First Days

When the 75th Congress met for the first time last January, the country was comparatively prosperous, Franklin Roosevelt had just been resoundingly endorsed at the polls and the New Deal had a huge Democratic majority in both houses.

Under very different auspices the 75th Congress reconvened in a Special Session last week, ostensibly to enact the ambitious program outlined by the President in his fireside chat six weeks ago. New Deal ranks in Congress, split by the fight over Franklin Roosevelt's plan to enlarge the Supreme Court last winter, were still sharply divided. The President's popularity, despite his triumphal tour of the West this fall, seemed subject to recheck. Most important of all, what had looked six weeks ago like a minor reaction on the New York Stock Exchange had developed into a major business recession which was not only the longest since 1933 but one of the sharpest in U. S. economic history.

In its first session, the 75th Congress' most important achievement was the negative one of defeating the President's Court plan. What it would accomplish in its less promising second session was still unpredictable last week but two things at least looked certain. One was that under the stimulus of Recession, Congress was likely to show an independence toward the White House unprecedented since 1933. The other was that Vice President John Nance Garner in the Senate and Speaker William Brockman Bankhead in the House were going to have their hands full making Congress do much of anything before it moves to adjourn, presumably about Dec. 18.

If the Recession had caused the President's attitude toward Business to undergo a marked change, there was every reason for Congress' attitude toward Business to change even more drastically and more sincerely. Back in Washington after nearly three months of putting their ears to the ground, its members felt that they knew even better than the President what the country wanted. Whether or not the President means to run for a third term, most Congressmen's hearts are set on re-election and a Roosevelt Recession would be the worst possible 1938 platform. Major administrative hold on both Houses for the past five years has been the flood of Federal spending. With the President set on checking expenditures and balancing the budget, there was that much more reason for Congress to feel a new spirit of independence. This was exactly what, in the first days of the Special Session, Congress most notably displayed in Washington last week.

Cut down to four items when he omitted modernized anti-trust legislation in his opening message, the President's program called for legislation on: 1) crop control, 2) wages & hours, 3) reorganization of the executive branch of the Government, 4) Regional Planning. Last week this program, with one exception, remained approximately where it was before the Session convened. The exception was Item No. 1.

Farm Bill. Main spur to the Senate Agriculture Committee was the antilynching filibuster on the floor, which could be ended only by the introduction of a Farm Bill. After a week of feverish work, the subcommittees finally had a bill ready to report which the full committee was expected to bring in this week. Based on regional hearings held before the session started, it included provisions for control by the Department of Agriculture of five major crops: wheat, corn, cotton, tobacco and rice.

Wheat and corn acreage and marketing quotas would be based on the aim of giving a bushel of either the same purchasing power it had between 1909 and 1914. The Government would impose on every bushel sold over Department of Agriculture marketing quotas a penalty tax of 50% of its price--provided that, in a referendum before the scheme goes into effect, two-thirds of the farmers affected approve the plan. Secretary Wallace's ever-normal granary would apply to both crops: the Government would begin to buy wheat for use in periods of scarcity when the supply is 10% above normal, corn when it reaches normal. For cotton and tobacco farmers, the bill provided both penalties for overproduction and bounty payments to encourage them to divert unneeded land to other uses; for rice, quotas were set on the basis of domestic consumption.

Stressed by the President was the recommendation that the farm program's cost should not exceed the current "soil conservation" appropriation of $500,000,000. Asked how he reconciled this with the fact that the Farm Bill made no provisions for raising the additional $250, 000,000 which it will probably cost the Government, the Committee's Chairman Ellison D. ("Cotton Ed") Smith had no answer, left to the House the problem of raising additional revenue for the payments. Meanwhile last week, the House Agriculture Committee under Marvin Jones was working on a Farm Bill of its own. This too was expected to omit the disagreeable and controversial question of raising money, leaving it to the Ways & Means Committee to work out a scheme of paying for crop control, presumably in the regular session.

