Angry Commuter

With 1940 coming up Franklin Roosevelt has every reason to want to be undisputed master of the Democratic Party. For, unless he is master of the Party, he cannot be sure that the Democratic National Convention will nominate a man of whom he approves (whether himself or another). Several times this year Congress has challenged that mastery and last week it was challenged once too often.

The occasion was the action of the Senate in voting to deprive him of his power to devalue the dollar (see col. j). At Hyde Park he indulged in one of those coldly furious, sarcastic lectures which his press has heard before. He accused Congress of endangering the national defense, of returning power over the dollar to international speculators as it was in 1931. He singled out Felix Belair Jr., correspondent of the New York Times, for a special blast about big newspapers, whom he accused of wishing to see control of the money markets return to private hands. (Next day the Times recalled editorially that in 1922, Franklin Roosevelt was president of United European Investors, Ltd., speculators in German marks.)

Returning purposefully to Washington, the President took personal charge of the fight, and presently the silverites were bought off in conference by a promise of 70.95-c- silver. Effect of this deal was to infuriate the hard-money men to the point of filibuster, and the bill failed to pass before the June 30 midnight deadline.

Earlier the same night in the House, isolationist Democrats ganged up with Republicans to hobble the President on Neutrality. These two blows in one week sent him back to Hyde Park a President angrier, but no less determined, than ever. The session of Congress was by no means over, and Franklin Roosevelt said he would not mind commuting between Hyde Park and Washington all summer. The President and his Congress settled down to a war of wills.

>Before the fiscal year's end last week, in time to function in 1940, the President signed three important bills, with critical comment:

1) The Tax Bill. Comment: He had no indication yet that its removal of "irritants" to business would result in a business pickup.

2) The Farm Bill. Comment: Still upon Congress lies the onus of not voting special taxes to meet special farm subsidies ($225,000,000 extra this year).

3) The Relief Bill. Comment: It would work a hardship on 8,000,000 people.

> The President further flayed Congress for failing to vote money to run the District of Columbia. To the D. C. Commissioners, he wrote a letter directing them to incur debts for vital services (police, fire, water, health, etc. etc.).

>The President signed the Army's final supply bill, $223,398,047 mostly for new planes. To this sum it was expected he would ask Congress to add $25,000,000. It would be used to purchase and store strategic minerals such as zinc, chromium, manganese and tin and to buy coffee, rubber and other tropical products under a $100,000,000 four-year program which would bring total expenditures for national defense close to $2,000,000.000. No opposition was expected, as there has been no opposition to any of the record-breaking peacetime appropriations for national defense.

>Of the President's revolving, self-liquidating Great White Rabbit of 1939 ($3,860,000,000 loan program), nothing was heard last week except a resolution put through the Senate by anti-Roosevelt Senator Byrd of Virginia, asking the Treasury to itemize some $8,000,000,000 of extra-Budget financing already entered into by the Government. Senator Byrd's point: the 1939 rabbit is superfluous.

>To open-air lunch with the President at Hyde Park, New York's Herbert Lehman carted 17 other Democratic Governors, ten Republicans who had just finished the business of their 31st Annual Governors' Conference at Albany. The Democrats needed comfort, for at the supposedly non-partisan conference such new G. O. P. brooms as Raymond E. Baldwin of Connecticut, John William Bricker of Ohio, had put them on the defensive by hammering at Federal Relief policies (but not at Relief cash).

Host Roosevelt confided his bet on the Louis-Galento fight. Wind tipped a vase of flowers and water into Herbert Lehman's lap, to the confusion of Hostess Eleanor Roosevelt. For the cameras and perhaps for solace, Democrats Stark (Missouri), Cochran (Nebraska) and Lehman ganged up with the President. At the President's feet, beaming innocently, sat a G. O. P. Governor's daughter, Anne Vanderbilt of Rhode Island, and a Democrat's daughter, Julia Holt of West Virginia.

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