In Motion

To Franklin Roosevelt, whom the cruel misfortune of a single illness deprived of the enjoyment of activities which lesser men take as a matter of course, nothing is dearer than action. Last week, unchained from his desk at the White House, he had his fill of it. He was in Wilmington, Hyde Park, New York City, Washington. Gettysburg. He motored, visited the sick, planned a house, laid a cornerstone, picnicked, orated and dedicated.

P:Some of his best fun was at the grounds of New York City's 1939 World's Fair. There, laying the cornerstone of the Fair's Federal Building, he said with a twinkle in his eye: "The master mason certifies that the cornerstone is well and truly laid and in return I have assured him that I hold a union card.''* There, accompanied by his dumpty little Fusion Republican friend, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, he also had the experience of being introduced to 20,000 delegates of the National Education Association (see p. 28) by a lady no less well known than himself: his wife. All three of them enjoyed the occasion mightily (see cut).

P:Dedicating an "eternal flame" (natural gas) at Gettysburg, on the 75th anniversary of the battle (see p. 10) was the President's July 4 weekend assignment. As every President speaking there inevitably must do, he sought to apply Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to the present state of the Union. Using 644 words to Lincoln's 266, Franklin Roosevelt pictured the people's Government threatened by unnamed enemies: ". . .When a challenge to constituted government is thrown down, the people must in self-defense take it up. . . . The fight must be fought through to a decision so clear that it is accepted as being beyond recall." In Lincoln's case, "a generation passed before the new unity became accepted." In Franklin Roosevelt's case, "it is another conflict, as fundamental as Lincoln's, fought not with glint of steel but with appeals to reason and justice on a thousand fronts--seeking to save for our common country opportunity and security for citizens in a free society. "We are near to winning this battle."

P:Thrice in the week the President greeted Swedish royalty. His welcome to Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf of Sweden, 55-year-old heir of 80-year-old King Gustaf V. took place in a sick room at Manhattan's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. Three days before the President had stopped in heavy rain at Wilmington, Del. to help dedicate a monument by Sculptor Carl Milles to the settling there, three centuries ago, of the first Swedes and Finns in America, but the tall Crown Prince, painfully stricken at the last moment by a kidney stone, had to let his third son,' dark, handsome, fast driving* Prince Bertil, 26, present the monument to the President. At the hospital, however, the President chatted for a half-hour with the Crown Prince, invited Crown Princess Louise to Hyde Park for Saturday luncheon. There, although the President's mother wanted to serve country sausages, the President's wife had her way, and the Crown Princess was fed hot dogs dripping with mustard.

P:Site of the hot-dog luncheon was a lately acquired hilltop on Franklin Roosevelt's own land, adjacent to his mother's. Here, he revealed, he is going to have something he has long wanted: his "dream house." To newshawks he showed its shape, outlined in the woods with stakes and string. Contracts were let last week to Adams, Faber Co. of Montclair, N. J. Architects: Franklin Roosevelt and Arthur Tombs of Manhattan and Atlanta (who laid out Georgia Warm Springs Foundation). Cost: $15,000. Name: "Dutchess Hill." Style: Dutch colonial. Material: native stone (from old fences). Rooms: five (living-dining room 34 by 22). Roof: slate. Furniture: old mahogany. Telephones: none. Occupancy: November ("just in time to close it for the winter").

P:Passing through Butte, Mont. on her way home to Seattle from Brother John's wedding, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger said: "I don't think father will run for another term. It's a wearisome grind, campaigning."

P: Notable among bills last week signed by the President: Flood Control ($375,000,000 authorized), vesting power in the U. S. to take title to all projects it wholly finances; Food & Drugs (requiring more detailed labels, forbidding harmful cosmetics, last work of New York's late Senator Copeland); La Follette Anti-Strike breaking (amendments prohibiting interstate transport of strikebreakers); Permanent Postmasters (ensuring 14,500 life jobs); Wages-&-Hours (its Pennsylvania prototype was last week declared unconstitutional--see p. 12); Mt. Olympus National Park (see p. 11).

P:Among ten more vetoes, two were: against Coronado memorial 50-c- pieces; against J. G. Bucklin of Rehoboth, Mass. who sought $516.12 for 243 turkey eggs destroyed by WPA blasting.

*Prince Bertil's motorcycle police escort credited him with driving 36 miles (Syosset, L. I. to Manhattan) in 20 min. *Following an old union custom, A. F. of L. bricklayers gave Franklin D. Roosevelt an honorary card in 1936, when he laid the cornerstone for the Department of Interior Building.

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