OUR ROYAL FAMILY

JEFFERSON CHASE

■ For the last fifteen years, America, the

land of monster parades, brass bands

and bathing beauties lias had to turn its eyes to "effete Europe" for that combination of bright color and ultra-respectability which goes by tbe name of Royalty.

The rotogravures and the tabloids in America have filled us, during all those years, with regal romances, until the spectacle of the ex-Kaiser sawing wood at Doom, the Prince of Wales on horseback, Queen Marie of Rumania in tbe midst of her family, Prince Carol with Magda Lupescu, King Alfonso departing into exile, King Albert of Belgium dismounting from an airplane, have all become better known to us than any of our American rotogravure favorites. Our Presidents—Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, and their family affairs— aroused about as much personal enthusiasm as an average Act of Congress.

■ KIND HEARTS ARE MORE THAN CORONETS.

—But, during the last nine months we

have changed all that. In response—halfinstinctive and half-calculated—to the immense public demand for the color-plusrespectability of royalty, America has produced the Roosevelt family.

The need for them bad long existed. During tbe last year of the Hoover regime, a

fashionable Washington hair-dresser (male, Latin, and hence unaccountable) remarked to bis clients: "I should like to pick up the paper some morning and read that two or three young men had l>oen caught serenading the President's daughter with guitars in the moonlight! With greater impatience, if less morality, he added: "Ah! if there were only a real scandal in the White House!" Life, he implied, would be so much brighter and happier for us all if we felt that our rulers also had their little weaknesses.

Since March 4, we have learned that our Presidential family is openly, unaffectedly and vigorously human. The popularity of this discovery has completely gainsaid that cynic who once remarked: "It must be very exhausting to be married to a Roosevelt— unless you are a Roosevelt yourself!" The answer seems to be, as an eminent clergyman once observed of Theodore the Great, that a "Roosevelt is like a diamond . . . with many facets ... all turned on!"

Whatever the basic facts of the Rooseveltian temperament, no one can deny the extraordinary degree to which their spontane-

activities have replaced in public print imported doings of Europe's royalty.

Whether the Roosevelts are founding a de facto royalty family, much as the bright young nephew of Julius Caesar did in Re-

publican Rome; whether we are living at the opening of an Augustan Age; or whether the world has really outlived the institution of hereditary monarchy a most amazing substitution of publicity values has taken place. No matter whether tbe Roosevelts are royal in the White House; they are certainly so in the rotogravure.

Even tbe deepest respect and affection for the members of that amazing group of vital human beings cannot obscure the scientific conclusion that the Roosevelts meet the public taste for royalty. Comparisons are generally criticisms; in this case, they are merely convenient illustrations of a process which constantly over-laps the bounds of literal accuracy. For example, when Mrs. Roosevelt was thrown from her horse into the mud, millions thought of the Prince of Wales, who is certainly no parallel to the vivacious First Lady. So, too, when Theodore Roosevelt 3rd, is fined for speeding at Cambridge, Mass., we are not dealing with an embryonic Prince Nicholas, but with a mere American undergraduate. Not merely what a Roosevelt does but also popular insistence on knowing what the Roosevelts do. is responsible for the torrent of personal publicity which is our tribute to this first American royal family.

■ THE MERRY MONARCH.—Let us put "first

things first," and consider the case of F.D.R. himself. No man has a shrewder knowledge of the uses of publicity than the man who deliberately clapped the lid on for three months after bis election, on tbe ground that the American people were tired of seeing his photograph and reading bis name in print.

Here we have a man who, undaunted by the limitations of illness, has retained his courage, bis ambition, bis good humor and bis zest in living.

He flies in airplanes; be drives in automobiles; be takes long railway journeys; be cruises down tbe Potomac on the Sequoia on week-ends; be sails the Amber jack 11 up the New England coast to Campobello Island; he goes to the theatre; he swims; he travels on battle ships and bolds a Cabinet meeting on the Indianapolis; be inspects forest camps and Boy Scout camps; he greets the Elks; be talks to the veterans whom be has deprived of their pensions; and always be smiles, smiles, smiles, invincibly and maybe a little inscrutably.

