as soon as he gets on a boat; Naval Aide Paul Bastedo; Physician Ross McIntyre; and Son James Roosevelt who, with Steve Early in Washington and Marvin Mclntyre on vacation, was getting his first taste of single-handed duty as one of his father's secretarial triumvirate.

Next day, convoyed by the destroyer Selfridge, the Potomac cruised off Montauk Point, the eastern tip of Long Island. The fishing was atrocious. First day's catch was one bass and "two miserable what-nots," one of which attached itself to the Presidential line. Next day's was just as bad. The third day of the cruise, when the President's onetime law partner Basil O'Connor joined the party, there was no fishing at all. Stormbound and anchored off Block Island, the President resigned himself to a press conference. Fourth day, en route back to Hyde

Park, the Presidential party finally contrived to catch 36 striped bass off New London.

P: Washington betting until the start of last week was 3-to-1 that the President would veto the Sugar Bill which lobbyists spurred through Congress in its closing days. To domestic growers, both cane and beet, the Bill provided continuance of the quota system limiting raw sugar imports, as well as cash benefits to be paid from a 1/2-c--per-lb. processing tax, and the President was reconciled to holding an umbrella over the growers in the form of a domestic price about three times the world price. But he strenuously objected in principle to that part of the bill which for the benefit of mainland refiners severely restricted imports of refined sugar from Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Cuba (TIME, Aug. 16). A veto, however, would have brought down on the President's head the anger of both growers and refiners. After meditating last week at Hyde Park, he decided that discretion was the better part of principle--simultaneously signed the Sugar Bill and denounced it, indignantly insisting that a sound measure had been "seriously impaired in its value by the inclusion of a provision designed to legalize a virtual monopoly in the hands of a small group of seaboard refiners." He added: "I am approving the bill with what amounts to a gentleman's agreement that the unholy alliance between the cane and beet growers on the one hand, and the seaboard refining monopoly on the other, has been terminated by the growers. That means that, hereafter, the refiners' lobby should expect no help from the domestic growers. That is at least a definite step in the right direction."

P: If President Roosevelt were to find that what is going on in the Far East is a war, he would be obliged to apply to it the provisions of the rickety Neutrality Act. Therefore, in explaining to the press why all 7,780 Americans in China had been warned to get out as fast as possible or stay at their own risk, he described the Sino-Japanese situation not as a war, but as an awful mess. As to applying the Neutrality Act, the President was still on a 24-hour basis.

P: Released the day after, but drafted several days before John L. Lewis' broadcast (see p. 11) was a Presidential Labor Day statement. By coincidence it sounded so much like a pointed reply to C. I. O.'s major-domo that some papers described it as such. Wrote the President: "The age-old contest between Capital and Labor has been complicated in recent months through mutual distrust and bitter recrimination. Both sides have made mistakes. . . ." On one major point, the President and John Lewis agreed: "The conference table must eventually take the place of the strike."

P: Before he boarded the Potomac last week, the President completed action on the last of 937 bills passed and sent to the White House by Congress in its last session. Of the year's total, the President signed 897, vetoed 40. Last week at his Hyde Park desk, he signed: the Wagner-Steagall Housing Bill (TIME, Aug. 30); a bill to permit exports of helium in ''non-military" quantities; a bill authorizing $2,760,000 to be appropriated for restoring U. S. wildlife (see p. 48); a bill providing $2,000,000 to purchase reindeer herds for Alaskan Eskimos and Indians. He also issued an order to all Federal employes to celebrate Sept. 17, the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, as a half holiday.

P: Most important measure the President vetoed was the Copeland-May Bill for the development of Washington's Washington-Hoover Airport, which the Airline Pilots' Association this summer declared unsafe. In his veto message the President suggested that instead of trying to improve an inadequate field, a new airport be developed at Gravelly Point, "Within ten minutes of the centre of Washington . . . for use in all good weather. . . ." Since low-lying Gravelly Point has many river fogs, he also recommended a second field farther away for use when flying conditions were unfavorable.

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