The August Battle

A corporal’s guard of Congressmen straggled back to Washington’s steaming midsummer heat. But there was no indication that they would soon agree on a plan to reconvert the U.S. to peace. At week’s end, two Senate reconversion bills —significantly differing—had been rushed out of committee rooms and were ready for action on the floor.

For Congress disagreed most violently on the two questions the U.S. people wanted cleared up first: How much unemployment pay should a war worker expect when cutbacks and contract cancellations leave him jobless? Who should pay him—the states or the Federal Government?

The battle began when the Senate Military Affairs Committee read the labor-sponsored Murray-Kilgore reconversion bill. The bill’s controversial core was a proposal for complete federalization of unemployment pay. It included a table of payments which ran up to $35 a week. Republicans cried: “Another WPA!” West Virginia’s Senator Chapman Revercomb charged that workers in some brackets would get more pay when jobless than when employed. Eyeing the $35 top rates for workers made jobless by peace, he asked a troublesome political question: How could the U.S. pay only $20 a week to returned soldiers?

Meanwhile Senator Walter F. George of Georgia had pushed ahead with his more conservative proposal, that the states should go on paying unemployment insurance at present rates (no state payments now exceed $22 a week) with, the state funds guaranteed by federal loans.

The backers of the Murray-Kilgore bill offered a compromise. Instead of the payment table they substituted a flat 75% of previous salary. They kept the $35 top for unemployment pay, but boosted benefits for returning veterans to meet it.