Here we have a man who meets the American demand for a merry monarch, a bon viveur like Edward VII, combined with a sailor king, like George V. Gay, yet untouched by scandal; sea-faring, yet not hard-bitten, he recalls that long series of beloved monarchs (with out their peccadilloes) which includes Henry VIII and Charles II of England, and Henry IV of France.

■ THE QUEEN MOTHER.—The President's mother, the distinguished Mrs. James

Roosevelt, Sr., whose estate at Hyde Park is the President's home, needs no comparisons. She is one of America's rarest products—a gracious and cultured gentlewoman of the old school. She enlists much the same general respect and affection as the Italians once lavished on the late Queen Margherita, mother of their present king.

■ ELEANOR REGINA.—Roosevelt in her own right as well as by marriage, Anna

Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the Land, possesses a charm and a vitality which should he studied by all who are interested in heredity, eugenics and humanity.

America loves a Queen and Mrs. Roosevelt is giving America what it wants, with an energy which surpasses the best efforts of the Old World. Something of the impeccable correctness of Queen Mary of England, something of the dignity of Queen Elizabeth of Belgium, something of the vibrant humanity of Queen Marie of Rumania, is here combined with something as deeply and as undefmably American as Louisa Alcott, to produce our First Lady. She teaches in Todhunter School, she runs

the Val Kill Shop (under the NRA Blue Eagle, of course), she broadcasts over the radio, she edited a magazine on babies. She attends a Hill Folk Festival in Virginia, recommends equal pay for women in industry, demands the boycotting of sweat-shop goods, is photographed eating hot dogs on Campobello Island, drives her own automobile from Maine to Albany. She rides horses. She is surrounded by dogs. She flies to Los Angeles to straighten out a son's domestic difficulties. She visits Bonus Camps, C.C.C. Camps, the women's camp on Bear Mountain. She rushes to another son's graduation at Groton; she conducts a Question and Answer Department for The WOman's Home Companion; she serves beer at the White House. She goes everywhere and does everything—with such tease, such naturalness and such eagerness, that no one could accuse her of publicity-seeking, for she is news.

Ten years ago, any Queen could visit America and be assured of headlines from coast-to-coast and a good bond-issue for her country as a steamer-basket at the end of the royal tour. Today she would be lucky if she broke even on expenses, let alone on newsspace, for Mrs. Roosevelt has just about ruined the import trade in royalty.

■ PRODIGIES IN PURPLE—There is nothing

so reassuring to the ruled as the spectacle of large families among the rulers. So, the five Roosevelt children—Anna Eleanor Daly, James, Elliott, Franklin D., Jr., and John A.—meet the demand of the public for monarchical exuberance.

The children themselves have been quick

to supply the American public with those free, gay, human doings which, in Europe, are the prerogative of Princes.

Mrs. Dali—whose husband is a practicing lawyer in New York who has mastered that technique of remaining in the background which is the first duty of a Prince Consort —is distinctively the Princess Royal. With her children—"Sistie" and "Buzzie" Dali— she suggests most strongly Princess Mary of England and her happy family life.

She has a competent grip upon-the technique of minor ceremonials, those occasions which in Europe are best illustrated by the laying on of corner-stones and the judging of horse-shows. She is on the editorial stall of Liberty magazine, she opens one of Mr. Bernarr MacFadden's admirable penny restaurants, she urges careers for girls, she opens an exhibition of aeronautical paintings, she presents a cup at the National Capital Kennel Club Show, she welcomes Ishbel MacDonald to the White House. She is pretty and charming. With her combination of semi-detached domesticity and gaiety, she shows to the public what European royalty learned long, long ago—that an attractive and well-bred girl is more important to a governing family than cornerstones, dress-uniforms, or even bond-issues.

■ YOUNG HOTSPUR.—James Roosevelt is

distinctly of the Crown Prince variety. You know, the young Hotspur who, rather than be a playboy, interests himself in politics and is apt to burn his fingers. Here is no Prince of Wales, no Prince Carol—possibly another Prince Humbert. Beyond the fact that he owns the first motor yacht registered by the Department of Commerce, the public knows little about him. However, what the Democratic politicians in Massachusetts know about him now is plenty.

