National Affairs: Trouble

The President received two gifts last week: 1) an autographed photo of the late Frederic Knight Logan, modernizer of The Missouri Waltz (one of Harry Truman’s favorite songs); 2) an old Sioux pipe of peace, said to have been smoked by Chief Crazy Horse when he decided (after the Custer massacre in 1876) to surrender and return to the reservation.

The gifts were ill-timed. The six-month waltz of Congress with the Missourian in the White House was definitely over. Democrats (notably Southerners) had boldly walked off the reservation and joined Republicans on the warpath. Last week the House Ways & Means Committee (14 Democrats and ten Republicans) voted 18-to-6 to reject the President’s reconversion proposal: unemployment compensation up to $25 a week for 26 weeks. Then the Committee voted 14-to-10 to shelve further consideration of aid to the jobless, including the bill the Senate had chopped out of the Truman recommendations (TIME, Sept. 17).

Harry Truman made a determined personal effort to get what he wanted. He called the Committee’s Democrats to the White House for a dose of the sort of persuasion Franklin Roosevelt used to exert. President Truman seemed resentful. He said the Senate had let him down. He expected that the House would not do the same. He stood pat on his program. He was no longer the “good old Harry” who liked to visit the Hill and chum with his old cronies. He was aggressively Mr. President.

Thumbs Down. But, reportedly, several of the Democrats spoke up to tell Mr. President that they would not come back on the reservation. And, clearly, several did not like either what he said or how he said it. Harry Truman had apparently changed nobody’s mind.

Congressmen, in the main, were resentful of tough talk from the White House. But Harry Truman had found that he could not count on friendships and personal popularity on the Hill. Many wise Washingtonians thought that the President had worked himself into a position from which strong assertion of leadership would now be more difficult than it would have been at his Administration’s beginning. In many a score book this was the one big error of Harry Truman’s half year, and meant more trouble ahead.

A few days later, the Senate Commerce Committee turned thumbs down on the President’s nomination of Raymond S. McKeough. onetime New Dealing Congressman and defeated Senate candidate (1942) of Illinois’ Kelly-Nash machine, to be a member of the U.S. Maritime Commission. If the Senate followed through, it would be the first rejection of a Truman appointee.