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¶The 70th Congress will try to do something about U. S. shipping. U. S. bottoms have been less & less used since the War. The U. S. Emergency Fleet Corporation is still a white elephant. None will buy its idle ships. The U. S. Shipping Board is in a quandary. Its loans to private builders have not increased U. S. tonnage speedily. Last week — while Senator Reed of Missouri, Rear Admiral Magruder, U. S. N., and Senator Copeland of New York flayed slow shipping progress in speeches — President Coolidge received and pondered a plan from Edward N. Hurley, Wartime Chairman of the U. S. Shipping Board. Mr. Hurley advocated: 1) A 500-million construction fund (the present fund is 84 millions) to be loaned at 2½% (the present rates are 5¼% and 4¼%) to U. S. builders; 2) Allowing railroads to participate in shipping (suspicion of trusts now prevents this) ; 3) Making the borrowing builders buy idle Government merchantmen; 4) Enrolling new vessels in the U. S. Naval Reserve; 5) Adjusting Panama Canal rates.
¶ Farm aid is a problem upon which President Coolidge has been hoping farmers would some day agree. Dispute over the price-fixing feature of the unsuccessful McNary-Haugen Bill has not brought forth a compromise. The export debenture feature urged by anti-McNary-Haugenists is another stumbling stone. Last week President Coolidge notified farmers that he and Congress would not shirk their duty to try and find a farm aid solution without waiting for farmers to find it. He received Senator McNary (Oregon), whose bill had just had another rebuff from U. S. business men,*to discuss the new bill which Senator McNary, admitting defeat on his old bill, is trying to draw up.
¶ At the President's request, Secretary of War Davis and Major General Edgar Jadwin, Chief of Engineers, called at the White House to assure President Coolidge that the War Department was getting on satisfactorily with its Mississippi Basin report, upon which national flood control legislation will be based (see p 10).
Political. There was nothing problematical about a ponderous man with two chins and two volumes of newspaper clippings on the Mississippi flood, who lumbered into the White House wearing a sombrero and a heavy grin. This caller shouted a good deal and waved his large hands, but he could tell President Coolidge nothing about the flood that was not already obvious. Nevertheless, the President felt he must ask him to come for breakfast next day and bring a dozen of his friends. The caller, Mayor William Hale ("Big Bill") Thompson of Chicago, is "a good Republican."
¶About the ensuing breakfast party, a Democratic correspondent later wrote: "'To the pure all things are pure'... Or it may mean that Mr. Coolidge thinks that to Republican politicians who control party machines in great States, a certain latitude should be allowed. . . ."