On Relief

Presidential press conferences are usually a bore. What happens is that a group of 100 or more reporters gather in the White House press room, stand around chatting with each other until thoroughly exhausted. Thus reduced to a state of total psychic subservience, they are ushered into Franklin Roosevelt's private sanctum. Here the President, comfortably tucked in under a massive desk and surrounded by a background of secretaries and Secret Service men, sits flourishing his cigaret holder. The correspondents gather closely around the front of the desk trying politely to look as though all this were a marvel they had never seen before and scarcely dared hope to see again. The questions then begin.

Since Franklin Roosevelt is easily the world's most newsworthy personage and since the questioners are presumably the world's ablest newsgatherers, it is obviously impossible to believe that such a meeting could actually occur without producing anything more printable than a conference of kerosene tank politicians in a mud-flat filling station. Nine times out of ten, however, that is what happens. The correspondents can rarely think of anything worthwhile to ask the President; if they do the convention of mystery that surrounds all sorts of government impels the President to demonstrate his unique ability to say nothing with so much good humor, emphasis and adverbial embellishment that it sounds sensational. The next morning, principally because reporters are by definition romanticists, not less than 50,000,000 deluded U. S. newspaper readers acquire the erroneous impression that they know what is happening at the White House.

Last week, the only newsworthy item that emerged from either of the President's semiweekly press conferences was the fact that the President had not only contrived to sell five volumes of collected "State Papers" to Random House for publication next spring but that he had also sold the unpublished prefaces to each volume separately for publication to United Feature Syndicate. Meanwhile, the major White House news of the week, as usual, originated elsewhere.

P: While telling Congress last January 5 how much he wanted to balance the budget, Franklin Roosevelt found it advisable to omit for later discussion two items which had considerable bearing on the subject. One was an enlarged Navy program. The other was Relief.

Three weeks ago the President remedied his first omission by asking Congress for $800,000,000 with which to build a bigger Navy. Last week, he remedied the second. To Speaker of the House William Bankhead, the President wrote:

"I have the honor to submit herewith for your consideration a supplemental estimate of appropriation of $250,000,000 for relief of the unemployed. . . .

"According to the best estimate available at this time it appears that during the last three months approximately three million persons have lost their jobs with private employers.

"This increase in unemployment could not, of course, have been foreseen at the time the last relief appropriation was under consideration. Hundreds of thousands of needy unemployed persons have recently applied for relief work, which could not be provided for them with the funds on hand. It has become increasingly clear that these needs cannot be met unless employment by the Works Progress Administration is increased immediately.

"The funds available on January 1, 1938, would permit employment of an average of only 1,700,000 persons for the six months ending June 30, 1938. The number of persons on the Works Progress Administration rolls today is 1,959,000. This estimate of $250,000,000 will permit the continued employment for the next five months of the number now on such rolls and will provide a reasonable measure of relief for those who have recently become unemployed and are in need."

What the President's first official recognition of the effects of Recession meant in cold figures was that the total relief bill for fiscal 1938 will be $1,750,000,000, the prospective budget deficit $1,338,100,000. What it meant to WPA was that instead of being forced to discharge 450,000 workers it .can add 500,000 to its rolls as soon as Congress appropriates the money. Currently being administered by Aubrey Williams, a diligent onetime social worker, in the illness of his chief, Harry Hopkins, WPA got 70% of the original $1,500,000,000 Relief Appropriation for 1938, expects to employ 2,500,000 workers in March.

P: To succeed Ambassador to Germany Hugh R. Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt last week nominated prodigious little Adolph Augustus Berle Jr., who at 14 (in 1909) was the second youngest freshman in Harvard history and who, since retiring from the original Roosevelt Brain Trust, has functioned most noticeably as City Chamberlain, then chairman of the City Planning Commission under New York's Mayor LaGuardia. Best guess as to the Berle specialty in the State Department: providing expert counsel on the complex economics of trade treaties.

P: At a party given by Mr. & Mrs. John Nance Garner for the President and Mrs. Roosevelt, New York Hypnotist Joseph Dunninger was asked to read the President's mind. The reading: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., the White House address.

P: In Manhattan, a corporation lawyer named Glen McNaughton revealed that he was soliciting pledges on Wall Street for a purse of $5,000,000, to be presented to President Roosevelt on condition that he resign within five months.

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