Rankin's Revenge

Mississippi's rancorous old Dixiecrat John Rankin had been nursing his wounds and biding his time. He had been bent on revenge ever since House Democrats unceremoniously kicked him off the publicity-making Un-American Activities Committee. Last week, like an angry mosquito, he circled, swooped and stung Congress spang on one of its most sensitive political spots. Over the loud protests of his Veterans' Affairs Committee (seven members walked out on him), Chairman Rankin highhandedly rammed through a staggering pension bill which seemed designed as much to pay back his congressional enemies as to pay off the veterans. No Congressman likes to appear ungenerous to veterans, and John Rankin was making his irresponsible most of the fact.

The cost of the bill would be enormous: $90 a month to each of the nation's 18,800,000 veterans at the age of 65, whether they needed it or not, and a minimum of $42 a month for veterans' widows. The cost for the first year would run to about $62 million, would rise to $6 billion within a decade, and eventually reach an astronomical total of $200 billion, four times as much as the U.S. has paid out from the Revolution to the present day.*

The bulk of World War II veterans will not reach retirement age until around 1990, and to many of them Demagogue Rankin's bill simply meant filling up the gravy boat again for World War I servicemen. Such veterans' groups as the V.F.W. and American Veterans Committee howled in dismay. Even the American Legion leadership, which has sometimes mistaken the public treasury for its own, remained guardedly silent.

Lazy Louts. Committee members protested that the bill had been railroaded through after only seven minutes' discussion and with no hearings at all. Cried Wisconsin's Republican John Byrnes: "This legislation is dishonest ... In ten years, our veterans will be shouldering half the nation's tax burden ... I am unalterably opposed to this bill. It is no hot potato as far as this member is concerned."

John Rankin just grinned. "If we can spend untold billions of dollars on other countries," he replied with sanctimonious calm, "feeding and clothing every lazy lout from Tokyo to Timbuctu--then we can take care of our aged veterans when they are unable to care for themselves."

Chairman Rankin could afford to gloat. To make revenge doubly sweet, he had a ready-made way of forcing the House to go on record: a new rule (TIME, Jan. 10), aimed originally at obstructionists like John Rankin, which permits any committee chairman to bring out a bill after the Rules Committee has pigeonholed it for 21 days.

Extraordinary Privilege. While the House sweated, the Senate, which would probably have to take final responsibility for extracting Rankin's stinger, was in almost as waspish a mood last week. After listening to A.F.L.'s 75-year-old President Bill Green, as he doggedly resisted anything but outright repeal of the Taft-Hartley Law, Ohio's Robert Taft finally exploded in exasperation: "Mr. Green, I don't want to make a speech. But it seems to me you are claiming the most extraordinary privilege any organization ever claimed in the United States."

Replied Bill Green: "All right, Senator. We know when a measure strikes at our heart and when it does not." Labor's opposition to Taft-Hartley, said Green, was "as uncompromising and rigid as was the opposition of our forefathers, the colonists, to Great Britain when it imposed upon them government without representation."

Three days later, Florida's New Dealing Senator Claude Pepper shocked spectators and his colleagues with an irresponsible, low-blow attack on the National Association of Manufacturers' ex-Chairman Ira Mosher. Pounding the desk, Pepper roared: "It was the poor people whose sons went to the battlefields, and a lot of the manufacturers' sons who stayed home and got rich." Said Witness Mosher quietly: "Three of my family died in the war." *Replied Pepper feebly: "Then you are an exception."

Before the week was out, Congress took one step toward restoring legislative calm. The House voted $150,000 to buy new chairs for the House floor. The old wooden seats, explained Capitol Physician George Calver, were so long from front to back that when a member sat back, circulation was cut off at his calves. When he sat forward to ease his legs, he tended to slump down, push his stomach up into his lungs, impairing his digestion and breathing. The new armless models would permit members to recline in healthy, upholstered comfort and, possibly, improve congressional dispositions.

*Not until 1946 did the U.S. pay off the last claims from the War of 1812. Still on the books are dependents of veterans of the Mexican War.

*All of them nephews. Two of his own sons were in service, one of them missing in action in the Philippines for more than a year.

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