He took a lead for his father in the bitter pre-convention fight in the Bay State, only to see the Walsh forces pledge the delegates to A1 Smith and only grudgingly vote the State into the Democratic column in November, 1932. Since then James has been having his revenge and has been "saying it with patronage" until the welkin has been wrung dry by the plaints of the bosses.

■ MORE SONS.—Elliott, the air-minded son of the family, who is domiciled in Los Angeles and whose writings as "aviation editor" of Mr. Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner show that the pen is trickier than the propeller, has given that touch of spiced gossip which is necessary to convince the mass of Americans that here we have the real thing. When Elliott was divorced at Reno, flew to Chicago and married (five days after the divorce) Miss Ruth Googins of Fort Worth, Texas, he did something which endeared the family to the whole tabloid world. Carol and his escapades, King Edward and his adventures, the long tradition of royal lovers, King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, came into their own in America with a characteristically respectable American version of something that looked like a royal indiscretion.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr., is still a little young for the princely role, but he seems certain to fdl this gap in the rotogravure sections before his father quits the White House. Franklin stroking the Groton crew, Franklin entering Harvard—did not The Illustrated London News once carry multitudinous photographs of Their Royal Highnesses running along the tow-path at Eights Week? Franklin taking a European tour—student-third—and returning as a fascinated student of the art of bull-fighting —echoes of (Continued on following page) the storied Haroun-al-Raschid, the Grand Tour and the princely baptism of fire! And then there is little John Roosevelt, still at Groton, but already prominent as one of the crew of the Amber jack // at Campobello Island. An embryo Prince Henry, perhaps.

■ KINGS IN EXILE.—To make the analogy perfect, we have the spectacle of our Kings in Exile, those Republican Roosevelts who are the disinherited political heirs of the old Emperor, Teddy himself.

Theodore the Great spent his Doom during Wilson's Democratic World War. The Crown Prince—or is he the Alfonso?— Theodore the Little, has been doing political odd-jobs for years, waiting for the magic restoration of these Republican Romanoffs. New York Assemblyman, war hero, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, biggame hunter, candidate for Governor of New York, father of a large family, Gov-

error-General of the Philippines; his position resembles that of many another royal exile, knowing that he will never ascend the throne, thinking just the same that perhaps. . . . Alice Long worth, the Empress Pita of the political perhaps burgs. . . . Theodore the Third, friend of Franklin the Second and fellow-undergraduate at Harvard, possibly the Young Pretender of our future dynasty.

The point of this series of regal analogies is that we are witnessing a profound change in our political philosophy. Fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, a President's family was his own business and the Presidency itself was no great pumpkin. Congress was King, and the Chief Executive was the principal hired man. The name of Mrs. Andrew Jackson was dragged into political badinage only as a dirty trick on her husband. Mrs. Lincoln's fads and foibles worried Honest Abe but didn't noticeably affect the conduct of the Civil War.

Grover Cleveland married while in the White House without causing the Republic to skip a heart-beat. It was not until Theodore Roosevelt assumed the Presidency that the doings of the White House family—led by "Princess Alice"—became news of national importance. This was Woodrow Wilson's first and most painful discovery in the White House, and the flurry of innuendo which accompanied his happy second marriage was proof that the change wras final.

Yet after Wilson, we tried to return to the old Republican tradition which had produced the Harrisons, McKinleys and Taft. It was too late. The country craved the red meat of colour, romance and personality.

The country wanted something different and the Roosevelt family rose to supply it.

As politics, it is magnificently successful, especially since it is unpremeditated and entirely natural; it has made President Roosevelt the best-loved President we have had in the White House in more than a generation. As history, it is intensely significant: it shows that, all along, the American people prefer one-man government, whether it be hereditary or elective monarchy, and that they like to see their Chief of State conduct his office on regal lines.

As a result, we see today in the White House, the American equivalent of a royal family, just as we see in the Presidency, the American equivalent of a European dictator. Already there is shrewd talk in political circles at Washington to the effect that 1932 was our last Presidential election. Perhaps in 1936 or 1940 we will discover that it was our first royal accession—no matter what the school-books call it.