THE CONGRESS: Brass Tacks

On a cool early morning in autumn, New York City’s Park Avenue is a quiet place to walk. Town-house curtains are drawn against the dawn; broad sidewalks are bare of people. Yawning, hotel doormen crack their white-gloved knuckles in boredom.

From his regular 45-minute morning constitutional on Park Avenue, Herbert Hoover returned one day last week to his Waldorf-Astoria sitting-room suite, summoned the press. He had polished up a 1932 idea to fit the exigencies of the Great Debate on U. S. neutrality.

On the grounds that both repeal or retention of the Neutrality Act’s arms embargo might lead the U. S. into World War II, Herbert Hoover now proposed that the U. S. sell freely “defensive” weapons (pursuit & light observation planes, anti-aircraft guns), prohibit forever the sale of “offensive” weapons (bombing planes, bombs, poison gas, submarines).

Herbert Hoover is a humanitarian, an unpractical politician. His characteristic proposal, overlooking the very nature of warfare, was greeted with wide disapproval. Yet hardly had his critics’ chorus died down when Mr. Hoover’s one overnight convert, Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, stuck out his tanned neck to echo the same idea. But Lindbergh went further than the Great Engineer. Denouncing Canada’s entry into World War II, he asserted that “sooner or later” the U. S. must “demand the freedom” of all European possessions in the Western Hemisphere as a defensive tactic.

Lindbergh, neither a Great Humanitarian nor an ex-President, but merely an ex-Hero, was met with a critical blast that made the blatts at Hoover sound like cheers. The fury of Canada and England reflected the Senate cloakroom bitterness; finally Nevada’s Key Pittman exploded: “Colonel Lindbergh’s statement . . . encourages the ideology of the totalitarian governments and is subject to the construction that he approves of their brutal conquest of democratic countries through war. . . .” Messrs. Hoover & Lindbergh retired to their corner, without seconds.

Reality. Early this week they and the U. S. got a conclusive tip-off that the Isolationist cause in the Great Debate was now becoming more & more a desperate attempt to stall off inevitable defeat. Michigan’s Vandenberg said he was drafting a version of the Hoover-Lindbergh plan as a substitute for the arms embargo if the embargo were beaten. But Pittman was now anxious to shut off futile chitchat, limit debate, get on to perfecting and passing the bill. To this end Pittman moved to speed the legislation by scrapping the controversial go-day credit provision, substituting strict cash-on-the-barrelhead.

In this they had the aid of the Senate’s No. 1 Realist, Vice President John Nance Garner. At about ball-game time each day the Senate sits he bowlegs his way through tall swing-doors to survey the chamber scene—fresh unlit cigar in hand, little Neon-blue eyes flickering, his back-hair ruffled from his after-lunch nap. Reality always enters a room with John Garner, and last week his impatience with empty gabble, his dislike of oratorical set-pieces, brought the high-flown debate down to earth.

First the Senate got rid of a move to split the Pittman bill in two, divorcing the controversial arms-embargo section from the less controversial title-and-carry provisions. Although New Hampshire’s Charles Tobey had proposed this split in a sincere desire to get U. S. shipping immediately legislated out of combat areas abroad, the effect would have been to put the weight of debate solely on the Isolationist issue: sale of arms to belligerents.

Jimmy Byrnes whipped 65 votes out of the cloakrooms; Bennett Clark mustered only 26. Shouted Tobey as he and the Isolationists were flattened: “You can’t lick a steam-roller.”

Shoes. Now into action came three Isolationists by inheritance, standing in the shoes of Isolationist Fathers: La Follette, Clark and Lodge. Day after day the Isolationists took the floor to bellow steadily all afternoon. The galleries were more than half empty; the press doodled or played word-puzzles in the press gallery. Shockproof to the familiar roar of the Isolationists’ big guns, the reporters sat up and took notice only when two new cannoneers appeared: homespun, silent William John Bulow of South Dakota, glib, emotional Dennis Chavez of New Mexico.

Bulow, in his first outstanding speech in nine years in the Senate, admitted that the U. S. might well forget neutrality to “track Hitler down and hang him to a sour apple tree.” But he warned that this hunt would cost millions of lives, while Hitler might have died a natural death meanwhile.

More eloquently spoke Dennis Chavez. Indeed, so eloquent was he that for many minutes no one could guess which side he was on. Then in a punch-line finish he deserted the Administration, pledged himself to fight against embargo repeal.

Generalissimo Pittman quietly held his fire for the moment the battle reached the amendment trenches. Victory was his—if he would make a certain sacrifice.

Ships. Key Pittman’s army is a motley one of Republican converts, Old Dealers, New Dealers. Some are stragglers by nature, others can easily be lured up inviting side alleys. In one of those side alleys stood an expert siren whose wiles have been 100% effective in U. S. history: the shipping lobby.

To Straggler Bailey of North Carolina, Commerce Committee chairman, the neutrality bill’s virtual erasure of the U. S. merchant marine is a major and unnecessary tragedy. After earnest counsel with Rear Admiral Emory Scott Land of the Maritime Commission, he presented to the Senate, with his peculiar, Biblical eloquence, the Admiral’s conclusions. (Meantime his onetime colleague, cadaverous William Gibbs McAdoo, now head of the American President Line, used his prerogative as an ex-Senator to lobby slickly on the Senate floor for Pacific Coast shipping.)

Said Admiral Land, through his Senatorial mouthpiece: If the proposed neutrality bill became law, of 326 U. S. ships (2,150,000 gross tons), 130 (860,000 gross tons) would be forced to rot in harbors. There is now no place for the 137 new Maritime Commission vessels (all ordered, 22 of them launched) to go. Annual gross revenues of $73,000,000 would be seriously impaired. About 9,000 seamen would become jobless. Such vital U. S. imports as tin, rubber, manganese, chromium, would be curtailed.

In cold, Garneresque practice, few Senators can find a sufficiently high patriotic excuse to oppose a lobby as solidly organized, well-greased as the shipping lobby. From 1928 until 1937 its ocean-going appetite took from the U. S. Treasury $200,000,000 in juicy ocean-mail contracts, has since taken out $19,868,000 in direct subsidies. Moreover, even such a sea-green incorruptible as Idaho’s Borah saw sound sense in Admiral Land’s report, urged that the bill’s stranglehold on Pacific Coast shipping, at least, be relaxed.

Sealing Wax. But no one in the Senate even pretended that the House would be able to resist the marine Lorelei. The House would never be able to stuff its ears with enough siren resisting wax. Yet Pittman’s bill, once past the Senate, had to have the House’s seal. And the calendar-conscious House, always haunted by the biennial spectre of reelection, is always amenable to pressure, its legislative fever-chart always related to the height of the mail-stack from back home. To the House, by mail and lobby, repeal of the arms embargo last week was being quietly but effectively presented, in the old flesh-creeping whisper, as dictatorship for Franklin Roosevelt.

Plainly seeing these brass tacks, the Administration forces last week nevertheless prepared to sit on them.