Phantoms

In the echoing rotunda of the U. S. Capitol, when the last creaking footstep of the final tourist has died away, when the Capitol police unbutton collars and open night-school lawbooks, and the fat rats begin their soft scuttling around the old statues--then, says legend, the great ghosts of the U. S. past meet for nightly debate over the day's issues. One sweet autumn night last week those historic phantoms had a new historic event to talk over. For as surely as if the votes were already counted, as definitely as if the President had already signed the bill, the U. S. had that day finally jettisoned a principle as old as John Paul Jones, a principle for which it had twice gone to war--the freedom of the seas.

Upon a time those words made U. S. bugles blow, flags wave, men march. Last week the bugles were still; the flags gathered dust in museums; many of those marching men had made a separate peace. And into another sort of grave--the pigeonholes of diplomacy--went the principle for which U. S. blood made red puddles in French mud 21 years ago.

No tears fell, no voice was lifted in lament. No one recalled that, rather than face such a "humiliation" of national honor as abandonment of the seas to the belligerents of World War I, President Wilson asked the Congress on April 2, 1917 to declare war on Germany.

The men who quietly closed that chapter last week had begun to write it in 1935, when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee drafted the first, misnamed Neutrality Act. In 1937 they had tied further hobbles on Presidential discretion. Last week, counting any sacrifice cheap that would keep the U. S. out of war, these men-consigned the freedom of the seas to the history books.

A former Klondike Gold Rush lawyer named Key Pittman was primarily responsible. Nevada's Pittman, a tall slender gentleman with a discriminating tongue for fine old whiskey and a talent for bumming cigarets from reporters, has one prime faculty--an ability to keep his mind's eye focused on the ice-cold political realities.

Never minding might-be or has-been, Key Pittman last week ran his committee straight down the track of what-is. He gave only a minimum of lip-service to Franklin Roosevelt's desire for a return to the indefinable fog of international law --where an energetic President could easily get lost from Congress' view. Then he set himself to his dual task: the drafting of a bill which would provide national security insurance against involvement in war, and the spiking of his opponents' guns.

Key Pittman believed that the mere question of repeal of the arms embargo was but a minor phase of the problem of national security. But as a practical man he knew how thunderous a drum-roll his Isolationist foes could beat up over that single issue. He set himself to smash their drumheads, roll the drum himself.

When the full committee filed in around the baize-covered table, they found before them one of the tightest prohibition bills in history--a bill in effect forbidding any U. S. citizen from leaving the Western Hemisphere while war raged outside it.

Key Pittman's bill decreed: 1) When the President or Congress finds a state of war existing abroad, the President shall (i. e., must) name the belligerents. 2) After issuance of such a proclamation, no American vessel may carry passengers or goods to any named belligerents. 3) No goods of any sort may be shipped to belligerents until all rights, title and interest have been transferred abroad. 4) The President shall then proclaim combat areas, which no citizen or U. S. vessel may enter. 5) No U. S. citizen may travel on any belligerent's vessel. 6) No U. S. merchant ship may be armed. 7) No U. S. citizen or corporation may buy, sell or exchange bonds, securities, etc. of any belligerent state--ordinary commercial and go-day credits exempted. 8) No person in the U. S. may solicit or receive funds for any belligerent state named. 9) If the President believes a ship leaving a U. S. port is carrying men, arms or supplies to a belligerent warship, but has insufficient evidence to stop its departure, he shall require the shipmaster to give a bond in any amount on the condition that he will not deliver the men, arms or supplies to any warship. 10) If the President finds any ship of any country has violated such clearance, he may intern that ship in a U. S. port for the war's duration, 11) The President may ban the entry of any foreign state's submarines or armed merchant vessels into U. S. territorial waters at any time.

From these rigid wartime prohibitions, the Senate exempted only 1) the 20 other Latin-American republics, 2) shipping to nations bordering the U. S. via inland waters, 3) shipping by air and sea within the Western Hemisphere, to any port, of mail, persons, personal effects, and goods to be used exclusively by U. S. vessels. Penalty for violations of any major section of the bill was set at $50,000, five years in jail, or both.

Out of this detailed mass of technicalities emerged the solid fact that President Roosevelt's discretionary powers over Foreign Policy would be sharply limited. In his strain to prove the honest will of the Administration to keep out of war, and to prove his intent to give Congress control over Foreign Policy, Senator Pittman even went beyond the Constitution. For, under the Constitution the President cannot be ordered by Congress to proclaim a state of war. Constitutionalists held that this provision of the bill would subordinate the White House to Congress.

Senator Pittman's Isolationist foes were annoyed at the isolationism of the Pittman bill. But they found one good target--the fact that the bill was credit-and-carry, not cash-and-carry. They shouted that this would modify the Johnson Act, one of the most sacred of U. S. cows, which bars loans to any government still in default on its World War I debts. But Key Pittman, a wily strategist, knew that in winning a political fight you must ask for twice what you can get, then compromise for half (TIME, Oct. 2); and that the loser must have at least something to take home. He let the thunder roar, knowing he was on solid ground: go-day credits are usually regarded as equivalent to cash. But Cali fornia's resolute old Isolationist, Hiram Johnson, snapped: "This is the camel's nose under the tent."

Sharply pointing up the debate, Germany flatly warned Washington that U. S. merchant ships must travel without convoy, must show lights and avoid zigzagging, must submit to halt and search. Yet the U. S. did not feel the "humiliation" of Wilson, could agree only unofficially that the seas now belong to belligerents in wartime.

On the eve of the Great Debate the Senate had been polled and re-polled to show a minimum of 49 votes for the Pittman bill, a maximum of 65. But these were "paper" votes; only the die-hards were committed beyond recall; and significantly the Washington wise men yet refused to bet good greenbacks that Franklin Roosevelt had won this fight. Still the House must be faced and won. Yet privately Republican leaders admitted defeat, felt that this was a time to heed an old counsel of GOP Leader McNary: "Lose the bad ones quickly. Then grab a good one and ride it." But the "hell-to-breakfast" fighters-Wisconsin's La Follette, Missouri's Clark, North Dakota's Nye--scoffed at the polls, waited for the debate to pound U. S. nerves into an anti-war hysteria that would result in the most utter Isolation. Having done their inky best with Stalin, Hitler and the rest, the cartoonists last week could still see the humor in a nation trying to make up its mind.

Pittman opened the debate, had been speaking more than an hour when the Republican cloakroom door opened. In came William Edgar Borah of Idaho in a black suit, a black straggly tie, his old, lined face solemn. The galleries had been packed and restless; the press gallery three-fourths empty. Now the old cry rang through the pressroom: "Borah's up!" and the correspondents crowded in. From 1:42 p. m. until 3:50 p. m., as the rain streamed softly on the skylight overhead, the Lion of Idaho, his grey mane shaking, stated with his cool, withering clearness the case ror Isolationism, the case against cash-and-carry. Said he:

"It will bring the war into our very midst." If the embargo is repealed, he asked, "can we stay off the battlefields of Europe with our young men? Having changed our laws that we may send the Allies our arms will we, can we, in the hour of greater need refuse to send our armies? We will be in the war from the time the machinery is set in motion which carries these instrumentalities to the seat of war."

When Borah stopped, the Senate adjourned; the galleries cracked palms in loud, illegal applause; Pittman walked over to shake his foe's hand. In both their minds was the thought the whole anxious country was thinking: whatever policy is adopted will open a door into the future--and no man knows what stands beyond the door.

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