Men at Bay
Hirohito, Son of Heaven, celebrated a warm 43rd birthday sweating over the problem of Jap plane production.
"General" Jacob S. Coxey finally finished his famed speech (in behalf of interest-free Government bonds as an economic cureall. The speech started in 1894 on the steps of Washington's Capitol, before his "army" (rumored 5,000, in fact 336) of fellow townsmen he had led from Massillon, Ohio, but was stopped in midphrase by the police. It ended this week on the same old steps, before an audience of 200 not-so-busy Capitol Hill employes.
Bernard De Voto, caustic and choleric critic of his contemporary writers, was blasted by heavy literary and legal artillery. Critic De Voto's lambasting, broadsiding The Literary Fallacy (TIME, April 24) aroused Sinclair Lewis, one of the book's targets, to solid invective: "... a tedious and egotistical fool ... a pompous and boresome liar. . , ." In Cambridge, Mass., where Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit was banned as "impure and indecent," and where Crusader De Voto rode his white horse straight to a bookshop to buy a copy publicly (TIME, April 17), District Judge Arthur P. Stone approved the ban, cracked the book as filthy, rapped De Voto: "The spectacle of a citizen notifying the police, the press . . . that he is about to commit an action which may be a crime . . . has little to recommend it."
Women at War
Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, only daughter of the President, won a $185 Hattie Carnegie dress on a $1 raffle ticket at a benefit fashion show and auction in Washington's Stage Door Canteen. Altogether, some 500 capital socialites (present at $5 a head) saw the show and admired such models as:
Mrs. Hugo L. Black, wife of the Supreme Court Justice — in a soft, voluminous, blue-and-grey print;
Mrs. Patrick Jay Hurley, wife of the onetime Secretary of War—in a dramatic black dinner gown;
Mrs. Douglas MacArthur II, wife of the General's nephew (TIME, March 20)—in a navy-blue afternoon dress;
Mrs. Ira Eaker, wife of the Mediterranean theater's air chief—in a gay block print with a Chinese hat;
Mrs. Thaddeus Brown Jr., wife of the former FCC chairman's son—in a plaid cotton evening dress.
Out of the Past
Orville Wright flew the giant new 57-passenger Lockheed Constellation (TIME, April 24) at Dayton's Wright Field. The 72-year-old aeronaut was up for almost an hour, piloted the great plane for five minutes. His comment: "Wonderful!"
Coast Guard Commander Jack Dempsey and Navy Commander Gene Tunney spoke at a Manhattan dinner for physical-fitness directors, listened to each other dourly (see cut).
Frau Alwine Dollfuss, widow of Austria's Nazi-murdered Chancellor, turned up at a Red Cross benefit in Montreal. At first a tragic wanderer (from Austria to Italy, Czechoslovakia. Hungary, Switzerland, England), Frau Dollfuss has lived quietly and obscurely in Canada since 1940. At the Montreal benefit, she posed for a picture (see cut p. 34) with a fellow refugee:
Oscar Straus, famed Viennese conductor-composer (The Chocolate Soldier), who was in Canada conducting a series of concerts.