Congress Week

In the U.S. Senate this week, Michigan's Arthur Vandenberg rose to present, "in the name of peace, stability, and freedom," the Economic Cooperation Act of 1948, more familiarly known as ERP.

Vandenberg's baroque oratorical style was scarcely equal to his urgent sense of history. But his long and detailed presentation had a ponderous impressiveness. Said he solemnly: "[This plan] is the final product of eight months of more intensive study by more devoted minds than I have ever known to concentrate upon any other one objective in all my 20 years in Congress. ... If it fails, we have done our final best. If it succeeds, our children and our children's children will call us blessed."

Shouts & Mutterings. Congress had spent the week clearing away a mass of legislative underbrush in preparation for the debate on ERP. There had been distractions. From the wings came the sound of angry mutterings and sudden shouts. It was the South's Democrats, denouncing Harry Truman for his civil-rights program. Republicans gleefully pushed and prodded. In the Senate, they dusted off an FEPC bill, pushed the House's anti-poll tax bill toward floor consideration. In the House, a Judiciary subcommittee voted out an anti-lynching bill. Heaping the coals higher, a delegation of Negro leaders waited on Speaker of the House Joe Martin, presented him with a petition bearing more than a million signatures which demanded the immediate ejection from Congress of Mississippi's rabid John Rankin.

Despite the distractions, Congress tended to its knitting. Both Houses rushed through a 30-day extension of rent control. The Maritime Commission's authority to charter and operate ships was extended for one year. The House voted $606 million for the Army's civil functions (including a record $539 million for flood control and navigation projects) and $503 million for the State, Justice and Commerce Departments. It then endorsed the Senate's proposal to cut $2.5 billion out of Harry Truman's budget.

Refusing to heed the pleas of Wisconsin's Alexander Wiley, the Senate ducked a 14-year-old issue and ordered the St. Lawrence Seaway bill returned to committee for further study. Said Wiley: "I know when I've been kicked in the pants."

Turkey & Potions. But work done did not interfere with political jockeying. Democrats who had begun to sidle away from the President's stand against tax reduction broke into an undignified jog. Minority Leader Alben Barkley let it be known that a $4 billion cut might be acceptable. Les Biffle, Harry Truman's eyes & ears in Congress, departed to talk turkey with Secretary of the Treasury John Snyder, who was vacationing in Florida.

Republicans, stirring election-year potions of their own, rammed through a whopping $170,000 appropriation for a new investigating subcommittee empowered to investigate anything and anybody. The committee chairmanship went to Michigan's Homer Ferguson. The first order of business: the 1946 Kansas City primary in which Harry Truman had purged Congressman Roger C. Slaughter.

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