The Mood of the Statesmen

The Congress was in an ugly mood. Like the rest of the nation, it was galled by the war news. And it had rubbed salt into its own sores: its pension-for-Congress bill, which the country would not let it forget.

In the House so many Congressmen rushed alibis into print that the galleries wondered if anybody had been present when the bill was up. Uprose Illinois' blonde, blue-eyed Jessie Sumner, to pin the blame on Georgia's patient Robert Ramspeck, the bill's sponsor. Miss Sumner had not known that the bill provided pensions for Congressmen; why hadn't Ramspeck said so?

Upjumped Ramspeck, his patience gone. In the Senate the bill had been debated fully, fully reported in the papers, then discussed and approved again by the House. Cried Ramspeck: "Why did you not object [then]? I say that to every other member who has gotten up on this floor and demagogued about this bill."

Miss Sumners, shrilly: "Don't call me a demagogue!"

Ramspeck: "If the cap fits, the lady can wear it. . . ."

In the Senate the name calling was even hotter. As usual the good intentions of earnest Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley paved the way. Barkley (another of the absentees) said the pension law was "untimely and unfortunate"; he hoped a committee would quickly report a repealer; if not, he would take matters into his own hands.

Off popped a face-to-face verbal brawl between Virginia's pinchfist Harry Byrd, hot opponent of pensions, and Wyoming's Joseph O'Mahoney, who stressed the fact that he had been "absent" when the bill passed. O'Mahoney roared that Congress was being "smeared" as a "conglomeration of grab-seeking individuals.'' Shouted Byrd: "I have never smeared the members of Congress. . . . The Senator shows ignorance. . . ."

Nevada's dapper young Berkeley L. Bunker, presiding, rapped in vain for order. For three hours the debate raged uncontrolled.

At its climax Maryland's acidulous Millard F. Tydings stood up. The war was going badly; Senators were mad at each other and at the country; Tydings was sick of the whole business. Out came all his long-pent bitterness. The Government was "an overgrown monstrosity from top to bottom"; strikes should be stopped; Wendell Willkie should get a war job; Dean Landis was the wrong man to head the Office of Civilian Defense; the war debt would be terrific; aid should be sent to General MacArthur; perhaps MacArthur should have been in Singapore in the first place; CCC and NYA should be abandoned; there should be no "political conduct of this war." In World War I, Millard Tydings was a good & able soldier. Oklahoma's Josh Lee, a 100% spellbinding New Dealer, cracked: ". . . General Tydings . . . the greatest advocate I have heard so far of trying to conduct the war from the floor of the Senate."

The debate and the shouting finally died down. But beneath the surface Congressional nerves still twitched.

Said Pundit Walter Lippmann last week: "The morale of the people is good when they are busy, excellent when they are very busy and poor to middling when they have nothing to do but think about the morale of someone else." In Congress, buck-passing the pension bill while Singapore fell, morale was very poor indeed.

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