AMERICAN NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 83, 7 April 1936, Page 10

AMERICAN NOTES

MARRIAGE AND BRIDGE

CRITIC OF ROOSEVELT

(From "The Post's" Representative.)

NEW YORK, March 11.

• A Chicago Judge is convinced that bridge is a home-wrecker, unles3 a man plays 'against his wife. Nevertheless, America has discovered two couples who can play bridge together, successfully, and without wrangling, Mr. and Mrs. Gottlieb and Mr. and Mrs. Lightner, who were placed first and second in the National Bridge Tournament The closest to this feat was in 1930, when Mr. Kid Mrs. Culbertson were second. Psychologists—they are legion in this country—are endeavouring to seek the reason why bridge disturbs marital happiness. Culbertson favours bridge quarrels between man and wife. -"I am always worried about a couple who do not wrangle; there is something wrong. Either they are in that state of abnormal'poignant bliss where'nothing matters much, or in a state of stupefied indifference, where each other's intellectual and emotional strivings cease to be a matter of concern." Although radio is "Big Business" in the United States—advertisers, last year, paid 50,000.000 dollars for time on the air, in which to extol their wares—there is a growing demand for the public-owned systems of Great Britain and other countries? Such a demand now comes in deep volume from the National Commission on Education by Radio, which is urging that the United States Government should establish and maintain a limited number of popularly-owned and controlled broadcasting stations, ■to supplement the present privately-owned system, and to make available to American listeners pr'ogramnies, free from advertising. and personal propaganda. The most outspoken condemnation of President Roosevelt to date comes from the pen of H. L. Mencken, relentless reviewer of the American Scene^ who discovers,; on his return from abroad, that his country is being ruled by a quack; that the New Deal began with "alarming blather" about the collapse of capitalism, the ruin of the Republic, the imminence of revolution, and is ending with claims .that the failure of these catastrophes _ to come off has been due to the medicaments of President Roosevelt and his Brain Trust. Mencken describes Roosevelt's wizards as the sorriest mob of mountebanks ever gathered together at one time or place. To them the man who husbanded his funds for his family and his old age has no rights in law or equity. The best-grounded of all the Brain Trusters, Mencken declares, is a former graduate of a college of chiropractic. "Having made the mess, Roosevelt will volunteer heroically to clean it up. But my guess is that the great mass of American freemen, including multitudes on the dole, will decide that some other scavenger—any other scavenger—will be safer." " J