Getting Restless

One day last week President Roosevelt opened his press conference in a mood of great good humor. Correspondents in the front row saw all the sure signs that the President was waiting to spring something --he pursed his lips, stretched his big cheeks and rolled his tongue against them as he stared at the ceiling--an omen from which Washington newsmen deduce the Presidential mood as fishermen scan the sky for breaks in the weather. A blurt by Secretary Steve Early helped start the conference--as they seldom start these days--with a laugh. The President announced that at 2:45 the next day he would dedicate three schools--"three at once."Quickly Steve Early corrected him: "At a quarter to three!" When the laughter subsided and routine questions were out of the way, Washington Times-Herald's Earl Godwin leaned over the President's desk, asked sonorously: "Mr. President, do you have any reason to believe that Germany and Italy are working for your defeat in this election?"

This was the moment Franklin Roosevelt had been waiting for. Fingering a copy of the New York Times, he wondered whether correspondents had read a story from Rome by a man named Matthews--Herbert Matthews, wasn't it?--that had amused him (see p. 50). Slowly and distinctly, he read: ". . . The Axis is out to defeat President Roosevelt. . . . The . . . election is of vast importance to the Axis. Therefore the normal strategy for the Axis is to do something before November 5 that would somehow have a great effect on the electoral campaign."

Said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Pete Brandt: "It's a pretty good ad."

Asked Scripps-Howard Reporter Fred Perkins: "Have you any reason to believe that it is true?"

President Roosevelt merely replied that he was quoting the press back at the newsmen. The implication that Hitler and Mussolini wanted him out--first advanced by Henry Wallace, offered last week by Governor Lehman--now had more than tacit sanction of the President himself. Wallace had been reproved by many people and Lehman's repetition by still more (said Oswald Garrison Villard, "It seems to me that your declaration that a vote for Willkie will be a vote for Hitler . . . touches the low-water mark of unfair, unjust and intolerable partisanship . . . playing upon passions and prejudices which you ought to be the last man in the State of New York to do"). But the President's added comment was, although oblique, much stronger.

Said the New York Times: "We are under no illusion that Hitler and Mussolini like Mr. Roosevelt. We are under no illusion that they will like Mr. Willkie any better, in case he is elected, for Mr. Willkie is just as vigorously pro-America, and just as bitterly anti-Axis, as Mr. Roosevelt, and it is entirely possible that, by preventing economic disintegration in the United States and assuring a more rapid production of airplanes and other war supplies, both for the United States and England, he would give the Axis even more to worry about."

Washington observers thought the veteran campaigner Franklin Roosevelt was showing signs of getting restless, would relish a chance to wade into an old-fashioned political slugging match. White House visitors who have urged the President to take trips to Chicago, to the West Coast, report that he reflects a long time, then shakes his head with the resigned sadness of a man pondering on the good speeches he has no chance to deliver, the good answers he has no opportunity to make.

If Franklin Roosevelt felt that he could hot answer Wendell Willkie except with quotations from newspapers, indirect allusions and indirect defenses, he could restate the philosophy of his administration: 1) about the extension of Federal power (that prompted Republican charges of eventual dictatorship); 2) about spending (that prompted Wendell Willkie's charge of eventual bankruptcy). Dedicating his three schools (a high school and two grade schools near Hyde Park), he reaffirmed the meaning of education in a democracy: "In these schools of ours . . . the children of today and of future generations will be taught, without censorship or restriction, the facts of current history and the whole content of current knowledge."

He obliquely defended New Deal spending by pointing out that Federal aid had been given in building the schools "in accordance with the purpose of the Federal Government to give work to many Americans who otherwise could find no work." Eight years ago, said he, the Government took on this new responsibility for the first time when there were some "who chanted that nature had to run its course of misery . . . that the depression was only the working of natural economic laws in a system of free enterprise." That philosophy of "inaction and irresponsibility and indifference" he condemned, pointed to the new useful structures--"not just a school, perhaps a hospital, or a bridge, or a town hall, or a highway, or an airport, or a dam or a new waterwork or sewage disposal system"--which increased public wealth. Also, said he: "Into every project went money for wages. . . ."

The Roosevelt political magic was still at work--adroit and fluent as ever, he somehow managed to make Federal spending merely a matter of building schools, and to link free education with his administration in untroubled defiance of the shades of Noah Webster and Horace Mann. This was as effective an answer as he had yet made to Wendell Willkie's charge that a continuation of New Deal policies meant a new economic system in the U. S. --but it was an answer, and it was effective.

The President announced that he would make a trip himself this week--stops at Johnstown and Seward, Pa.; a tour of Pittsburgh; tours in Youngstown, Columbus, Dayton, Ohio, climaxed by a worldwide radio broadcast from the parlor car of the train at Dayton.

The campaign might be in the bag, as many a gleeful Washington New Dealer thought. Nevertheless, an old campaigner was getting ready to put on his campaign hat.

Last week the President also:

>Appointed Lowell Mellett, onetime Scripps-Howard newspaperman, now Chief of the Office of Government Reports, to be one of his Administrative assistants.

>Received 20 military chiefs of Latin-American countries, announced a slogan for defense of the Americas: "One for all and all for one."

>Reassured Midwestern Governors-Nebraska's Cochran, Kansas' Ratner, Oklahoma's Phillips--that inland regions would get a share of new defense industries.

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