Last week President-elect Roosevelt was back at his home-away-from-home, Warm Springs, Ga. There he was to pick his Cabinet before going off on Vincent Astor's Nourmahal for a fishing trip in Florida waters. The shank of February was to be spent either at Hyde Park or in the Capital itself at the Townsend home on Massachusetts Avenue. After that—the Inaugural, plans for which had grown so lavish last week that it was going to take General Pershing to lead the parade.
The President-elect's arrival at Warm Springs climaxed an arduous and eventful week. In Manhattan he had watched Socialite Artist Natalie Van Vleck, who went to work in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce, dab the finishing touches to his portrait. By going 16 hours at a stretch, he had kept as many appointments as 50 per day. He had found time to address retiring President Abbott Lawrence Lowell and "the Harvard family" at the University's club. He had endorsed the back-to- the-farm movement and Secretary of State Stimson's reiterated Far Eastern policy of nonrecognition of governments established by force. Then President-elect Roosevelt made a final trip to his dentist, found his favorite (fishing rod and was bidden Godspeed at Jersey City's Communipaw Terminal by Mayor Frank Hague as he left for Washington and his second knee-to-knee conference with President Hoover.
Over the luncheon dishes in his private car, Mr. Roosevelt conferred with four advisers: Norman Hezekiah Davis, who, some think, will be the next Secretary of State, and others, the next Ambassador to the Court of St. James's; American Car & Foundry's William Hartman Woodin whom some dopesters put into the Treasury; the "brain trust," Professors Moley & Tugwell. Also aboard was Rear Admiral Gary Travers Grayson, who took President Wilson's stomach pump ; way and made him exercise, to discuss the inauguration plans.
In a White House Fierce-Arrow, the President-elect was whisked to Washington's Mayflower Hotel where he was shot up the back elevator and helped along velvet-roped corridors to Room 776. First off, Secretary Stimson, who had arranged the White House meeting at Hyde Park week before, was ushered in to tea. He stayed 70 minutes, emerged ironically to tell reporters that among things he and Mr. Roosevelt did not discuss were Prohibition and the Domestic Allotment plan.
Then the visiting began in earnest. Western legislators arrived to plead remonetization of silver. An Ohio delegation came to get a Cabinet job. Republicans packed the Roosevelt levee as well as Democrats. Oregon's McNary came because he is chairman of the Senate's Agricultural Committee. He heard Mr. Roosevelt's wish that the Domestic Allotment plan be limited to wheat, cotton, hogs and tobacco, that it be enacted by this session in time to be effective for the 1933 crops. Cultured Senator Bronson Cutting of New Mexico came because he was a boyhood friend. Hiram Johnson was there out of Republican cussedness. The Press-as smiled off with the comment that its questions were "very intelligent and very embarrassing." At this point occurred the journalistic event of the day.
Down the hall stomped flushed, truculent Senator Huey Pierce ("Kingfish")