Question Marks

Nerves strung fiddle-tight, emotions running skin-deep, the U. S. watched its 76th Congress open a Great Debate last week. A thousand curious citizens pulled wires to wangle passes to cram into the Senate's gallery of 450 seats. Eighty-three Senators out of 96--a portentous proportion--answered the roll call.

Four days later six Senators lolled in their chairs, one of them asleep. The galleries were half empty. The U. S., and the Senate with it, was watching the World Series. In Vice President John Garner's cloakroom, office a near-quorum collected around his portable radio, bet cigars on the scores. Despairing of a week-end quorum in the chamber, leaders moved debate ahead to this week. In five days the Great Debate had gone bloop.

Washington wisemen pondered the abrupt petering-out of this latest advertised Battle of the Century, saw ahead only victory for the Administration, barring a sudden unpredictable shift in the weather of World War II.

At this point, repeal of the arms embargo, and Senate adoption of the Pittman neutrality bill, seemed imminent certainties. Even the much-ignored and resentful House would probably whip through a bill in a few weeks, the wisemen believed. Congress might well adjourn before Thanksgiving.

Observers could explain the Administration's legislative Blitzkrieg only thus: 1) the U. S. public found out at once that both sides wanted the same thing--i. e., that the U. S. stay out of war--and were arguing only over one minor, technical phase of the method; 2) the real debate had already been exhaustively aired for six weeks by almost every leading figure in all walks of life on the radio and in the press, leaving nothing for Congress but second-rate oratory on a second-hand subject.* Congressional mail dropped from its alltime high of 487,000 pieces on Sept. 19 to 85,000.

The Senate's oratorical display was not enough to keep the galleries from emptying. After Idaho's Borah and Nevada's Pittman had fired the opening rockets against and for repeal of the arms embargo, the rest of the show was anticlimactic. Two days later bulbous Tom Connally of Texas, his wavy grey locks disheveled, roared for repeal for two hours and 45 minutes. For two hours and three minutes Michigan's Vandenberg played hard for his stake in 1940 (TIME, Oct. 2).

The debate that counts, in either house of Congress, comes when a bill is being amended. Then legislators are working spontaneously with their wits and tongues to shape and perfect legislation. Full-dress debate, such as last week's in the Senate, is almost as empty of reality as the cook books and tracts that filibusterers read into the Congressional Record. Even as a powerhouse of arguments, this Congressional debate was of little or no importance. The Washington public stayed away from a mere set of written speeches; waited for the sparring to come when such phrase-fisted boxers as Missouri's Clark and Montana's Wheeler clash with South Carolina's Byrnes and Nevada's Pittman over the bill itself.

This second phase was to come more quickly than even Optimist Franklin Roosevelt had hoped, for Isolationist Charles William Tobey of New Hampshire moved strategically to split the Pittman bill apart, pass the major sections, which few oppose, then concentrate the opposition fire wholly on repeal of the arms-embargo provision.

Still no Senator on either side openly faced the real issues of U. S. foreign policy. Each side had its Achilles heel, its big unanswered question. Repealsters, with the brave exception of Nebraska's Nestor, old George William Norris, avoided mentioning their Big Secret: that embargo repeal was designed primarily to aid the Allies. The Isolationists made bitter cause with the sale of guns to belligerents, yet failed to admit their Big Secret: that cotton, wheat and oil, whose shipment the arms embargo would not affect, are basically materials of war.

It was not from the powerhouse of Congress that any gleams of light came last week, but from the study windows of private citizens.

One such gleam of light came from the master statistician of Palo Alto--Herbert Hoover--who comforted the U. S. through Publisher Roy Wilson Howard. Mr. Hoover, after quoting known sea and land strengths, chose the Allies to win; depreciated Germany's supposed air superiority as an indeterminate factor, indecisive at best; conclusively argued that time, economics and the British blockade would make final victory certain for the Allies even without U. S. aid.

Clearest beam came from the study of President James Bryant Conant of Harvard University, who took time off from his academic troubles (see p. 62) to point out:

"I believe that if these countries [the Allies] are defeated by a totalitarian power, the hope of free institutions as a basis of modern civilization will be jeopardized. To . . . handicap those who are fighting for ideals we share, seems to me inconsistent and unwise. ... It appears to be taken as a premise that the only matter before the country is how to keep the United States out of war. This attitude is the natural result of 20 years of persistent agitation. . . . Should we not examine without fear the advantages and disadvantages from our own selfish point of view of every aspect of our foreign policy? Must we not assume that a democracy can make a rational choice on matters of war and peace? If not, war has already defeated democracy on this continent."

Franklin Roosevelt talked of making the U. S. a "citadel wherein . . . civilization may be kept alive." Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh pleaded that the U. S. be made a citadel of democracy. But nowhere, in or out of Congress, was the cause of Isolation pictured so heroically as in the Hearst-papers (see cuts). Hearst cartoonists made Uncle Sam taller, nobler, Miss Liberty more luscious, thus carried on the Bris-banic genius for making Hearstreaders proud of their manhood.

*Since Sept. 1, on national hook-ups only, 29 speeches on neutrality had been made through NBC; 23 through CBS; 13 on MBS.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.