PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT

Evening Star, Issue 21718, 12 May 1934, Page 23

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT

AT WORK AND AT HOME A NATION'S UNQUESTIONING TRUST All roads lead to Washington to-day. In the space of a few short months the Federal capital has become the busiest city in the United States. One man s name is on every lip (writes Valentine Williams, in the London ‘ Daily Telegraph ’). In the United States to-day President Roosevelt’s personal prestige is a formidable thing. He has succeeded in capturing the imagination of his fellowcountrymen to gn extent which has in a large measure blotted out the dividing lino between Republican and Democrat.

He is the prohplict leading the people out of the desert. That such an immense majority is content to trust him blindly to bring them in safety to the Promised Land is a tribute to one < f his greatest qualities, his knowledge of human nature.

FULL OF FIGHT AND LAUGHTER. The cardinal note of the President’s character is his simplicity. To meet and talk with him is to realise that his simplicity .s not a pose, that when lie asks “ Well, and how do yon lind things going?” he ;s genuinely bitnr.isled in checking his own impressions hy the impressions of others. To him has been entrusted a greater volume of irresponsible power than any American President in history lias enjoyed, and he has launched forces ol immeasurable strength and unpredictable influence; yet he has no attitudes of the super-man, no false pride, and, before all things, no false modesty. What you find when you call upon him at the White House is a pleasant, placid man full of fight and laughter. In almost his opening sentence you realise that he actually is what he appears to be—a good American taking off his coat to tackle a big job confided .to him, and quietly determined to make a go of it. His manner is direct and very riant, his laugh a joyous shout with head flung backward, his smile tentative and singularly attractive —one feels he is the type of man who all through his life has made friends without difficulty wherever he goes. Tall, broad-chested, and muscular, a jittle heavy through years of a crippling illness, he looks comfortable in the grey lounge suit hanging loosely on the big frame —like so many Americans, be prefers to discard his waistcoat. A daily swim in the pool at the White House, the gift of the American public, keeps him in hue physical shape. For one who carries on his shoulders such a tremendous burden or responsibilitv he looks astonishingly lit. It the United States officially admitted an aristocracy, I‘ranklni Delano Roosevelt would unquestionably bo of it. He comes from a branch ol the family which the genius ol his cou-

sin, the late Theodore Roosevelt, first made world-famous—well-to-do and established for generations on the banks of the Hudson. He has the poise and charming manners which birth and good breeding bestow, but also the same strong sense of duty and a certain inborn shrewdness seen in men like Palmerston and Salisbury, recruited into statesmanship from the ranks of the aristocracy. ... He has a mind which is continually absorbing and storing away information for future use. Washington had forgotten that all through the Wilson Administration there was “ a chiel among them takin’ notes ” in tile person of the dashing young Assistant Secretary of the Navy Department. Back at Washington he has revealed that he knows every move in the g?me.

FIRM AND PROMPT IN DECISION. He is the type of American who is thoroughly familiar with England and the English scene as an integral part of the background of American life. He has many friends in England, and shows himself remarkably conversant with British politics. Since taking office he has been receiving an enormous correspondence from England and all parts of the British Empire, the friendly and encouraging tone of which, 1 gather, com trusts rather sharply with what the President deplores as the “ ludicrous misrepresentations of his policy in the greater part of the British Press. Any preconceived idea of Roosevelt as a dangerous Radical or a drawing loom Socialist is dispelled in the first live minutes with him. Any notion that he is the willing instrument of a pack ot hare-brained professors will not survive. My personal impression ot him is of a man who. with both leet firmly planted on the ground, is conscious oi Ids own limitations, and summons to Ids aid counsellors to advise him on matters with which he is necessarily unfamiliar. . He is very definitely master of his Administration. Even among Jus intimates there is none who professes to be able to read his mind. He keeps Jus own counsel; and nobody, they tell me, is so adept as he in saying nothing when he so wills. Jt is his habit to make decisions, even the most important, firmly and promptly; but there is nothing impulsive about his calm and reflective manner. It suggests _ that he acts only after mature reflection. The man’s outstanding trait is his courage. The quality of Roosevelt s pluck is shown by his refusal to let himself be mastered by the attadk ot infantile paralysis which laid him low soon after the armistice. Without repining for a career, for a busy, athletic life, apparently hopelessly broken, he sec himsplf to work to re-educate his limbs. WHITE HOUSE AND ITS VAST MAIL. In pain and helplessness he .learnt patience and an infinite compassion for suffering humanity. To an impancit office-seeker he said recently: “ Do > on realise that 1 spent two years in bed learning to wiggle one toe? In my judgment, it is this almost, passionate commiseration of his for the inarticulate masses—“ The Forgotten Man, in the phrase he coined- —which is at the root of the radical changes he is cliecung

ill the whole structure of government and finance in this country. There is something more. He and Mrs Roosevelt are probably the first persons on this vast continent to obtain a true and comprehensive picture of the whole sum of human misery which the depression brought in its tram. Their mail—the largest in the history of the White House—has thrown a flood of light on this epic of human suffering. The men write to him, the women to Mrs Roosevelt, and from this_ flood of letters, thousands a day, arriving from all parts of the land, the President and Mrs Roosevelt have pieced together a picture of helplessness, hopeless misery which even to-day few Americans realise. As much as any other factor, I believe, it has steeled the President to meet a drastic and unprecedented situation with drastic and unprecedents measures, though it means staking his own political future, and the future of the Democratic party, on the outcome. . This is the land of improvisation, ot violent swings upward and downward. Such large sections of the country have been living from hand to mouth in the depression, that to most American eyes there is nothing inherently shocking in the radical measures of reform winch Washington has initiated. Business is slowly picking up, and ,is undoubtedly better all round, while unemployment has diminished. . The country as a whole is dimly aware that it'is in the throes of a revolution, hut for one doubter who feels the earth quake and speaks darkly of the ultimate reckoning for the colossal sums the Administration is spending, there arc nine whose misgivings are stilled bv the constant waves of faith and optimism radiating from the man in the White House. Franklin 1). Roosevelt, the spirit of Kipling’s “If” personified, carries on.