Rickety Roller

When he was elected Speaker last month, Joseph Wellington ("Call Me Uncle") Byrns was widely regarded as a legislative weakling incapable of running the top-heavy House with discipline and dispatch. With a 3-to-1 advantage over the Republicans, he could not possibly lose a fight but he was not expected to win many with flash and finesse. Last week brought the first major test of his capabilities as a Speaker and he prepared to make it a great demonstration, to show doubters once & for all that the Democratic majority in the House could and would roll opposition flatter than a sheet of tissue paper. When it was all over, however, and Speaker Byrns was nervously mopping his perspiring brow, doubters held as firmly as ever to their doubts.

The occasion for the demonstration was the bill to give the President $4,000,000,000, without strings attached, for putting 3,500,000 men to work. Everyone knew that the size of the appropriation would not be seriously questioned because Congress was in an appropriating mood. The issue was whether $4,000,000,000 should be given with or without strings.

The Democratic steamroller was to flatten: 1) the few remaining Constitutionalists who object to Congress abdicating its power over the public purse; 2) the pork-packers who want to salt away some of the $4,000,000,000 for their constituencies; 3) the Ickes-haters, who, thoroughly angered by the PWAdministrator's treatment of Congress, object to giving him more spending money (see p. 22). For generations all good House steamrollers have had a special attachment for rolling over such opposition--the Rules Committee.

Speaker Byrns called on his Rules Committee to produce a parliamentary rule cutting short debate, forbidding any amendments to the bill except those proposed by the Appropriations Committee. Obligingly Rules Chairman John Joseph O'Connor drew up the necessary rule and took it to his committee. To his distress three of his nine Democratic committeemen balked strenuously for three reasons.

1) Representative Edward Eugene ("Goober") Cox of Camilla, Ga. opposed giving an "insulter" of Congress like Secretary Ickes anything more.

2) Representative Howard Worth Smith of Alexandria, Va., conscious of the fact that his constituency includes the home of the Father of his Country, was determined to preserve the Constitution at the making of which that Father presided.

3) Representative Martin ( Kid Boots") Dies of Orange. Tex. opposed letting the President decide where and how all the "pork" should be distributed.

Annoyed at this initial setback, Messrs. Byrns & O'Connor saw that the rule would have to be approved by a Democratic caucus. In his distressed state Speaker Byrns was called to the White House and given to understand in no uncertain terms that the President wanted the money without strings, and no fooling. Hastily a Democratic caucus was called. Suddenly the Speaker grew aware that he had a full-sized revolt on his hands. Democrats were playing dangerous parlor games. Representative Sol Bloom of Manhattan calculated that the money Franklin Roosevelt was asking for "without strings," would have more than financed payments of $3.50 a minute, for every minute since Solomon's Temple fell (586 B.C.). Representative Kent Keller of Ava, Ill., figured that if a $1 bill could be dropped every 100 ft. between Washington, D. C. and the Sun, the appropriation would be about used up.

Speaker Byrns made a ringing, rousing "Stand-By-Your-President" stump speech to the Democratic caucus. But more than a stump speech was required to end the revolt. His fellow Democrats had to be promised, on the President's indefinitely definite authority, that Secretary Ickes would have "very little to do" with spending the $4,000,000,000. Chairman Buchanan of the Appropriations Committee promised amendments in the bill to meet objections. Finally the caucus agreed to the rule and only then did the steamroller begin to move.

But Speaker Byrns was not easy in the cab. The Appropriations Committee confined hearings on the bill to a few secret subcommittee sessions. At those hearings Rear Admiral Christian Joy Peoples, who built up the Navy's purchasing system and now uses his talents as director of the Treasury's Procurement Division, explained the bill. He mentioned that the Administration proposed to pay wages of about $50 a month on its work projects. When the Committee hearings were published, this news created a storm among Representatives who wanted higher relief pay.

After this graceless start, Mr. O'Connor's amended gag rule was adopted by the House 250-10-146. Among the 146 who voted against it were 40 Democrats including Mrs. Roosevelt's friend and bridesmaid, Isabella Greenway of Arizona. Most notable speech in the limited time for debate was made by Representative Dewey Short, lone Republican from Missouri. Son of Jackson Grant and Permelia Cordelia Long Short, this self-proclaimed hillbilly from the Ozark hills obtained his education at such diverse places as Marionville College, Baker, Boston, Harvard, Heidelberg, Berlin and Oxford Universities, has been a soldier in the World War, a teacher of philosophy at Southwestern College (Winfield, Kans.), pastor of a Methodist church, a prohibitionist, a traveler in the Orient and a politician. Congressman Short descended on his colleagues in his best revivalist style:

"If this House votes this bill we might as well adjourn and go home for we will have become a hollow chamber full of hollow heads. ... In my home county last year the relief agency hired a little girl scarcely out of high school, young, single, with no dependents, from a comfortable home, and paid her $125 a month to ride over the hills of Stone County to teach the kids out in the sticks how to play.

"They hired another fine little woman in my county, the wife of a professional man who needed not the position, and paid her $127.50 per month to teach the good old country housewives out in the hills how to make soap--and God knows she had never seen an ash hopper in her life! In two other counties in my district the New Dealers have employed three men, Government agents at good salaries, to roam over the hills in Wright and Howell Counties hunting for Indian mounds. After several weeks' search I asked if any mounds had been found, and the answer was, 'Nope; but we're still hunting for them.'... In another county a bedbug inspector was employed to inspect the mattresses which the relief agencies dealt out to those who would vote the straight Democratic ticket. . . .

"We are bitterly opposed to voting a $4,000,000,000 slush-fund to this Administration to be spent in the future as so much of this money has been spent in the past. ... I deeply and sincerely regret that this body has degenerated into a supine, subservient, soporific, superfluous, supercilious, pusillanimous body of nit-wits."

Speeches might slow but could not stop the steamroller. To keep it going the President sent a message to the Capitol on conservation, to accompany the report of his National Resources Board. In it he said: "A permanent National Resources Board, toward the establishment of which we should be looking forward, would recommend yearly to the President and the Congress priority of projects in the national plan. This will give to the Congress, as is entirely proper, the final determination in relation to the projects and the appropriations involved.

"As I have already stated, it is only because of the current emergency of unemployment and because of the physical impossibility of surveying, weighing and testing each and every project that a segregation of items is clearly impossible at the moment."

As a concession to recalcitrant Democrats, the Appropriations Committee made several notable amendments in the bill: 1) Knocked out was a section which would have given the President power to extend the life of any Government agency to June 30, 1937. 2) Knocked out was the penalty of two years in jail, for violating any rules the President might make about his $4,000,000,000. 3) Knocked out was the President's power to acquire personal property by exercising the right of eminent domain.

When other amendments were proposed from the floor, Congressman O'Connor took the gavel from Speaker Byrns's trembling hand, declared some of them out of order, let his colleagues defeat the rest with roars of "No." Then 329 Representatives gave the President his $4,000,000,000 "without strings." Of the 78 Representatives who voted "No" ten were Democrats including "Goober" Cox and four other Georgians, "Father-of-his-Country" Smith and two other Virginians.

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