Veto Upheld

Democratic House leaders had given Franklin D. Roosevelt some advice: if you are sending up any more vetoes, give us 24 hours notice or don't expect us to rally our forces in time.

Last week, a full day before the next message went up, Jimmy Byrnes phoned rangy John McCormack, Majority Leader, told him to get set for a veto of the Commodity Credit Corp. bill, which prohibited the use of subsidies to roll back food prices. Immediately the House strategists conferred, under the prism-hung chandelier in Speaker Sam Rayburn's ornate office. Telegrams were hurried off to more than 50 absentees, mostly in the big cities along the Atlantic seaboard. Members of the House Whip organization streamed in, got a broad sketch of the veto message, were told to go to work on Republicans and Democrats alike with one big argument: "There is going to be a certain amount of inflation, we all know that. It is here already. But we've got to keep the dam propped up some way. If we override this veto, no matter what happens that is wrong, Congress will be blamed for it. . . ." Buttonholing went on half the night.

Next day, at 2:30 p.m., balding House Clerk Irving Swanson began reading the message. The President was not only vetoing a bill; he was confidently, almost scornfully, lashing Congress. Some passages sounded almost like the old days of the fighting New Deal. Swanson's mellifluous voice accented the tough phrases (reputedly written by Fred Vinson Prentiss Brown and the Budget Bureau): "A bill to hamstring the Commodity Credit Corp. . . . would serve only to set the soldier, the worker and the unorganized consumer at war with the farmer . . . these unorganized millions must not become the forgotten men and women of our war economy."*

At one point Congressmen laughed--at the President's crack that discussing all the difficulties in the bill would make his message as confused as the bill itself. At 4:22 p.m. Tally Clerk Hans Jorgensen completed the count: 228 to override the veto (every Republican vote except four), 154 to sustain it.

The veto extinguished the authority and the money for the 90%-of-parity support under farm prices, yet Franklin Roosevelt still retained the authority of the price control bill to use any money he can dig up for food subsidies. Hurriedly, the House farm bloc got up a simple resolution merely extending CCC. The Senate, not in such a hurry, began again to tack on anti-subsidy amendments. And many a Congressman, convinced that subsidies would not work, smiled--and waited.

* The President's astonishing statistics: four million workers still earn less than 40-c- an hour, while the income of over four million families has increased less than 5% in the last 18 months.

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