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Before the Trustees of Warm Springs Foundation in the East Room of the White House, Rear Admiral Gary T. Grayson presented the President with a check 3 ft. long by 18 in. wide, for $1,003,030.08 — receipts for the President's "birthday balls" last January. The amount was half a million dollars smaller than Warm Springs had confidently hoped for but the President waved the check triumphantly aloft, before handing it to Trustee Arthur Carpenter. "Just for five or ten seconds, Carp," said the President, "I wouldn't trust you longer with it. No danger was there of defalcation, however. The check was never meant to be honored, merely to be framed and hung in Georgia Hall at Warm Springs. Actually the funds it represented already stood to the credit of the Foundation in seven Manhattan banks. The President promised that the money would not be used to repay advances to the Institution. Of the $1,003,000, $100,000 was designated to be used "to stimulate coordination" of infantile paralysis work, $650,000 for "research and study" at Warm Springs, the remaining $253,000 for building and maintenance at the Institution.
Dinner guest of the President was vacationing Novelist H. G. Wells.
Mrs. Roosevelt took time out from travel and the President from work to make a cinema which will be shown, on large screens, at next week's reopening of Chicago's Century of Progress. When the First Lady (on the screen) makes an imperative gesture, spotlights will be turned on a great fountain. When the President finishes speaking all the lights of the Fair will blaze up.
While the President was busy deciding what message he would send to Congress on War Debts, the State Department was busy telling foreign diplomats about what would constitute "default." Attorney General Cummings interpreted the Johnson Act to mean that in the past token payers were not in default, because the President in accepting tokens had said they were not. Secretary Hull made it clear that token payments in the future would not save debtor nations from being technically in default. Questioned by newshawks, the President merely answered that whether a token payment constituted payment or default was a point he would decide on the merits of each case as it arose.