The Waterbury Democrat., 1938-01-19
l :. BEHIND THE SCENESl WASHINGTON nv RODNEY DUTCHER-A
 Democrat Washington
 Correspondent
Business And FDR Agree It's Bad To Keep Tossing
 Dead Cats All
 Around The Lot

Washington, Jan. 19 - The out standing fact in these conferences between Roosevelt and big business leaders is that the President in sists on assuming the role of key noter.
 His essential keynote, despite the genial urbanity that F. D. R. cus- tomarily assumes, centers, around his belief that he and Big Bus mess" recently have had a passage at arms, and that he, Roosevelt, ob- viously has come out on top.
 In effect, the President told the | five business leaders-representa
 tives of the steel, automobile, rail-
 road, machinery and food indus
 trials-that he thought he had
 "outdemagogued them," and could continue to tout -dema-
 gogue his business critics in a1:y
 argument as to whether the ad- miniStratiOn or business itself
 had brought on the depression. He asked whether government and business ought to keep on | throwing dead cats at each other. The business leaders agreed that it would be a mistake.
 Business More Reasonable
 There is so much nip-and- tuck, touch-and-go and guess-guess- guess in the current situation as it involves government, business, de- pression and the hope of recovery, that this writer prefers not to &C., cept now any of the various yer sions of possible subsequnt rap prochment between government and business.
 But the business leaders are
 veering more toward an attitude
 of sweet reasOnablenesS since
 three things became apparent:
 That Roosevelt's pals were going to dominate the Supreme court.
 That leaderless congress could n't be dependeed upon to do any, thing that made any sense.
 That Roosevelt was getting
 along very nicely with his anti monopoly, anti-coEcentratiOn, an-
 ti-big business attack whish be-
 gan with the sarefully planned
 tirades of Assistant Attorney Gen.
 eral Robert H. Jackson and Sec
 retary of the Interior Ickes.
 This last is partly because of evidence that Roosevelt's worker anud rank-and-file following has shown an astonishing disposition to believe charges that capital was deliberately making the de- pression through sabotage in or der to bring the New Deal to its knees.
 Thinks Business Began It
 Industrialists have healthy fear of the possibility that workers can be reused up against them by able demogoguery, and the New Deal crowd has been just ruthless enough to toss such a threat at them. In justice to Roosevelt and his aides, it might be said that they think this threat is less reprehenSible than the alleged tactics of "big business" in seeking to blame te depression on the administration, and using 1t as pretext for wiping out the New Deals legislative structure.
 The presidents attitude is that
 business leaders started the name ealing free-fOr-al, and he has
 intimated to business cOnferees that he wonders whether they thought the government was
 comprised of a group of punching
 dummies who would never hit back.
 To get into his real frame of mind it is necessary to remember that Roosevelt is an incurable op- | timist who regards himself as un- beatable, and to remember his hope as expressed in the 1886 Madison Square Garden speech - that in his second administration the forces of sel1shness and greed" would meet their master" Didn't End in Row
 No stenographic copy appears to | be available on the conference at which Roosevelt sat with Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors, Ernest Weir of the National Steel Corpo- ration, M. w. Clement of the Penn sylvania Railroad, Lewis Brown of the Johns -Manville Corporation, Colby M. Chester of General Foods, and Donald Richberg.
 But if local grapevines are good for anything it would seem that Roosevelt suggested business should reform itself before the government got around to it. The business men talked back, but everyone was careful to see that the meeting didn't break up in row.
 Copyright 1888, NEA Service, Incl