At Last, Obedience

The Hoover Administration, dedicated to law-enforcement, last week was saved the ignominy of conducting its affairs through the medium of an illegal Congress. Long-wrangled, long-overdue Reapportionment, approved last fortnight (TIME, June 10) by the Senate, was provided for last week by the House when it passed a combined Census & Reapportionment Bill. The House measure duplicated the essentials of the Senate bill in providing that membership of the House shall be retained at 435, and that, after the taking of the census, State representations in the House shall be automatically reapportioned according to 1930 population figures by the executive branch of the Government.

Thus population changes, ignored since 1910, will at last be considered. When the post-census Congress meets, it will, on estimates of the 1930 count, contain six additional members from California, four from Michigan, three from Ohio, two from New Jersey and Texas, and one from Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Washington. Subtractions will be three from Missouri; two from Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky. Mississippi; one from Alabama, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Nebraska, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia.

It was not without severe internal convulsions and frantic scenes upon the floor that the House succeeded in obeying the Constitution by passing the Reapportionment bill. The measure, designed to produce a more equitable representation of the People, for a time was burdened with two amendments which would have excluded 15 million U. S. inhabitants from any representation whatsoever. This peculiar perversion of the bill's intent resulted from sectional prejudices and was accomplished by misinterpreting representation according to population as representation according to citizenship.

First up rose Representative Homer Hoch, Kansas Republican, to propose an amendment by which all aliens would be omitted from the population count on which representation is based. Such a counting of voters rather than of heads has long been a favorite project of Drys and the Ku Klux Klan, for it would reduce the representation of large Eastern cities with their many Wet and Liberal aliens. Exclusion of aliens would, for instance, cut six members from New York's representation. A coalition of Southern Democrats and Western Republicans from states adversely affected by reapportionment secured the adoption of the Hoch amendment, though the Constitution had specifically designated "persons," not citizens, as the basis for Congressional representation. Said New York's Congressman O'Connor: "It's a wonder to me that any self-respecting alien stays in this country." But the assault of the South and the West provoked a counter attack from the North and the East. Up rose Representative George Holden Tinkham, Massachusetts Republican, to offer another amendment providing that States which disfranchised citizens should have their Congressional representation reduced. This amendment was aimed directly at the Southern States where only whites cast the ballots but where Negroes are counted in determining how many voices in Congress the States shall have. It would cut in half the representation of South Carolina. Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. The Tinkham amendment was probably as illegal as the Hoch. But Northern Republicans have for many years threatened to "do something" about Southern disfranchisement of the Negro, and here was an admirable opportunity to do it. So the Tinkham amendment was passed, by a narrow margin Amid hysterical excitement, Congressman Tinkham kept hopping up and down, while his huge black beard bristled with triumph as he watched the (momentary) victory of his long-championed but apparently hopeless cause.

After the passage of the two amendments, all that seemed lacking to start another sectional war was someone to fire on Fort Sumter. Cooler Republican heads, notably Speaker Longworth's and Leader Tilson's, moved and carried an adjournment, then sought and found a way to repair the damage injudiciously done. When Congress reassembled, Floor Leader Tilson moved to strike out both the Hoch and the Tinkham amendments, to restore the original provisions of the Census & Reapportionment Bill. By astute parliamentary direction, the Tilson amendment was adopted and the measure passed by a vote of 271 to 104. The sound and fury ultimately signified nothing, except the sectional antagonisms that lie so close below the House's usually calm surface.