OCR Text |
Show Washington, D. C. OFFICIALS GO TO SCHOOL All over Washington, grown men are going to school again. More than 500 officials of a dozen different departments are doing "home work" learning vocabularies, drawing maps, and studying charts. It's the latest phase of the Good Neighbor policy. The government is teaching itself to know Latin-America. i With funds from the Rockefeller office, a school has been set up, known as the Inter-American Training Train-ing center. Dr. Henry Grattan Doyle took a year's leave from George Washington university to run it. When Morris Cooke was asked to head an economic mission to Brazil, Bra-zil, his experts attended Doyle's school before flying down to Rio. The treasury department has 28 lawyers dealing with Latin America. All are boning up with Dean Doyle and his faculty. Luncheon conferences are held all over town to discuss Latin America Amer-ica usually in Spanish. Doyle provides pro-vides a Latin expert for each luncheon. lunch-eon. WAR DULLS POLITICAL AXE The fact that Economic Stabilizer Jimmy Byrnes is not letting politics creep into his job is evidenced by the appointment of bald, mustachioed mustachi-oed Ralph E. Flanders, as one of the two management representatives representa-tives on his advisory board. For Flanders, who is president of the Jones and Lamson Machine com-rjanv com-rjanv of SDrinefield. Vt.. has been one of the President's severest critics. crit-ics. In fact if he could get his hands on a certain letter he wrote during the 1936 campaign, undoubtedly he would lose no time burning it up. The letter was sent to Joseph Leib of South Bend, Ind., founder (in 1930) of the first Roosevelt-for-Pres-ident club. Leib had written Flanders Flan-ders asking if he thought business would receive the "breathing spell" promised by the President during the campaign. The Vermont manufacturer replied, re-plied, August 25, 1936, that it was "increasingly difficult" to support New Deal policies, chiefly because of the tax bill of that year, which, he said, "makes it practically impossible im-possible either to pay dividends or to lay aside reserves to meet future conditions of unemployment. "I can only conclude," Flanders added, "that there is no such thing as a 'breathing spell' so long as Mr. Roosevelt is President." Early in 1941 Flanders was appointed ap-pointed to a key job in the Machine and Tools group of the OPM priorities priori-ties division. His company also has received several substantial contracts con-tracts from the government. Taxes are a lot higher than in 1936, however, how-ever, and there will be no breathing-spell breathing-spell for profits. But when Leib again wrote Flan- ders asking if he still held to the views expressed in the 1936 letter, Flanders replied: "Since we are now at war, much of the misunderstanding of the peacetime situation no longer holds." SYNTHETIC CHRISTMAS This December 25 one year after Pearl Harbor will be a wooden Christmas with a synthetic Santa Claus. The spirit will be the same, but the form will be different. Skates, scooters, sleds, electric trains, rubber balls these will be scarce everywhere if not absent entirely. en-tirely. Only the stores which placed their orders early last January will have the usual toys, and these probably prob-ably will be sold out by Thanksgiving. Thanksgiv-ing. Experts of the commerce department depart-ment have made a survey of the toy situation. They find that three types will be especially short rubber rub-ber toys, wheel toys, and metal goods. A WPB order stopped production of children's bicycles last April. Velocipedes, scooters, baby carriages, car-riages, "flexies" all will be short. Clearly it will not be a rolling Christmas. Makers of electric trains are 90 per cent converted to making materials ma-terials of war. There may be 50 per cent of the normal train supply this year, but they are disappearing fast. Ice skates and roller skates are almost unobtainable, and lead soldiers are practically extinct. Meanwhile, warlike toys are appearing ap-pearing everywhere toy bomb-sights, bomb-sights, tanks, bombing planes, and even bomb-banks for the dimes and nickels instead of the old piggy bank. In all this there is one consolation for the girls. The war has not disturbed the production of dolls, except for those made of rubber. MERRY-GO-ROUXD C. Uncensored reports from the Solomon Solo-mon islands, when finally published, will show that the U. S. marines fought with even greater heroism than we realize. It will be one of the great epics in American naval history. The marines at Solomon islands were relatively unseasoned only about eight months. The man who deserves chief credit for seasoning them is efficient Dan Barbey, U. S. navy, w:;o supervised their training as a task force at Solomon Island, Maryland. |