Family Affair

Franklin Roosevelt's kin often get themselves into the newspapers. One who did so last week was the President's lusty second son, Elliott, who runs his second wife's radio station (KFJZ) at Fort Worth, and knows which side of his bread bears Texas butter. In one of his semiweekly personal broadcasts he said: "John Garner is in the driver's seat right now, well in the lead as a likely Democratic candidate for the Presidency. . . ."

Last week the publisher of a Seattle, Wash. newspaper frontpaged an open letter to "Dear Elliott":

"Regardless of how the family might feel about it, the fact of the matter is that out here you can't stop people insisting that your pa has got to stand for a third term. . . .

"We've got a lot of unemployed folks out here, Elliott, who've got to be taken care of, and we don't see how Garner's economy program is going to mean food and jobs for them. If 'Cactus Jack' and all his bellowing calves in Congress would really get behind the old man and quit sniping at him and upsetting the country and business, we'd be able to put these jobless to work all the sooner. . . .

"So tell Mr. Garner for us that we're very fond of him, but he just don't fit.

"And while you're at the job, try to figure out a real honest-to-God Roosevelt New Dealer to take over the old man's job, so we can all get out of the fishbowl. . . ."

The letter was written, of course, by Franklin Roosevelt's son-in-law, John Boettiger, publisher of Hearst's Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It got under Elliott's hide. From Pinehurst, N. C. he retorted to Brother-in-law Boettiger in his best literary style:

"You infer by your public letter that I am not as strong in support of the President as you are. I am not a politician. I am not a New Dealer, anti-New Dealer or any other type of supporter of 'isms' but I am as loyal as you or any one else in the country to my father.

". . . My statement regarding Garner was purely my observation and report to the people of Texas. I have no way nor do you of knowing whether the President would run for a third term or not. . . . What the family thinks or feels has no bearing on his decision. . . .

"Texas would like to see a Texan in the White House and so would I. . . . Get to know Garner some time when you get a chance to leave Seattle. You'll find him to be very much the same kind of a humanitarian thinker that the President is. . . . "

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