National Affairs: Idle Hands

No mellow statesman is fire-breathing Hamilton Fish, since 1919 the chosen U. S. Representative of the 249,589 inhabitants of Orange, Putnam and Dutchess counties in New York. To onetime Tackle Ham Fish, who represents in Harvard football history what the late Big Bill Edwards did in Princeton’s, the day is lost that brings no new scrimmage, no fresh fray into which he can charge with windmilling arms, roof-raising voice and not-quite legal logic.

Sharpest possible contrast to loud, big boned Mr. Fish is Virginia’s quiet, studious Clifton Alexander Woodrum. If a composite of typical U. S. businessmen could be assembled and varnished, he might look like Mr. Woodrum. The gentleman from Roanoke is milk-mild about everything but the public debt; only New Deal extravagance burns him up.

Last week, to the delight of tourists contemplating the usual spectacle of a Houseful of sleepy fat men, quiet Mr. Woodrum spotted a hole in Ham Fish’s position, crashed through it to score standing up. He charged that 37 Republicans and one Democrat, led by Ham Fish, had organized a “propaganda racket that makes the utility outfit and that of Dr. Townsend look like pikers.”

Withdrawing the word “racket” on a point of order, Mr. Woodrum said that the Fish organization—the National Committee to Keep America Out of Foreign Wars—with headquarters in Fish’s office, using Government facilities and employes, had been sending out appeals for campaign funds on official stationery. The funds were to offset what the Fish committee called “the New Deal war-hysteria campaign” and “to expose these efforts to involve us in war.”

Said Mr. Woodrum: “I have never heard of such a colossal propaganda undertaking in the 16 years I have been a member. We have condemned the utilities, we have condemned Dr. Townsend; but at least they had to have offices downtown. They had to employ secretaries. They had to buy typewriters and, at least, they did not set up their committees under the dome of the Capitol.”

Pointedly Mr. Woodrum read the record of Mr. Fish’s Grand Tour of Europe’s chancelleries last August: Fish’s arrival in Oslo in the personal airplane of Joachim von Ribbentrop, German Foreign Minister; Fish’s proposal to the Inter-Parliamentary Union of a 30-day armistice for the “four great powers” to settle European problems; Fish’s statement that Germany’s claims are “just.” Mr. Woodrum passed over Mr. Fish’s modest willingness, expressed in Berlin, to arbitrate the Danzig dispute personally.

Said Mr. Woodrum: “There is no member of this body or any other body who has so unfailingly, so persistently, so regularly, so systematically and so ineffectively opposed the present Administration.”

Keep-Out-of-War-horse Fish, no stylistic debater, who is wont to put one of his size 12 shoes squarely on a front-row leather seat while discoursing, took the floor to reply. He had listened to the charges “more in sorrow than in anger.” Things have “come to a pretty state,” said he, in a nice display of his syntax, when “a member of the House can be charged as being a traitor to his own country, and particularly one who has served for a number of years in the House, because he took a ride in Mr. von Ribbentrop’s airplane, the Foreign Minister of Germany.”

Mr. Woodrum’s resolution to investigate the committee, said Mr. Fish, getting into his stride, “is the dagger in the back to smear the members of the committee publicly.” Besides: “Where was Mr. Woodrum 20 years ago? He is my age. Where was he when we went out to make the world safe for democracy?”*

There was no need of investigating him, said Mr. Fish; what really needed investigation was the sale of the 1936 campaign books autographed by the President. With a triumphant short cheer he concluded:”I served my country in time of war and I will do so again if necessary.”

* In 1918 Mr. Woodrum was Commonwealth’s attorney in Roanoke; Mr. Fish was a Captain in the 369th Infantry, in France, writing to his father: “I am pleased to hear that the nation has shaken off its shackles and destroyed the maggots of pacifism which fed on its carcass and lulled us into a fancied security.”