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Show Rural Boys 'Make Good' As President's Advisers Harry Hopkins and Leon Henderson Have FDR's Confidence in Policies Vital to U. S. Welfare. f By BAUKHAGE Nationul Farm and Home Hour Commentator. (W.NU Service, 1343 H Street N. W., Washington, D. C.) WASHINGTON. America faces its second crisis under Roosevelt. Whether America knows it or not and by the time this reaches print the last doubt may be removed the President knows it now. The first crisis was the peak of the economic panic. The present one is the valley of allied fortunes. The WPA and the NRA were two of the institutions which the President Presi-dent created to meet our economic problems in 1933. Since then many an outstanding member of the New Deal palace guard has had his hour to strut and fret upon the stage and then be heard no more. General Johnson and his blue eagle now a mere columnist; Donald Richberg, his successor, back with his law books; the professors, Raymond Mo-ley, Mo-ley, once in the state department, today to-day behind an editorial desk in the seat of the scorner, and Rexford Guy Tugwell, still loyal, but silent, a partner of industry. We might go on. But two men, one a veteran of NRA, another of WPA, have been chosen to sit at the right and left hands of the Chief in crisis II: Harry Hopkins, head of the program I " " if - ' x U 1 ) Ns; "v - j HARRY HOPKINS under the lend-lease law, and Leon Henderson, officer of price administration adminis-tration and civilian supply. The two men are alike in few characteristics except that both were poor farm boys, both have a New Deal slant on life, and neither has much interest in the art of a Fifth avenue tailor. There is no doubt that the defense program, if we must still use that euphemistic label for this anything but negative undertaking, has passed out of the joint power of the dollar-a-year men and into control of thesa two staunch supporters of the Roosevelt administration. The rise of Harry Hopkins' influence influ-ence has been steady, interrupted only by periods of ill-health. His relationship with the President started start-ed from a sympathy of viewpoint concerning the duty of government toward its underprivileged. It has grown into an intimate friendship, bastioned by propinquity that comes from sharing the same rooftree and many leisure hours, before nine in the morning and after six at night, since May of last year. That was when Hitler's blitz across the low countries showed the President that the possibility of peaceful intervention in the cause of democracy in Europe was over. In his despair, he called his friend to the White House for a week-end of comfort and counsel. Hopkins has been there ever since. Perhaps the barefoot boy driving a neighbor's cows up a dusty lane some four decades ago dreamed of the White House every boy has a chance to be President we know. But how many boys dream of being a President's chief advisor and bossing boss-ing seven billion dollars' worth of supplies for democracy? Harry's father was a harness maker. He had a harness shop in Grinnell, Iowa, and it was in Iowa because Mrs. Hopkins was ambitious am-bitious for her children and there was a college there. Harry earned some nickels and dimes herding cows, and then worked in the shop. Later he worked his way through college. Money never meant much to him. He never handled much of his own. But he has bossed millions for other people in the Red Cross during the World war, with the Association Asso-ciation for the Improvement of the Poor in New York, where he got to know Governor Roosevelt, and then with the relief organization of the federal government. Hopkins, lean, slight, amiable, grew up with the New Deal. So did Leon Henderson but he reached the inner circle by a more roundabout way. He is thick-set and dynamic and he blustered into the confidence of General Johnson in the NRA, as an economist who could punctuate his theories with the salty expletives that appealed to Old Iron Pants. When the blue eagle folded its wings, Henderson plowed his own furrow and got out of the way when he was not needed but always managed man-aged to bob up when he had a chance to say something important. He predicted the "bust" as he called it the slump of 1937. In-1938 he warned against price rises. He kept warning. Prices went up. Now he is czar over prices. Like Hopkins, Henderson worked his way through college. Like him, too, the jobs he has held since his maturity were all outside the marts of trade and commerce. These two self-made rural boys see the same dreams of America when they look out of the White House windows side by side with the Hyde Park Squire. Early Morning In a Nation's Capital Six o'clock in the morning. From a Saturday to a Monday spring changed to summer in Washington, Wash-ington, buds turned to blooms and bare branches burst out into full-leaved full-leaved green. In a city, the first walk under this newly spread canopy of green is a strange delight. There is nothing quite like it Leafy curtains shut out the harsh, cold stone and steel about you as a drawn shade shuts out the night from a lamp-lit room. Washington does not wake early. At six in the morning there are so few people on the streets that the folks you pass seem as friendly as a neighbor you meet on a lonely lane. The red and green traffic lights still have their eyes closed and only the yellow bulbs blink sleepily sleep-ily at you as they have all night But these days the sun is well up and as you walk west to east the light strikes you square in the eyes. It always reminds me of a prairie town and that always reminds me of how I was reminded of my prairie town when we used to be marching eastward in the dawn of a murky French morning when the sun suddenly sud-denly burst on us and made us long for the old, wide-brimmed campaign cam-paign hat instead of the little cloth rag of an overseas cap. You don't see many campaign hats any more. As I came down the avenue this morning almost-empty buses passed me. I saw a colored man watering a pathetic little patch of lawn in front of his two-story cottage. The rest of the family were still asleep, the bedroom windows were open. I saw an old-fashioned ornate oil lamp in one. All rooms seem to be bedrooms in Washington. The fine old residences resi-dences are turned into rooming houses many of them and early in the morning the windows are open. In an hour thousands of government govern-ment workers will be hurriedly dressing behind carelessly drawn shades, then jamming the now-empty now-empty buses with all the roomy comfort of steers in a cattlecar. Between old, transmogrified residences resi-dences rise the new apartments. Here and there are a few that sprang into being when 1917 filled the city with war workers. They are frequently impressive looking on the outside, built to suggest sug-gest a French chateau. Inside, tiny little boxes of rooms with low ceilings ceil-ings that the third floor windows can hardly see over the sills of the second sec-ond floor of the residences next door. But the modern apartments that are springing up like dandelions these days do not go in for French facades. fa-cades. They are the same boxes inside. in-side. Outside, there are ugly flat walls with plenty of glass, the whole entrance is glass. They look too much like modern Moscow to please my old-fashioned eyes. |