Black-Connery Bill, giving the Federal Government power to regulate maximum hours and minimum wages throughout U. S. industry, was passed by the Senate just before it adjourned last August. In the House, the bill hit a snag in the potent Rules Committee, which can at least temporarily prevent passage of any bill by not giving a rule to bring it up for debate and which, since it includes a majority of four Republicans and five Democrats from the South whose industrialization depends on low wages, was last week as unwilling as ever to let the Black-Connery Bill reach the floor. Only means of getting it there in this session appeared to be a petition to discharge the Committee, which must be signed by 218 of the House's 435 members. Labor Committee's Chairman Mary T. Norton, having got 153 signatures on such a petition, was this week faced with a growing opposition to the bill. Although both Secretary Perkins and John L. Lewis had urged its early adoption, William Green flatly announced the A. F. of L.'s opposition to the bill in its present form.

Executive Reorganization was represented in the Senate by one bill, in the House by four, two of which, including one to provide for six executive assistants equipped with a "passion for anonymity," were passed last summer. Reorganization's chance of passage this session was exceedingly small.

Regional Planning--the Administration measure to set up seven little TVAs throughout the land--was being extensively modified to the prospective advantage of private utility companies and, according to leaders in both Houses last week, was "still in the exploratory stage." Exploration was being conducted by the House Rivers and Harbors Committee from which Speaker Bankhead last week said he expected a report "sooner than anticipated."

That Congress was paying far less heed than the President might have wished to the program he had asked it to attend to, by no means meant that it was doing nothing last week. On the contrary, it meant principally that an extraordinary session called when there was nothing very extraordinary going on, had assembled when something most extraordinary was. This was of course, Recession. Notoriously liberal in regard to spending money, Congress is otherwise generally inclined to be conservative. The problem most on the minds of both Houses last week was helping business. In the ways it considered for doing so last week, Congress exhibited both its innate conservatism and its new found freedom from the Presidential apron strings.

In the Senate last week, 18 of the 20 members of the Senate Finance Committee went on record for modifying the undistributed profits tax. Strongest opposition to the tax came from the Committee's Chairman Pat Harrison who, having failed by one vote to beat Kentucky's Alben Barkley for the Senate Democratic Leadership last summer, no longer feels any inhibitions about speaking out on fiscal policies which may or may not have Presidential favor. Said he: "The main thing I have in mind is employment, and if private industry is given some encouragement it will help. Today, if a corporation owes money it has to pay a penalty tax and if it wants to expend money it has to pay a penalty tax. I am opposed to penalizing a corporation that wants to pay its debts or expand its plant operations."

On the Senate floor, North Carolina's Josiah Bailey used the immediate necessity of dealing with taxation as grounds for postponing consideration of antilynching. Said he of the undistributed profits tax, "Let's repeal it today. . . . Even the President says it isn't working. ..." Aware that any plan to do anything about taxation must originate in the House, enthusiastic Senator Bailey proposed that the Senate adopt a resolution "to repeal this tax just as soon as we get something from the House to which we can attach a repealer."

In the House the uproar about Taxes was more lively than the Senate's, more likely to have reasonably prompt consequences. Most pertinent words on the subject in which U. S. business was most interested came from Chairman Fred M. Vinson of the Ways & Means Subcommittee on Taxation, which had already tentatively approved exempting all corporation incomes of $5,000 or less from the undistributed profits tax. Chairman Vinson outlined three schemes being considered by the committee: 1) grading the exemptions upwards to include corporations whose incomes are between $5,000 and $50,000; 2) permitting the carryover of operating losses for one year to be applied against adjusted net income for the following year in computing the undistributed profits tax; and 3) permitting taxpayers to "segregate the capital gains into a class of income by itself." First proposal would mean that 93% of U. S. corporations would be affected by corporate gains modifications. Second would affect large and small business alike. Third would principally benefit large individual incomes. Representative Vinson, seconded by the Ways & Means Committee's Chairman Robert Lee Doughton made it clear that tax legislation would not be ready for action in the special session. Said Chair-man Doughton: "I think it would take just as long to get a part of the program through as to do all of it. I don't object to consideration at the special session, but I don't think we can get the bill ready in time."

