Blood on the Saddle

Like bird-dogs on point, newshawks and lobbyists clustered around a saloon-like swinging door in the U. S. Capitol one sticky morning last week. Behind that door sat bald-domed "Little Alva" Adams and the Senate deficiency appropriations subcommittee. Through it filed Government chiefs, great and small, to make their last pleas for money.

Colorado's Adams listened patiently, asked embarrassing questions, stuffed scribbled notes in his pockets, said "No" a great many times. To-Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace he said "Yes," and restored to the Third Deficiency Bill $119,000,000 for crop loans through the Commodity Credit Corporation--an item killed two days before by the slaughter-bent House.

At last Senator Adams popped through the swing-door, worries and pencils sticking out all over him, brushed through the hovering swarm and trotted upstairs to the Senate floor. The bare fact that he had emerged was hot news in Congress-wise Washington.

In the District of Columbia, news of the last Deficiency Bill's report to the Senate floor is treated as the year's best moment to buy a pint or more of hard liquor. Open house is declared in the Capitol from end to end. Even dignified Speaker Bankhead lets word get about that there is cracked ice in his office. Small groups of members gather chummily in cloakroom corners to sing the ancient adjournment favorite: There's Blood on the Saddle.

That afternoon Senator Adams had even more worries than pencils. The clerk's notes on the marble rostrum below John Garner's chair formed the only copy of the Deficiency Bill. Crumpled in Adams' pockets were the only explanations of the unprinted measure. Around his desk, like hawks hovering over a sidehill cornfield, were some 30 Senators intent on: 1) restoring the prevailing-wage principle to Relief, 2) softening the rule furloughing all WPA workers who have been on the rolls more than 18 months, 3) reviving the Federal Theatre project under WPA, 4) authorizing Farm Mortgage Corp. to refinance mortgages when normal farm income yields insufficient margin for debt service.

Forty other Senators sat in the chamber, grimly set on stiff-arming everything that might slow up adjournment. And between his afternoon naps in the cloakroom they had the support of Vice President Garner, who had a ticket to Texas in his wallet.

The afternoon waned, dinnertime came, then night, but still the Deficiency herdsman stuck to the floor: explaining, arguing, wheedling votes. Hot Senatorial tempers kept the galleries lathered with laughter. But Adams and his adjournment-bent majority held their lines, beat off all amendments, brought the Third Deficiency Bill safely through the gauntlet.

The bill now totaled $185,000,000. It had come over from the House at $54,000,000. Next day back it went for final House approval.

But the House of Saturday, August 5, was not the House it had been all week. The fever of killing had subsided. Members' shoes were full of feet; all they wanted was to go home. Throughout the week the slickly oiled Republocratic machine, working efficiently under the Republican strategy triumvirate of Leader Joseph Martin and Michigan's Mapes and Wolcott, had guillotined Administration spending bills while Congressional wives knitted excitedly in the galleries.

On Tuesday the first head had fallen, that of the gaunt Great White Rabbit of 1939, Franklin Roosevelt's Spend-Lend Bill that was proposed at $3,860,000,000 but had been slashed to $1,615,000,000 in the Senate (TIME, July 24, et seq.). In Franklin Roosevelt's biggest legislative defeat yet, the House refused (193-167) even to consider the bill. This was the first time a Roosevelt Congress had turned down pap and pork.

Franklin Roosevelt took the defeat calmly (see p. 11). To get his foes' names on the record he ordered bald, kindly Leader Sam Rayburn to bring up the $800,000,000 Housing bill. But that very day the House was still crashing the ax on Roosevelt spending, slashing the Deficiency bill by three-fourths.

Heartsick Leader Rayburn let antique Adolph Sabath bring up the Housing bill. And again the knife fell, as Republicans Mapes and Wolcott brought figures to show that Housing under this bill would cost taxpayers not $800,000,000 but $4,380,000,000 in the next 60 years. Showman Martin of Massachusetts stepped aside to let a freshman Democrat, handsome young (31) Albert Arnold Gore of Carthage, Tenn. deliver the coup de grace. Gore, who got his law degree from the Nashville Y.M.C.A., roared in his maiden House speech:

"This is crazy change-of-the-pocket procedure . . . The United States housing program is in no respect self-liquidating. . . ." He slammed a book down on the well-table so hard it bounced into the lap of grinning Joseph Shannon of Missouri. "My 18-months-old baby will be lucky to live to see one of these contracts consummated!"

So down went Housing, 193-166. And down with it went the House's bloodlust. By Saturday, when Adams sent back the Deficiency bill, the House was relaxed, approved it swiftly. Leaders tried to soothe the session's accumulated seven-months bitterness. In the House they succeeded, in the Senate a diehard New Dealer, patent-leather-haired Claude Pepper of Florida, re-opened and salted afresh all the old wounds with a last-minute castigation of the anti-Administration "alliance." In words so cutting they skirted the edge of Senate rules he scourged the Republocrats for "putting personal grudge and party feeling above the welfare and safety of the American people" because "they hate Roosevelt."

Up jumped North Carolina's Bailey, old enemy of the Administration. Bailey asked Key Pittman, in the chair, if it would be out of order for him to call "Pepper's remarks 'cowardly and mendacious.' " Assured that it would, he snapped: "Then I will so characterize it to his face," stalked out.

When the shooting was all over, members rejoiced in the thought that no matter what home-folks think, this autumn there is no election. Some wandered up to the press-galleries to sit in a last pitch-game with newshawks and cameramen, chipping in to send a boy across the plaza for a bottle. Some went directly to Union Station, where wives awaited them on made-up trains. And some took time to total up the spirited 76th's box score: found that this Congress had defied Franklin Roosevelt's will twelve times, knuckled under only four times. Also, the "economy" Congress had appropriated more than $13,000,000,000--most in history.

In a men-not-mice mood, the tired 76th went home.

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