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oe we peare ne ares } ~ Oo saca- we weer ee ow, two years after Franklin D. Roosevelt's death, there keeps returning to me the memory of those great qualities which he had in so large a measure and which today are so lack- ing in our national leadership. He had, first of all, a surpassing talent for im- provisation, an ability to call forth genius to flesh out his dreams. He had, secondly, an overwhelmingly infectious humanity, « quality of affection that ’ sadiated from him to his countrymen and was returned with the same in- atensity. He had, lastly, that huge sense of destiny which grew and grew over . the years until it almost completeiy ” obscured his human faults and failings and made him, while he still lived, pact ’ of the American legend. Roosevelt was a masterful improviser. He caught at ideas like an atstist, absorbed them, implemented them, re- jected them as soon as his imagination caught a fresher note that served his broad purposes better. He came to Washington in the spring of 1933, to a city paralyzed by the dead hand of custom and habit. He destroyed the paralysis by rejecting all the patterns of convention and throwing the doors of Washington open to the men whom the “practical” world called crackpots. He arrived with no‘ inflexible code of ideas; within a month he had made our - Capital the most powerful center of fresh thought in the Western world. Dseamers and planners, schemers and vey eet Suns ania aed hall aliianh ain Feemiation on metabo nnttenmeameintenmnetenen 1 politicians, poured in, all of them mag- netized by the man in the White House whose eyes sparkled when he heard them talk. My first conversation with Roosevelt was in the summer of 1932 when he first broached the sheiter-belt idea to me. Roosevelt was a great lover of trees; the concept of a belt of trees stretching across the conotinent and sheltering the arid plains had long in- trigued him. He thought the shelter- belt might even change the climate of the continent. Though experts disagreed with him on his concept of climatology, it bothered Roosevelt but little. He wanted a continental shelter-belt and 2 year later men were planting it. His detailed planning, his mastery of the hard facts that went into grand schemes was sometimes faulty—but the grand schemes themselves were his domain. Tn a city of small-minded men, he col- lected them like a connoisseur. Other ideas came to him similacly from all quarters. He knew that some- thing had to be done quickly to reverse the spiral of deflation. The actual tech- nique was a matter for experts to work out, Homer Cummings, several others and myself were convinced very early that the point of attack on deflation was the price of gold. We felt it must be raised. I suggested that the President call in Professor George A. Warren and James Harvey Rogers (author of America Weighs Her Geld). - Roose- “ oa eo. . . LACE ene ener reer me se an 8 wD RE A " ( ‘:) NEW REPUBLIC velt received them, listened to them and installed them immediately in an office in the Department of Commerce. There he put them to work on the tech- nique of a new gold program and almost overnight the Administration had a new gold policy. The times were such as to aorake broad and sweeping acts permissible, and this was the nature of his own tem- " perament. He throve on sweeping new concepts. It was suggested to Roosevelt that he set up a Commodity Credit Cor- poration as a possible mechanism for handling gold purchase. We set up a % corporation with sweeping powers un- der the laws of Delaware. It was never used for gold purchase—but it served a dozen other purposes; Roosevelt hearti- ly applauded as we used it to issue farm loans on cotton, corn, wheat. Later it traded extra cotton for rubber and the American people had 20 million extra — automobile tires as a result. The trail-blazer pr forget the hard times of the early thirties. Those were the days when farmers in northern Iowa jerked a judge off the bench in a foreclosure case, when a physical revolt of our farm- ing population was going on not only against misery and failure, but against law and order, too. We used the Com- modity Credit Corporaticn to double corn prices with four-percent, non-re- Cee ee Le Bet course loans. Roosevelt gave us the green os = Treen maps pene pene ee ge ne