National Affairs: Debate’s End

To the House of Representatives this week came at last the Pittman Neutrality Bill. With it came hordes of newsmen, shoals of tourists, and Franklin Roosevelt’s hopes of quick enactment and adjournment. House leaders maneuvered the Neutrality Bill to the floor under technical safeguards that guaranteed swift action. Only a major upset now could plant new barriers in the path of U. S. aid to the Allies — and no upset was expected.

Two men prepared themselves to cushion any thank-you-ma’ams along that road —a slight, stooped Pennsylvania Irishman with grey hair frizzled in a permanent wave, Pat Boland of Scranton; and a short, old-fashioned general law practitioner, perfecto-puffing Luther Alexander Johnson of Corsicana, Tex.

On their small rounded shoulders weighed a solemn responsibility, as the House strategists of a bill that would take the U. S. around an unlit, unmarked curve in the historic road of its foreign policy.

But Mr. Boland and Mr. Johnson, prac tical and earthy men, saw their job as getting out the vote and to their job they swung with vim.

Before the House stretched a week’s brass-knuckle debate. Until the last chap ter, the Senate’s had been a different and duller story. For three stodgy weeks that body had shifted uneasily about in the un accustomed formal garments of full-dress debate. But last week the Senate, almost to a man, happily shucked its tight collar, stripped off the white gloves. The nodding press gallery awoke, and in five days of catch-as-catch-can heckling the Senate finished its task, passed the Pittman Bill after 26 days and 1,000,000 words of the Great Debate.

Bill. The Pittman Bill, in final Senate form, repealed the controversial arms embargo. But the bill did many other things of possibly greater significance. It provided, following proclamation of a state of war either by the President or Congress, that thereafter no U. S. citizen may travel on the ships of any belligerent named; that no U. S. ship may carry passengers or goods to any belligerent.

Thereafter no belligerent may buy arms in the U. S. without paying cash on the barrelhead. No belligerent may buy other materials until title has been transferred abroad. But the Senate left a large credit loophole in its ban of the purchase or sale of belligerent securities by U. S. citizens. It provided that this ban did not apply to “renewal or adjustment” of existing debts —which would permit further vast credit extensions.

U. S. ships may carry any goods but arms to any port in the Western Hemisphere south and west of an imaginary fence set around the North Atlantic Ocean; and anywhere in the other world waters. The President may declare any region a combat area—which would automatically ban U. S. citizens, ships, planes from trespassing in that area. Minor provisions bar alien seamen from U. S. entry, mounted arms on U. S. merchant vessels, use of the U. S. flag by foreign ships. Penalties for major infractions: $50,000 fine, five years in jail or both; for minor $10,000 fine, two years in jail or both.

Brawl. The details of the bill were old stuff; the course of the debate was new. For, with victory certain, with 60 votes in the well-tailored pocket of Strategist Jimmy Byrnes of South Carolina, the long-silent Administration wrecking crew last week suddenly let loose at the Isolationists. When Isolationist Nye of North Dakota made his third speech, Byrnes signaled for the attack himself, with an assault on Nye’s recent change-of-front on the responsibility of J. P. Morgan & Co. for World War I. Then jut-jawed “Shay” Minton snapped: “He [Nye] has been on every side of the question. … I dare say the Senator from North Dakota has made more from his lectures on munitions than Du Pont has made.”

In the next two days the wreckers smashed every Isolationist attempt to demonstrate that embargo repeal would be the first step to war; raced ahead with amendments, with Vice President Garner giving them a clear track. Grinning Mr. Garner gaveled amendments through even before Senators finished presenting them. Protested Bennett Clark: “. . . railroading!” Cracked John Garner: “There is not going to be any horse-and-buggy business in this Senate as long as I am running it.”

The pace heightened: when debate slowed up, the Administration men impatiently chorused “Vote, Vote!” Once sly “Old Tawm” Connally protested mildly: “I should like to have the occupants of the galleries quithollering ‘Vote!,'” On the final day, his freshly salted wounds smarting, Isolationist Bennett Clark got good & mad, accused Pittman of “pettifogging.” Nevada’s Pittman, who packs a seldom-stirred temper, rose and roared: “He has a habit, in his conceit and vanity and lack of ethics, of indulging in such expressions. I want to have the pleasure of answering him.” He was quickly dissuaded, cooled off. Not so Bennett Clark, who stayed white-hot through the long day.

When all resorts failed, repeal of the arms embargo won, 60-33: the bill itself passed, 63-30. As the denouement came, hapless Leader Barkley rose to the occasion with a well-meant speech complimenting the Senate on the high level of the debate. Everything happens to Mr. Barkley. In the next few minutes the debate fell to one of the lowest levels in years.

For as the galleries emptied, “Old Tawm” presented a dramatic new preamble to the bill. All day he had been balked by Smart-Aleck Clark on a technicality. Now he proposed to have his way. Sourly Montana’s Wheeler objected, called the preamble “a stump speech.” Senators popped up all over the chamber to dust off Mr. Wheeler. “Old Tawm” Connally moved snorting into the fray, his glasses perched on nose-tip, an infallible sign of Connally wrath. He slammed his fist so hard on his desk that a book jumped to Wheeler’s lap, bellowed: “Just because you are licked you cannot take it. … I know the . . . Senator’s answer … it would be just a lot of flub-dub, another stump-speech, just a lot of ‘hooey’ . . . the methods of the back-room domino-parlor.”

For one embarrassing hour the dogfight snarled along, weary Senators standing about in overcoats waiting for a vote. Finally unhappy Mr. Barkley prevailed on Connally to withdraw the preamble, and the Great Debate grumbled to a sorry end.