Lumber Pile

A mighty pile of legislative lumber remained last week to be sawed by Congress before adjournment. But controversies between men at opposite ends of the saw grew hotter with the weather instead of abating.

Taxation was the one big subject on which all agreed. Three days after the House had passed its measure with but one dissenting vote, easing corporate income taxes and removing business "irritants" (TIME, June 26), the Senate passed the measure unanimously, shot it to the White House, leaving President Roosevelt one week in which to preserve the excise tax structure expiring June 30.

National Defense was also relatively uncontroversial. The House last week had up the last of the big rearmament appropriations, $292,695,547 for personnel, new airbases, etc., and to buy 2,290 more planes for the Army Air Corps. The Republicans managed momentarily to strike some $37,000,000 from the bill, on the ground that 1,283 of the proposed ships, intended for reserves, might be obsolete before commissioned. The Democrats rallied, voted the reserve planes back in, passed the whole bill on to the Senate. Striking feature : provision for giving Army pilots their first three months' training at commercial air schools, to relieve congestion at Randolph and Kelly Fields.

Money Bills. Extension beyond June 30 of the Treasury's $2,000,000,000 exchange stabilization fund, of its silver purchasing power, and of the President's power to devalue the dollar further, were all voted two months ago by the House. Old Senator Glass kept the bill deadlocked in his Banking and Currency subcommittee until the White House induced Senator Miller of Arkansas to change his vote. The bill then got out to the Senate floor, with Senator Glass swearing from his sickbed that he would fight to the end against monkeying with the currency.

He soon had allies of an opposite stripe --a band of eleven Senators led by Oklahoma's silver-haired Thomas and Nevada's roseate McCarran, who advanced an inflation plan calling for $2,000,000,000 of new paper currency to be backed by the Treasury's idle gold. Idaho's Borah and Nevada's Pittman joined them in demanding, further, that the price now paid for silver by the Treasury (64.64-c- per oz.) be raised much higher above the market price (40 3/4-c-). For four long days last week they tied up other legislation while they "explained" their aims to the Senate and nation. Senator Pittman, an Administration man in most things, gave Secretary Morgenthau a ferocious wigging for not telling the President about the plight of 318,000 Westerners who (Pittman said), dependent on silver production & processing, were thrown out of work when the Treasury lowered its silver subsidy price from 77.57-c- per oz. to 64.64-c-. Senator Pittman demanded $1.29 per oz., which he called "normal."

Senator Pittman's blackjack was potent. The harassed Senate compromised by voting back the 1937 silver price for domestic silver, barring further purchases of foreign silver (from China and Mexico). More surprising, it gave Senator Glass his victory, voted 47-to-31 to end the President's power to pare the dollar. But it gave new life to the stabilization fund, essential for U. S. participation in steadying foreign exchange with England and France.

Relief was another subject calling for action before June 30, when WPA's appropriations would run out. Last fortnight the House, with fair speed, passed a measure granting as much money ($1,735,000,000) as Franklin Roosevelt asked for but switching $125,000,000 from WPA's share to PWA, for continuance of heavy construction projects (TIME, June 26). The measure also killed the Federal Theatre and crippled other white-collar projects, called for a three-man, bipartisan WPAdministration, limited WPA building projects to $50,000. As the Senate settled down to ponder this bill, Actress Tallulah Bankhead and other theatrical talent created a diversion in behalf of restoring FTP. Secretary Ickes climbed Capitol Hill to ask $500,000,000 outright, instead of a diverted $125,000,000, for PWA. But Franklin Roosevelt created the biggest diversion of all by asking Congress to inaugurate a $3,860,000,000, "self-liquidating" public works program on a revolving fund basis outside the Budget. This sweeping proposal threw the whole Relief issue far in the air momentarily.

Neutrality promised to delay adjournment more than any other subject, and in this fight Filibusterer Pittman. chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was cast for another leading role. Last fortnight the House received from acting chairman Sol Bloom of the Foreign Affairs Committee, prognathous hero of the reception to King George & Queen Elizabeth, a bill drafted in accordance with Franklin Roosevelt's and Cordell Hull's desire for a free hand in case of war abroad. Under it, embargoes of war material would no longer be mandatory. The President would have broad discretion to regulate U. S. exports, travel by U. S. citizens, dealing in combatants' securities, etc., etc. Passage of the Bloom bill by the House would mean little, even in diluted form. In the Senate a band of 21 isolationists led by Idaho's Borah and North Dakota's Nye promised to fight this Roosevelt brand of Neutrality all summer if necessary.

Farm Billion. Relief is largely city men's matter, farm bills are won by country men. When Senator Bankhead of Alabama explained this to his emotional niece last week, he was courting support from city men in the House for the $383,000,000 increases which the Senate wrote into the 1940 farm bill (TIME, May 22) and which last week were threshed by House-Senate conferees. Besides Actress Bankhead, another lobbyist for Relief who last week journeyed to Washington from Manhattan was Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. Having served seven terms in Congress himself, he knew just what to do. He got city men in the House to offer their support of the farm bill increases in return for country men's promises to liberalize the Relief bill.

Forthwith the farm bill emerged from conference shorn of only $13,000,000 of the Senate's whopping additions. With still more padding in prospect, it totaled $1,205,000,000--a record--and preserved its status as the bill that killed Economy in the 76th Congress.

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