"It Is the People . . ."

In the U.S., words like cold and hunger had a remote and dimly remembered sound. Thanksgiving turkeys arrived in market by the carload; to get more mincemeat on the holiday table, OPA raised the ceiling price 2-c- a pound. Shoe rationing was over; department stores were taking orders for Christmas nylons.

The Congress was still bogged deep in debate over the United Nations Relief & Rehabilitation Administration. Although the nation had long since pledged $1,350,000,000 (1% of its 1943 national income) to UNRRA, the final $550,000,000 was still unappropriated. Why? Because the House had tacked on an amendment barring use of the funds in countries which do not give free access to U.S. news correspondents (i.e., Russia and her satellites), and UNRRA's U.S. representatives said this provision was unworkable.

Last week UNRRA's Director General Herbert H. Lehman told a House Committee what damage the delay had done. Pressed for funds, UNRRA had been forced to drop $50,000,000 in orders for "critically needed" medical supplies, to spend the money on food instead. Now UNRRA was completely broke.

The New York Times, which often acts as the nation's conscience, took two full pages to report the findings of its correspondents on Europe's plight:

"More than 20,000,000 desperate and homeless people are now milling east and west, north and south, across the Continent. . . . In all things that it takes to keep body and soul together . . . Poland is severely lacking; 800,000 are now living in holes in the ground and dugouts. . . .

"Rumania is suffering from the worst drought in 50 years. . . . The average Norwegian must wait one full year before he can hope to have a new pair of shoes. Stockings are unobtainable. . . . The resistance of Europe is low. Tuberculosis is rife. The very young and the very old especially are beginning to die in droves as the autumn leaves fall. . . ."

Herbert Lehman also asked the Congress to lose no time in appropriating another $1,350,000,000 to keep UNRRA going next year. Grain, he explained, must be bought four to six weeks in advance of shipping, medical items 90 days in advance, clothing even longer. Unless the money was available before year's end, UNRRA would have to stop buying and its shipments would halt in February.

But Congress, angry at UNRRA bungling (of which there has been plenty), worried about misuse of UNRRA funds in Russian-controlled areas (of which there have been persistent rumors), seemed to regard UNRRA as just another leisurely political issue.

In China, where the land has been ravaged by eight years of constant warfare and "migration, nobody yet has even dared estimate the needs of the people.

For two precarious days, UNRRA's future looked black. Republican leaders stuck by a recent report from their Food Study Committee, which recommended that 1) all future UNRRA appropriations be viewed with "jaundiced eyes," 2) all appropriations be subject to the free press provision. Then one farseeing Republican rose in an attempt to break the log jam.

Said Michigan's Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg: "I am unable to agree that we should suddenly choose UNRRA, on the threshold of winter, as the vehicle for [freedom of the press]. . . .

"The iron curtain [of censorship] is in the control of governments. It is the people in these areas who die for want of bread. ... It is the people--pitiful, suffering, starving millions of them facing what will probably be the blackest, cruelest winter since the age of plagues--from whom our aid would be withheld. . . .

"You may say the blame would rest upon the government which denied our requirement. But the dead would not know the difference."

In London, a letter-to-an-editor suggesting that Britons give up some of their own skimpy rations for the sake of Europe brought out 30,000 volunteers in a month. In France, an American occupation soldier wrote to the editor of Stars & Stripes: "I am getting too damned fat. . . . With a lot of women, children, grown men, etc., in Europe on the verge of starvation, why do they insist on fattening us up like pigs? Please bring more for folks over here who need it and less for me."

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