National Affairs: State of the Union

"I wish you all a very Happy New Year. . . ."

With this ingratiating preamble, Franklin Delano Roosevelt this week began to discharge his constitutional duty of addressing Congress on the State of the Union. Surrounded by microphones, against a background formed by Vice President Garner and House Speaker William Bankhead (see cut), the President proceeded to cover assorted aspects of the Union's condition without concentrating on any one. His address lacked the fire of his historic denunciation of "entrenched greed" in 1936, the amiability of his complacent curtain-raiser to the Supreme Court...