Miraculous Conviction

Reporting on a family weekend at Hyde Park, Columnist Eleanor Roosevelt last week wrote in My Day: "After lunch yesterday my brother [Gracie Hall Roosevelt] wanted to go over to look at a barn which the President is interested in changing into a house. As usual, the President thinks it can be done far more economically than the rest of us do. I was glad to have my brother bear me out, but our combined arguments had no effect on the President, who said cheerfully: 'Well, we will wait and see,' with the calm conviction that he could perform miracles."

Delighted editorialists hailed this wife-witness incident as a nutshell exposition of the President's free & easy economics,* a revealing display of his ego. It also illuminated a Roosevelt quality little known outside his family: with his own money the President tries to make 59-c- go as far as most people's $1.

*Ex-Brain Truster Raymond Moley in the last of a series of Saturday Evening Post articles ("Five Years of Roosevelt--and After") last week related that in 1933, just before his inauguration, Franklin Roosevelt horrified his advisers by receiving two crackpot money theorists at Warm Springs, Ga. The President-elect huddled with them for two hours, had a grand time comparing heresies. "The hero of this adventure would be no stranger to the Roosevelt of today. There is the same physical courage, the same friendliness, the same susceptibility to the new and untried," reflected Mr. Moley.

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