Extra

When Presidential Secretary Steve Early told newshawks one morning last week that the President's afternoon conference would be worth attending, Trans-radio Press promptly picked up the information and an announcer of the District of Columbia's Mutual station WOL broadcast it over Washington.

Thus well warned nearly 150 newspapermen trooped into Franklin Roosevelt's office at four o'clock. After a few words about the death of Consul General Marriner (see p. 14), he expressed his regrets to the correspondents. All the news he had for them was a little proclamation he had just signed: "Whereas public interests require that the Congress of the United States should be convened in extra session at twelve o'clock, noon, on the fifteenth day of November, 1937. . . ."

Half-a-dozen correspondents dashed from, the room to flash their offices the long-awaited news. To those who remained the President explained that his reasons for this extra session would be expounded by radio within six hours.

Tenth Fireside, After dinner that evening, Franklin Roosevelt seated himself before a microphone in-the White House oval Diplomatic Room (which has no fireplace) for the tenth "fireside chat" of his Administration, to tell the U. S. what he expected of the New Deal's second extra session of Congress.*

At Franklin Roosevelt's normal broadcasting pace, last week's fireside chat would have taken 35 minutes to deliver. Actually, spoken with fewer persuasive pauses and in a more matter-of-fact tone than usual, it took just over 27. He had used previous fireside chats to put new lines of thought and action before the nation. Last week, however, the keynote of his broadcast was a multiple line of political defense.

Apropos of the extra session he defended himself from charges of dictatorship: "Those who do not like Democracy want to keep legislators at home." He defended his recent trip to Seattle from accusations of being politically motivated: "Any one charged with proposing or judging national policies should have first-hand knowledge of the nation as a whole." He defended himself--on the oblique--from imputations that he desires a third term: "[A President] . . . must think not only of this year but of future years when some one else will be President." He defended CCC and WPA for flood-control projects they have constructed; an irrigation project in Idaho for providing good land for farmers from the dust strip 1,000 miles away;

Grand Coulee Dam because almost half the cost had been spent for materials which came from the eastern third of the U. S.

But most of all, he defended his extra session of Congress because it would avoid a lengthy session next year "extending through the summer," because the people of the U. S. have been checked in their efforts to make "prosperity stable." Among these efforts he listed:

Crop Control "We intend this winter to find a way to prevent four-and-a-half-cent cotton, nine-cent corn and thirty-cent wheat--with all the disaster these prices mean for all of us--from ever coming back again. To do that, the farmers themselves want to cooperate to build an all-weather farm program so that in the long run prices will be more stable."

Little TVAS, "... I recommended to the last session of the Congress the creation of seven planning regions, in which local people will originate and co-ordinate recommendations as to work of this kind to be done in their particular regions. The Congress will, of course, determine the projects to be selected within the budget limits."

Executive Reorganization."To carry out any Twentieth-Century program, we must give the executive branch of the Government Twentieth-Century machinery to work with. . . . For many years we have all known that the executive and administrative departments are a higgledy-piggledy patchwork of duplicate responsibilities and overlapping powers."

Wages and Hours. "A few more dollars a week in wages, a better distribution of jobs with a shorter working day will almost overnight make millions of our lowest-paid workers actual buyers of billions of dollars of industrial and farm products. That increased volume of sales ought to lessen other costs of production so much that even a considerable increase in labor costs can be absorbed without imposing higher prices on the consumer."

Anti-Trust Laws, "We have anti-trust laws, to be sure, but they have not been adequate to check the growth of many monopolies. Whether or not they might have been adequate originally, interpretation by the courts and the difficulties and delays of legal procedure have now definitely limited their effectiveness. We are already studying how to strengthen our anti-trust laws in order to end monopoly--not to hurt but to free legitimate business of the nation."

Busiest of the President's 50,000,000 listeners last week was his onetime aide, Hugh Johnson, who last month started a series of 15-minute broadcasts four times a week for Grove's Bromo Quinine, in addition to his daily Scripps-Howard column in which he has become one of the New Deal's sharpest critics. During the "fireside chat" Hugh Johnson took notes on what the President said. Three minutes after the chat was over, on the air at his usual time, he undertook to rebut some of his former chief's points with a promptness unprecedented for the radio. Speaking extemporaneously from his notes, he applauded the President's crop control program, warned that a continuation of New Deal spending and taxing would lead to a "distribution of poverty."

In his fireside chat the President approvingly quoted "one of the country's leading economists":*'"The continuance of business recovery in the United States depends far more upon business policies, business pricing policies, than it does on anything that may be done, or not done, in Washington.' "

"The high cost of living," ad libbed Hugh Johnson, "has depended for some time, and will continue to depend, more on what happens in Washington than on any other single cause in this country."

*First extra session convened March 9, 1933. the week after he took office. *Harvard Professor Oliver Mitchell Weni-vvorth Sprague, in an address before the New-York Chapter of the American Statistical Association, published last fortnight in the New-York Times'?, Annalist.

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