Ninth Year Begins

At noon last Tuesday Franklin Roosevelt became the first man in U. S. history to serve as President for more than eight years. His head still heavy with a cold, his natural buoyancy overlaid with the gravity of his ever heavier responsibility, he told reporters that the crisis today was greater in some ways than the crisis of 1933. His voice was low and tired.

His job in Term III was without precedent: to win a war without fighting it.

Shelved was the domestic New Deal; in obscurity, unfriendly or dead were nearly all his original corps of New Dealers. He was now so tied to his desk that even Hyde Park weekends were rarities. With the Lend-Lease Bill passed, the burden of action was on him; he must move with speed on a thousand fronts. Like fighter planes attacking bombers, rumors zoomed and dipped about each of his acts.

One rumor zoomed louder than others: that the President planned to lend the British a number of U. S. Navy light cruisers of the Omaha class (7,050 tons, ten 6-in. guns, four 3-in. anti-aircraft guns); a number of destroyers (not the Navy's newest, which Navy Secretary Knox calls "young cruisers"); and unlimited numbers of motor torpedo (mosquito) boats both large & small. For these the British would trade at least two spanking-new battleships of the enormous King George V class (35,000 tons, mounting ten 14-in. guns). With the two new U. S. battleships, North Carolina (due in April) and Washington (due in May), null mounting nine 16-in. guns, the U. S. could reinforce the Pacific Fleet with four modern battleships, increase its battle line to 16 capital ships.

Sea Dogs Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill seemed certain that sea power would decide the world's fate.

Besides transfer of part of the Navy to Britain, another considered proposal (rumor had it) was to extend the Western Hemisphere to the Azores, thus halving the length of the British convoy trips.

So it went. Great things were afoot, great expectations in the air. To England this week the President sent Aid-Expediter William Averell Harriman, the sobersided multimillionaire who once bred the finest U. S. polo ponies (he was rated at eight goals). He also sent a group of scientists to study everything from the increase in rats to the social effects of underground life (last fortnight Harvard President James Bryant Conant arrived in London as a sort of Scientific Ambassador).

The President was enormously busy, conferring, planning, driving his vast crew to later hours, harder tasks, heavier responsibilities. He froze Bulgarian credits, signed a bill easing inequities of the 1940 excess-profits-tax law, as early Treasury tax returns showed 58% larger than 1939's; signed a bill providing $375,000,000 to continue WPA until July 1, subjected 16 more critical war materials to export license control; slashed by 55% the Army Engineers' $366,808,925 recommendations for 619 juicy rivers-&-harbors pork-barrel projects. Twice at press conferences he endeavored to quiet fears that labor strikes were now impeding or would soon impede defense progress.

Nevertheless he blasted at jurisdictional strikes as unjustified, conferred repeatedly on the labor situation. He made a brief speech to the farmers of the nation on the place of the farm in defense.

The days & nights fled toward spring. From French bases huge Focke-Wulf Kuriers roared out over the Atlantic, radioing to Nazi submarines the location of the convoys that are the British lifeline from the U. S. After unloading bombs the Kuriers flew on their great semicircular course to Denmark or Norway; refueled, made the return trip. Week in & out the British ships sank, with their loads of U. S. foods, supplies, war materials. The need for ships and ships and ships grew greater by the day; in the U. S. the Navy Yard workers' rivet hammers beat faster in the race against time--the undeclared war between the timetables of Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler.

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