Camp Trouble

Rampant upon the tariff battlefield still strode the Senatorial armies (TIME, Sept. 30 et ante). But from the heavens on the Republican side came a portentous rumbling. Battle between the lines ceased as the Republican chieftains harkened to awful words from the White House, even as the chieftains at Troy used to attend whenever Zeus spoke.

"I," said President Hoover, "gave my views [at the opening of the current special session of congress]. . . . I then pressed . . . the importance of maintaining the flexible tariff." The Voice went on to say that Flexible Tariff Ridge (see map, TIME, Sept. 30) must by all valor be held for the Republic. To hold it would not make the President a despot. To lose it would surrender the whole tariff into the hands of delay, mischance, selfish bickering. The tariff was a human institution, inevitably imperfect. Let the President correct it (through the present clause allowing him to raise or lower duties 50% upon recommendation of the Tariff Commission, without consulting Congress) whenever necessary.

Insurgent as Zeus's own thunder, up at once arose Senator Borah, freebooting generalissimo, to challenge the Voice to continue. Though this was a war he talked of a plowshare, to which the Voice, he said, had put its hand and whence it could not now turn away. ''I ask from the floor of the Senate that the President advise this body . . . whether he approves of the industrial schedules in this bill. "

The Voice did not answer, and on the Democratic side, foxy little Field Marshal Simmons began massing his troops behind the Borah irregulars to capture perhaps not only Flexible Tariff Ridge but some of the industrial salients--Chateau de Steel, Fort Cement, Brickopolis, Woolensville, perhaps even Manufacturing City.

But then the battle was disconcerted again. An observer (the Hearst press) noticed what looked like a spy within the Republican lines. The observer told Chief of Staff Harrison, chief hurler of Democratic sarcasm grenades. To the breast-works leapt Harrison and shouted that Brigadier Bingham, the Republican's most air-conscious hero and a superb college professor, had harbored in his tent one Charles L. Eyanson, assistant to the chieftain of the Manufacturers' Association in Brigadier Bingham's home domain of Connecticut; that this Eyanson had received federal pay as Bingham's assistant, what time he was undoubtedly working, even in the Republican army's most secret caucuses of war, to get more loot for Connecticut than other divisions in the Republican line.

Loud then was the outcry within the Republican ranks, loud then the catcalls across the trenches. Brigadier Bingham protested that, sadly ignorant of tariff warfare and needing counsel, he had followed a natural course. Great-bodied Lieutenant-General Watson, nominal chief of all the Republican forces, cried faintly that his subordinate had done quite right. Tall, thin, generalissimo Smoot tried to tell how he had warned his ignorant comrade to send the man Eyanson away, which was done. But these cries were drowned by the angry outbursts of Insurgent Brigadiers Norris and La Follette.