Job of making the Senate stop filibustering and get down to work last week devolved on robust, red-faced John Nance Garner who, as Speaker of the House the year before the New Deal and in last winter's Court fight in the Senate, has had enough experience with recalcitrant legislative bodies to be ready for anything. The Senate held U. S. headlines through most of last winter, thanks to the Court fight. This winter, when, despite the President's program, Congress' liveliest debates are likely to be about taxation, that honor is likely to go to the House. Job of presiding over that notoriously unruly body in what is likely to be a notoriously unruly period belongs to a politician of a very different stamp. Until he was elected Speaker of the House to succeed the late Joe Byrns a year ago last June, William Brockman Bankhead was known chiefly as one of the less colorful members of a kaleidoscopic family. His brother John defeated Thomas ("Tom-Tom") Heflin for the Senate in 1930. His sister, Marie Bankhead Owen, succeeded her husband as director of Alabama's Department of Archives and History, has been mentioned as a gubernatorial prospect for 1938. His eldest daughter, Eugenia, has been married six times, three of them to Morton Hoyt. His younger daughter is famed Tallulah Bankhead (married to Actor John Emery), whose sensational career on the U. S. and British stage was climaxed last fortnight when a $100,000 production of Antony and Cleopatra in which she starred closed after five performances. In the next few months, John's brother and Tallulah's father will get his belated share of attention. Whether Congress rises early, as the President hoped when he called it to convene seven weeks earlier than usual, or late, as last week's commotion suggested, by the time it adjourns, Speaker Bankhead will have had his abilities as leader, parliamentarian and politician thoroughly tested.

Of the House's 46 Speakers since 1789, only one--James K. Polk--ever became President. Many, nonetheless, have left their mark on U. S. history much more indelibly than President Polk. As Speaker-- the title is derived from the ancient custom of the House of Commons which, voteless, sent a member to the King to speak for them--men like Henry Clay, James G. Elaine, Joseph Cannon, Champ Clark and Nicholas Longworth have used their authority so effectively as to give the job a lively tradition of being second in importance only to the Presidency itself. Since the departure to the Senate of John Nance Garner the speakership has suffered a woeful decline in prestige. Old Henry T. Rainey and gangling Joe Byrns, Speaker Bankhead's predecessors under the New Deal, were not men to make the job what it had been theretofore--that of a boss, for whom the House Majority Leader functioned as a sort of floor operative. Furthermore, under the New Deal, with lump sum appropriations to the President, the patronage arrangements for which in previous administrations the Speaker had been a sort of clearing house began instead to be handled much more directly by the White House. Thus the job that, after his 20 years in the House as an able if not spectacular Southern politician, came to William Bankhead last year was by no means as consequential as it had been. If, in the first years of the New Deal, the Speaker found it harder to run the House, there was also from the President's point of view, less need for him to do so, since the reins were in his own hands. Currently, with Federal spending curtailed and Congressional revolt on foot, the President has less control of the House than before. In this state of affairs, Franklin Roosevelt's toothache might have been considerably alleviated last week had he been sure that Speaker Bankhead could: 1) re-establish the onetime prestige of the Speakership and 2) employ it with a strong hand.

Total Congressional service of the Bankheads--including John and William's father, Senator John Hollis Bankhead-- is a U. S. family record of 61 years. Of these William Bankhead accounts for 21. When, at his mother's request, he gave up an adolescent desire to go on the stage, spent two years in the State Legislature, got into Congress in 1917, William Bankhead's advice from his father was to learn the rules. He followed it, remained an amiable, well-liked but not particularly influential member of the House until despite a serious illness he was made Majority Leader in 1935. When he succeeded Joe Byrns, William Bankhead laid down his own requirements for a Speaker: "I should say that the most important is that the Speaker should be a parliamentarian. The second is that ... he should act impartially. . . . And he should have a sense of humor."

Last year, Speaker Bankhead lived up to his own advice as well as he followed his father's. This winter, after nearly three months' holiday at Jasper, Ala. (pop. 5,313) in Walker County which contains a town, a highway and a Resettlement project named for the Bankheads. Speaker Bankhead returned to Washington better equipped than he was last year for the rigors of a job that can be as rigorous as any in the land. Speaker Bankhead's hobby is collecting gavels used by his predecessors, of which he has six, belonging to Speakers Clark, Gillett, Longworth, Garner, Rainey, Byrns. Although his own is the smallest of the lot, Administration leaders were hoping last week that it would not prove the least effective.

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