Most weekends Franklin Roosevelt goes cruising on the Sequoia to get away from his troubles. Last week he took his troubles with him in the persons of two Senators and his No. i relief administrator. South Carolina's James Byrnes and Kentucky's Alben Barkley this week will have to deal with a Senate disposed to gnaw and shred the President's tax bill (see p. 16). Harry Hopkins is trying to keep the President's promise to put 3,500,000 unemployed to work by Nov. 1 and at the same time keep organized labor in line in the matter of less-than-union wages (see p. 18). When a seaplane, circling over the Chesapeake, settled down beside the Sequoia and Son John Roosevelt, who had spent a few weeks on a vacation job with TVA, went aboard to see his father, he walked into the political equivalent of a council of war on the night before a battle.
¶ For 35 years the District of Columbia has permitted divorce for adultery only. Lately Congress passed a new law adding as grounds for divorce desertion for two years, voluntary separation for five years, a prison sentence of two or more years for a crime involving moral turpitude. President Roosevelt, whose ideas on divorce are liberal, signed the bill one afternoon last week.
¶ Every U. S.-born Boy Scout can hope some day to be President of the U. S. Because Franklin Roosevelt does not want any more U. S. Presidents to have the physical handicap he has, he canceled a Boy Scout jamboree scheduled for Aug. 21 in Washington because poliomyelitis was epidemic in nearby Virginia (see p. 36).
¶ When a court martial found Col. Alexander Elliot Williams, onetime Assistant Quartermaster General of the Army, guilty of soliciting and taking a $2,500 loan from a salesman (TIME, June 3), it was unanimously recommended that he be accorded "clemency." The President, having pondered his case, last week was not moved to mercy, dismissed him, thereby denying him the right to $4,500 a year retirement pay.
¶ In Chicago a huge turkey was cooked in a huge oven in a huge (24 ft. long) electric range. It came out done to a turn. Satisfied, Edison General Electric Appliance Co. announced that the $5,000 stove to be installed in the White House kitchen, now being renovated at a cost of $152,000, had passed all tests, was fit to cook the President's breakfast or a dinner for 150 diplomats.