Except for a tornado, Washington was quiet last week and so were the President's days & nights.
¶ President Coolidge had prepared himself for a trip to Philadelphia. But he paused on the White House threshold, retreated, waited. From a window he watched a tornado which had come whooping up the Potomac from Alexandria, Va., at 92 m.p.h., to lay waste a strip of Washington. A crashing rainstorm followed the wind. When at last the elements permitted, the President set out for Union Station. The streets clanged with ambulances, fire trucks, police wagons. President Coolidge learned in due course that Washington's total damage exceeded a million; that Mrs. Jane Carter, Negress, had been killed; that scores had been badly injured; that the Presidential yacht Mayflower had been blown from her moorings and banged against the dock, but was not injured so badly as the U. S. destroyer Allen, lying near, which lost a funnel; that the Naval Air Station at Anacostia had lost a hangar, suffered damage to eight planes and seen its men blown about and rolled across the flying field.
¶ Tax Assessor William P. Richards of the District of Columbia announced that the White House and its grounds are now worth some 22 millions. No other Washington residence rates so high. The tax on it would be $374,000 per annum—if the U. S. had to pay property taxes to the District of Columbia. A controversy has been bubbling on this question of tax-exempt U. S. properties. Tax Assessor Richards' figures showed that if all taxable U. S. property in the District paid the present rate of $1.70 per $100, the total would be $7,990,000. The U. S. at present pays the District a lump sum of nine millions, less than a quarter of the District's running expenses. District commissioners think the U. S. should bear 40% of the District's running expenses.
¶ At Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, throngs milled. The face that President Coolidge looked for was that of William Cameron Sproul (Sprole), onetime (1919-23) Governor of Pennsylvania. Mr. Sproul is president of Philadelphia's Union League Club. This evening he was the President's host.
President Coolidge and Mr. Sproul stepped into one motor, Frank W. Stearns of Boston and Major General William Gray Price of the Pennsylvania National Guard into the next motor. It was a stag affair. Mrs. Coolidge was not present. Within the heavy portals of the Union League Club, some of the faces the President saw, the hands he shook, belonged to Governor John S. Fisher (see p. 11), Mayor W. Freeland Kendrick of Philadelphia, Senator-Elect William S. Vare and onetime (1922-27) Senator George Wharton Pepper, Chief Justice Robert von Moschzisker of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Railroad Presidents William Wallace Atterbury (Pennsylvania), Daniel Willard (Baltimore & Ohio), Patrick Edward Crowley (New York Central), Edward Loomis (Lehigh Valley) ; also Samuel Rea, onetime (1913-25) President of the Pennsylvania R. R., Lawyer Owen J. Roberts of the Government's special Fall-Sinclair prosecution counsel, and those inevitable patrons of all that is important in Philadelphia, Publisher Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmer Curtis and his editor-son-in-law, Edward William Bok.