The Lady or the Guernsey?

It seemed hard to believe that so bland and salve-like a substance as oleomargarine could have set off so abrasive a row. As the House debated repeal of federal oleo taxes last week, party lines snapped like serpentin in a gale; the sulphurous debate grew reminiscent of argument in a waterfront saloon. But there was a good reason. Congress holds few subjects more sacred than 1) American womanhood and 2) American cows. Oleo had forced an awful choice between them.

"Bull Butter." Farm-area Congressmen had long sneered at margarine as "bull butter," had taxed it, regulated and abused it for more than half a century. Women had hardly murmured. For one thing, early margarine was not very tasty. A French chemist had stewed up the first batch from animal fats in 1869 because Napoleon III had offered a prize for a butter substitute. The result was a lardlike, greasy substance. Improved margarine, made from coconut oil, caught the public fancy during World War I. But it was not until the butter-rationed days of World War II that millions of women began buying it in earnest.

Most were surprised and pleased to discover that it tasted and acted almost like butter. Chemists had purified it, changed its consistency and injected it with Vitamin A. They had reduced the size of its water particles so that, when heated, it sizzled and foamed instead of popping and spattering. The only difference (besides its cheaper price) was its color. The dairy lobby had persuaded most states to forbid or restrict the sale of colored oleo; it had prodded Congress in 1902 to impose a 10-c--a-pound tax on the colored product.

Congressmen from the big cities had fought the tax without success. But they got potent allies when oleo manufacturers began making their product from the oils of cottonseed and soybeans--raised in the southern and midwestern states. By the time South Carolina's Congressman L. Mendel Rivers introduced his bill for tax repeal, margarine had become as politically explosive as plutonium.

The House Agriculture Committee, a farm-bloc group, tried to avert its imminent detonation by shelving it. But 218 Congressmen signed a petition to bring it to the floor. Last week, when the House thrashed it out, the galleries were jammed tighter than during the debate on ERP.

"You Saps." Farm-bloc Congressmen fought for U.S. cows as though the margarine-makers were going to throw them all into giant hamburger machines; they predicted balefully that herds would be so depleted that little babies would be denied milk. They cried that oleo was full of worms and that its natural color was tattletale grey. Oleo's partisans replied that butter had been found to contain "insects, hair, moth scales and something with a Latin name."

Minnesota's dairy-defending G.O.P. Congressman Harold Knutson wrathfully contemplated the spectacle of city Republicans working for oleo with Southern Democrats. "You saps!" he screamed. (For the Congressional Record he edited this to "You poor, misguided creatures.") "I cannot understand you. You did what the New Dealers shied away from doing for 16 long years." He threatened the South with revenge. "We are going to remove all quotas on cotton imports . . . If you pull us down, by the eternal, we will pull you down with us!"

But men who had to face a million embattled housewives at the polls or who wanted their constituents to sell more cottonseed oil were not to be frightened by forensics. The bill passed, 260 to 106.

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