Duty

For the first time since the turn of the year Franklin Roosevelt retired last week to the inside pages of the nation's press. If the President was startled by the antagonism displayed by the little businessmen (see p. 11 ) toward him and his Administration, he did not indicate it, for he let them run wild on the front page. In the uproar over foreign policy (see col. 2) he took no visible part. With vocal Congressmen trying desperately to force him to redefine his stand, the closest approach to a statement on foreign policy the President made last week was a little speech made to a visiting group of Protestant ministers. The President, an Episcopal warden, said:

"I do not know how you gentlemen feel, but I cannot help feeling . . . that there has been definite and distinct progress toward a spiritual reawakening. ... It is a very significant thing that this awakening has come about in America. It makes me realize more fully that we do have, in addition to the duty we owe to our own people, an additional duty to the rest of the world. Things have been going on in other countries, things which are not spiritual in any sense of the word--and that is putting it mildly."

P: With Homer Martin and other United Automobile WTorkers the President discussed unemployment and relief in the Detroit area. Later in the week Mr. Martin massed 100,000 workers in Detroit's Cadillac Square for a Relief demonstration.

P: White House clerks spent the better part of two days trying to find their pay checks which arrived in the same mails as 100,000 letters containing dimes for the Infantile Paralysis Campaign.

P: In sack suit and felt hat the President went to a white-tie horse show at Fort Myer to see Eleanor Roosevelt ride a chestnut gelding called Badger, in the Useful Park or Road Hack Class. Mrs. Roosevelt survived eliminations but by prearrangement received no prize, only flowers.

P: Told last week in the National Press Club's monthly sheetlet was a story about some reporters who tried to outsmart the President at a recent Press Club dinner. On the back of a menu they wrote: "I hereby nominate Herbert Bratter [a Washington writer] as Ambassador to the North Pole." Folding the menu so that these words were hidden, they passed it to the President to autograph. When the menu was returned, they discovered that the President had unfolded it, struck out "North," inserted "South," added: "(North Pole already occupied)."

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