Ill Winds

Through the Senate last week ill winds whined and whistled for the Hoover administration. Consideration of the farm relief bill drew to a close. The Senate's Republican Leader, Senator Watson of Indiana, appeared on the floor in mourning. "When I go to a funeral, I dress for it," he explained with a liverish smile.

Debentures In. Trouble began when the Senate voted 47 to 44 to retain in the bill the Export Debenture Plan, ten objections by President Hoover notwithstanding (TIME, April 29). The line of cleavage on this vote proved two things; 1) The Hoover 1928 victory in four Southern States carried no weight in the Senate where Democrats (with two exceptions) joined solidly against him and for the Debenture Plan; 2) The nine-year coalition of Democrats and Progressive Republicans still held a whip hand over major legislation, despite the G. O. P.'s paper majority of 17 votes.

The House, always jumpy about its constitutional prerogatives, stirred with plans for refusing to accept the Senate's farm bill, for refusing even a conference to reconcile differences between it and the House's measure. The Constitution gives the House sole power to initiate revenue legislation. Many a House leader considered the Senate's Debenture plan a revenue item because it would affect tariff income. The Senate countermoved by planning to insert the Debenture Plan in the Tariff Bill when that comes up from the House (see col. 2).

Salary. Secretary of Agriculture Hyde had suggested that the salary of the chairman of the proposed Federal Farm Board be left to the President to fix, on the ground that he could thus obtain the services of a "high-powered" man who could be induced to take this job without financial sacrifice. The House bill authorized presidential leeway. So did the Senate bill until last week, when the Senate, a suspicious body, voted 46 to 32 to hold the board chairman's salary down to $12,000. Alarmed Senators claimed the President should not have such power, warned that he might fix the chairman's salary at as much as $50,000 per year in his effort to get the man he wanted.

"Mutt Psychology." Just before the vote, California's Senator Hiram Johnson arose, pulled down his waistcoat, rattled off a fast-stepping speech which, beneath the ridicule, epitomized the Senate's opinion in favor of Debentures. His fists moved back and forth characteristically as he conceded the debenture was a "bounty" and asked, "What of it?"

His points were: 1) The farm bill, with its board and its money, will put the Government farther into business than ever before "if it means what it says"; 2) It implies "price-fixing . . . barter and sale, buying and borrowing" by the U. S.; 3) To accept the bill's generalities and gag at its only concrete feature--the Debenture Plan--was "nonsense."

Shouted Senator Johnson: "Bellowed from the hustings, tintinnabulated over the radio, ululated from a servile press . . . has come the objurgation 'Agriculture must be placed on an equality with industry'. . . . There is a peculiar mutt psychology existing in this land today. Press, pulpit and politician unite in influencing it. ... Those of us who in- dulge in mystery stories have read of authors who endeavored to paint the perfect crime. None has ever succeeded. We have, however . . . something of the perfect conspiracy of press, pulpit and poli- tician, exercising its sway over a mutt psychology . . . putting over exactly what that conspiracy . . . desires. . . .

"This, sir, is the moronic era of the age of 'bunk.' It is an era, sir, in which I am perfectly willing to recognize I am culpable with others, but at least I am different from some others in admitting it, and I can yet laugh. . . .

"The whole question is, Do you mean it [the farm bill's implication] or do you not? If you mean it, kiss good-by to the old platitude of not taking the Government into business; kiss good-by forever the old dogma . . . that we should never permit the Government to do anything for its people that private initiative or private endeavor may do and make a profit out of."

"Pseudo-Republicans." Idaho's ursine Senator Borah campaigned for Candidate Hoover, voted against President Hoover on the Debenture Plan. Ohio's fussy Senator Fess who supported President Hoover in the Debenture vote but would not trust him to fix the salary of the Farm Board chairman, took this occasion to upset G. O. P. harmony by issuing, in a letter to an Ohio constituent, a broadside against those Republicans who had failed the President on the farm issue. Wrote Senator Fess:

"The President had been led, through Senator Borah and other pseudo-Republicans, to promise a special session. . . . Borah and his crowd argued that it would not be fair to Hoover [to enact farm legislation at the last short session].... The Senate's vote . . . means a complete coalition between the Democrats and insurgents . . . also that we are in session for all summer."

"Pseudo-Pride." Great was Senator Borah's annoyance at this Fess slap. He issued a formal retort:

"In the support I gave Mr. Hoover, I did not get the idea that I was to be deprived ever afterward of voting upon public measures in accordance with my own views. . . . Only a base class of intellectual slaves would entertain or promulgate such an idea. . . . There is no difficulty about such matters . . . among gentlemen of self-respect or intellectual integrity or of the slightest sense of intellectual responsibility. There are two classes of politicians . . . the individual who barters his vote for gain, for money . . . the other who holds his convictions, his conscience at the disposal of someone he looks up to as a political superior with a possible power to advance his interests. . . . Mr. Fess hastens with impatient pride to devote all kinds of bounty in the way of high duties to manufacturing interests but recoils with pseudo-pride from extending the same principle to the [farm] producers."