Ninth-Inning Rally

"It is not too much to say that what we are now here considering today is the question of plunging a dagger into the very heart of democracy!"

Shouted at a packed Senate Chamber by Massachusetts' David Walsh, these violent words week were the final major volley of the bitterest political fight of 1938--against Franklin Delano Roosevelt's plan to reorganize the executive department of the Federal Government. After portly Mr. Walsh had completed his tirade, echoed only a shade less vehemently by Senators Tydings, Vandenberg and Borah, the Reorganization Bill came to its two final votes.

First question put to the Chamber was whether to recommit the bill--i.e., kill it. As the roll call proceeded, every Senator except three (Florida's Pepper, Indiana's Van Nuys, Nevada's McCarran) was present on the floor. Then, while the gallery-- so crowded that young Mrs. James Roosevelt had to sit on the stairs--held its breath, the votes were counted. Result was 48-10-43, against recommittal. Five minutes later, there followed the formality of voting on the bill itself. This time the count was 49-0-42 for passage, and the Senate's fight was over.

Most extraordinary feature of the battle over Reorganization--next to last year's battle over the plan to enlarge the Supreme Court, noisiest of the Roosevelt Administration--was its timing. When the President launched his Reorganization Plan 15 months ago, it was far more drastic than the bill the Senate voted for last week. Nationwide reaction was total apathy. When the Reorganization Plan emerged on the Senate floor a month ago, instantaneous reaction of Congress and a large section of the U. S. press and public was a horrified suspicion that Franklin Roosevelt wanted to make himself a dictator. Reason for this superficially bewildering paradox was, of course, that the Court Plan, brought up and beaten since the Reorganization Bill's inception, looked enough like a grab for power to make anything remotely resembling another power grab doubly alarming and doubly vulnerable.

As drafted by South Carolina's Byrnes --who helped conduct the fight against the Court Plan--the Reorganization Bill 1) empowers the President to reshuffle any or all of the 100-odd agencies under the executive branch; 2) calls for a single Civil Service Administrator instead of a three-man commission; 3) splits disbursing and auditing functions by abolishing the Comptroller General who has previously done both, giving the first half of his job to the Director of the Budget, the second to a newly created Auditor General; 4) sets up a Department of Welfare; 5) empowers the President to hire six administrative assistants. Major basis for the claim that Reorganization would give the President dictatorial authority lay in the wording of Title I, whereby Congressional disapproval of any of his proposed changes in Government agencies must be made within 60 days and is still subject to Presidential veto, which can be overridden only by a two-thirds vote.

Last fortnight the Senate defeated an amendment to make Congressional approval by a mere majority a prerequisite of any Presidential shift. Since this point was the crux of the matter, the vote, though closer than expected, made it look as though the bill would have clear sailing. Far from silencing the opposition, however, it served to redouble it. Consequently, what had been merely a political tug-of-war last week became a nationwide commotion ranging from a series of articles by columnist Dorothy Thompson to the effect that if the bill passed "one man, once elected President, can rule this country with a camarilla'' to a scheduled town meeting at which the suburban citizenry of the stanchly Republican stronghold of New Canaan, Conn, proposed to record their opposition to the bill this week.

While most of the press inveighed against the bill, a thoroughly well-organized Administration bloc kept it moving forward in the Senate. When Missouri's Bennett Clark and several collaborators laboriously brought in 20 amendments, most of them excepting specific Government agencies from Presidential tampering, they were voted down at the rate of one a minute. When Virginia's Harry Byrd proposed killing the section applying to the Comptroller General, the Administration's majority against him stood at 4740-36. All this evidently made Floor Leader Alben Barkley so confident that instead of letting the bill come to a final test on Friday, he postponed the roll call over the week end to make his victory all the more one-sided. This almost turned out to be a serious error.

What Senator Barkley, in common with most of the rest of the U. S., had pardonably forgotten was the existence of a Catholic priest who after the 1936 Democratic landslide promised to refrain from "all radio activity in the best interests of all the people": Detroit's Rev. Charles E. Coughlin. Last week Father Coughlin, back on the air again for the last three months, was scheduled to speak on Sunday afternoon. When he had done so, it was apparent that if the U. S. press and the U. S. Congress had forgotten him, there were plenty of radio listeners who had not. Roared the frantic radio priest against the Reorganization Bill: "It will mean that it's none of the people's business how their tax moneys are used. . . . [It] sets up a financial dictatorship in the person of the President. . . . The immediacy of the danger insists that before tomorrow noon your telegram is in the hands of your Senator to stop the Reorganization Bill as Washington stopped George III. . . ."

When Father Coughlin denounced the World Court in 1935, Western Union and Postal Telegraph handled 200,000 telegrams to Congressmen. Last week, result of his exhortation fell just short of that record, but it was second to nothing else in the history of U. S. communications. For hours after his speech, anyone in New York City who hoped to send a telegram had to wait at least an hour because the whole facilities of both Postal Telegraph and Western Union were being used by Father Coughlin's responsive listeners. By the next day, when the time came for a vote on recommittal, no fewer than 100,000 telegrams had piled up on Senators' desks in Washington and quantities were still pouring in. Twenty thousand went to New York's Royal S. Copeland, who was going to vote against the bill anyway. Ten thousand went to New York's Robert Wagner, who promptly decided to vote against instead of for the bill, and the presumption was that several of his colleagues would do likewise. At this point, it looked so much as though the Detroit priest, who last fortnight went on record as favoring authoritarian government in the U. S., had administered a ninth-inning defeat to Franklin Roosevelt that the New York World-Telegram ran a streamer headline: REORGANIZATION BILL SEEMS DOOMED.

"We are assured of enough votes to recommit," declared Missouri's Clark.

"We've got the votes," said South Carolina's Byrnes. "The bill will pass." That the roll call which followed these contradictory claims proved Byrnes right and Clark wrong did not mean that the Reorganization Bill's difficulties were completely over. From the Senate it goes not to conference, but to the House, where Administration leaders may expect the battle to begin again.

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