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Show BehindjIi THEfey By- PaulMallon Jb Rclcuscd by Western Newspaper Union. PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AND CONSERVATISM WASHINGTON. Mr. Roosevelt'i choice of his lend-lease administrator, administra-tor, Edward Stettinius, ex-big business busi-ness man, to the post of undersecretary under-secretary of state has been commonly com-monly interpreted as another surprising sur-prising evidence of Mr. Roosevelt's swing to conservatism in preparation prepara-tion for the coming election. It looks more like Mr. Roosevelt, and especially State Secretary Hull are getting ready for a big worldwide world-wide trade development program after the war as perhaps the main theme of peace. Mr. Hull's pet policy pol-icy throughout his career has been international free trade. He needed and wanted a man with business experience to help along that line. The scope of coming policy in this respect has not yet been divulged. Furthermore, Stettinius is about as close to the Russians as anyone in this government, having been in charge of all the lend-lease arrange-' ments with them. Some of the liberal lib-eral groups have been complaining that insufficient attention has been paid Russia lately. Stettinius gets along well with the Russians, without having been converted con-verted to their ideology. As a business busi-ness man, lend-leasor and Russian friend, he fills three practical requirements. re-quirements. These are sufficient basic reasons for the surprise, beyond the advertised ad-vertised political implications. j r r TREND IS THAT WAY It is true the entire series of recent re-cent presidential appointments has followed the more conservative trend which Mr. Roosevelt established estab-lished back when he dropped Leon Henderson as OPA administrator. Since then, he has set up the judicial judi-cial front composed of Byrnes, Vinson Vin-son and Jones (with Eernard Baruch as official adviser) in charge of practically all domestic planning. He called in the Wisconsin ex-banker, ex-banker, Leo Crowley, already filling two important government posts, to take over in addition the Wallace-Milo Wallace-Milo Perkins economic sideshow and turn it over to a business functioning function-ing basis without all the animal acts and reforming ballyhoo. Now he. has boosted Mr. Crowley a notch higher, elevating him to control of relief and rehabilitation, since Governor Gov-ernor Lehman is preparing to take the bigger international role in that line, (Lehman also being a New York banker). All these appointees may be conservative con-servative as the liberals rate them, but more important than that, they seem to represent an effort to do a practical job here rather than a political job. To say that Mr. Roosevelt has gone conservative, however, would be going too far. as he still has all his old most intimate New Deal associates as-sociates around, Messrs. Hopkins, Frankfurter, Rosenman, Cohen, etc., and, in most government agencies, agen-cies, you will still find New Dealers hidden away in key spots. To me, it seems the President has not gone anywhere politically. $ WEIRD ACTIVITIES IN ECONOMIC WARFARE The weird activities of agents of Vice President Wallace's former Bureau Bu-reau of Economic Warfare in their search for strategic materials, are still being related. Many of his men went into the Amazon jungle area, inhabited chiefly by Indians, who do not even wear a sarong, or at least only in its most abbreviated form. An effort was made to induce them to gather rubber. Before the project really got under un-der way, a government shipment of 1,500 sewing machines arrived in the jungle for distribution to the Indians as an inducement to make them work. Just who sent them, or why, was not apparent to those in charge on the ground. They were not used and were sent back. Incidentally Inci-dentally the Indians of that area would not do the work anyway and natives had to be imported from another an-other district. s s s CONGRESS AND BUREAUCRATS There is much current discussion about how tough congress is going to be with Mr. Roosevelt and the bureaucrats. The truth is congress cannot do much about either. Mr. Roosevelt obtained most of his powers immediately after the war started, and they are to extend legally until a short time after it ends. The annual appropriation bills will not come up until January, and the agenda of congress is light. The tax bill seems to be the major item for consideration, and some authorities doubt that anything will be done even on that subject. In fact, the leaders already are talking about adjournment, although they have not agreed on a date. The main power of congress probably prob-ably will continue to be exerted in a negative way by investigations of various government activities in civilian and military fields. |