The Wilmington morning star. [volume] (Wilmington, N.C.) 1909-1990, 1945-02-19
Fair Enough

/ Editors note-The Star accepts no re-
sponsibility for the personal views OF Mr..
Pegler and often disagrees with them as
much as many of his readers. His articles
serve the good purpose of making people
think)
Copyright, 1s45, by King Features Syndicate)
In her role of journalistic excrescence
which is her own husbands definition of
columnist and which means an abnormal out
growth, as wart, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt
runs @. and A. feature in the Ladies Home
Journal, entitled IF You Ask Me-" In this
| anchored position, Mrs. Roosevelt selects GER
tain questions and gives her answers some
times find myself under a temptation to sus-
pect that some of the questions are rugged by
kind friends with intent to distort propositions
SO that the replies seem to be candid and
fortnight, whereas they would not suffice
were the questions properly put
For example, Mrs. Roosevelt was asked
chow can you consider your husbands gift
of the Hyde Park estate to the Government
as real gift when you and your children can
occupy it, tax-free with the upkeep paid by the
Government?''
To this my colleague in excrescency was
able to reply that while it is true that Presi-
dent Roosevelt reserved the right of occu-
pancy as long as he, she or any of their chill
dren desire to live there, the taxes and the
running expenses must be privately borne
That understand to be correct and an ade-
quate answer to the question, as put, and we
get suggestion of patient and injured inno-
cence for Lagniappe.
more searching way to have phrased
it, however, would have been something like
this
us it a fact that by this gift the taxable
inheritance of President Roosevelt's heirs will
be reduced at large saving to them in estate
taxes while they retain tn eright of occu-
pancy as long as they shall live?"
1t is my belief that our not excess
sively beloved curmudgeon, that avaricious
and covetous miser Harold Ickes, of the De-
partment of the Interior, did not inspect the
teeth of this gift horse infinitely but accepted
it impetuously for the Nation. a great favor
to friend after his own heart. Real estate
men in that part of the country familiar with
the values of such enormous old heaps with
their requirements Of servants, explain that
if legal ownership is retained at the time of
the death of millionaire, which Roosevelt
is, and they are taxed in the top brackets,
this tax often exceeds by far their practical
sale value which may be nothing.
Other rich men in the same region have
had less luck and have been less fortunate
in their friends. One millionaire who lived in
Westchester county, adjoining Duchess coun-
ty, where Hyde Park is, tried for several years
before his death to unload his enormous old
and the state.
The public officials to whom he made
these offers of generosity always saw him
coming, however, and frankly told him that
it was worth more to the various public
treasures, in inheritance taxes collectible
from his heirs than 1t could possibly be worth
as a public institution. In the present case,
then, the Roosevelt ancestral home, built with
the proceeds of the opium smuggling trade
bv Warren Delano, the Presidents grand
father not only represents loss OF public
revenue as a taxable inheritance but becomes,
inevitably and endlessly, direct burden on
the National Government for its preservation
and care 1t will be in due time, a burden on
all the neighbors because it then becomes a
national historical monument, immune to To-
cal real estate taxes. Its removal from the
local tax rolls must result in a corresponding
increase, pro rata, in the real estate taxes OF
all the owners of private property around
and about.
It is no reproach to any man that he try
so to arrange his affairs that he will have to
paw the least possible taxes. Taxation is not
sentimental and war of wits goes On con-
stantly between the various collectors on one
side and the citizen on the other. Roosevelt
once spoke bitterly about men who devise
clever little schemes, having the color OF le-
gality, to escape taxes, but any reviewing
agent of the Internal Revenue will admit over
quiet, social uIdIl, III IiS iioelSi VI
clever little schemes, the Treasury, too. is
very ingenious and, moreover has the right
to make arbitrary decisions in its own favor
in border-line problems and almost invariably
does. Some of it's clever little schemes, while
thew have the color of legality, certainly do
not have the odor.
To my personal knowledge, a house much
more modern than the Roosevelt mansion,
built after the first war in fact, at cost OF
about $500, 900 was torn down SO that the owner
would not have to pay real estate taxes during
the remainder of his life and would not be
caught dead with it, to the disadvantage OF
his family.
There is no need to represent President
Roosevelt a generous man. That is not
stated constitutional requirement OF the office
and the most generous man who ever held 1t
got no credit for his gifts to the Nation but
was smeared by the early New Deal propa-
ganda as the personification and agent of
ruthless greed This was Herbert Hoover who
lived economically in the White House by con-
trast with the expanded services installed by
his successor, and gave his entire salary to
the Government. Oliver Wendell Holmes, on
the other hand, has been eulogized for his
bequest of relatively small estate to the
Nation on his death.
Generosity has not pervaded the Roose-
welt regime. Ickes, rich and greedy and the