A MIRACLE MAN

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 516, 27 April 1933, Page 7

A MIRACLE MAN

UNKIND PEN PICTURE OF AMERICA'S NEW j PRESIDENT. Writing from the United States of America, Frank A. Russell sends "The Bulletin" this pen-picture of the new President, who took the oath of office during March. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is to be next President of th'e United States because Hoover bored the American people by prophesying smooth things that failed to come to pass. The voters turned out the Republicans because, after they had claimed to have cornered Prosperity, they couldn't even1 remember which corner it was around. I have seen Roosevelt; I have heard him speak; I have listened to the same old promises; I have heard his campaign song, "Happy Days are Here Again," and couldn't help thinking of the days when the same song was sung for Jack Lang in the Domain. Well, what sort of fellow is this Roosevelt? He's a smiling, white-toothed showman, with a professional charm that gets the people and causes women to call him a darling. He's as general in his glitteralities as Alfred Deacon at his most leloquent. He sidesteps real issues like a born politician, but does the popular thing with a flashing grin that sweeps people off their feet. In practical politics he is governed by a machine as cunning and as ruthless as any the despised 'Republicans .ever devised! but in actualities, meaning real remedies for existing ills, he is as amateurish' as a curate. I have heard him make suggestions for relieving unemployment, for instance, that would have taken the treasures of Ind to perform. But they sounded great. His scheme for afforestation was devised to put a million men to work planting trees throughout the United States of America. It took real timber men to blow it up. They pointed out cruelly that it would cost 10 billion dollars a year and would need such imports of young trees as to denude other countri'es of. available supplies. Every practical man laughed, but it's not practical men who

elect Presidents. The people yelled their heads off for the miracle-man. Another bright -promise he is now being asked to perform, even though he's not yet in office, is: one to engage in gainful employment the twhdle of the surplus lahour of the United States pf America. This, he declared, in a letter published by th'e Unemployed Committee, should he the first duty of a Chief E'xecutive. Rough, rude .accountants have worlced out a sum in arithmetic, and the execution ^ of this little promise will cost 10 billion dollars a year, and ; cumber the United States . of America with' public works ; sufficient for . three generations of a ; 'nation of rehuilders. Concurrently ; with these two- side lines he has en- ; gaged himself to snip a billion dollars out of the annual Budget. . A promising 1 fellow, .this- ih'aiiklin Delano