The Record

The first session of the 81st Congress, which had begun its work in high hope ten months ago and passed through despairing depths, ended last week in wan and shaky congratulations among the Democratic majority. There was a great deal of tired, last-minute fun: barbershop ballads, a few well-placed smooches on the cheek by departing Congresswomen and gay festivities by congressional employees (see cut) whose salaries had just been raised.

The session was the longest in peacetime since 1922, and it had been a stormy voyage. Harry Truman's Fair Deal often seemed about to founder with all its cargo. But the crew, checking over what was left after many an item had been jettisoned, found it amounted to a fair-sized package.

Abroad. In international affairs, the 81st's record--like the 80th's -was good. Under bipartisan leadership, the Senate approved the North Atlantic Treaty,, the first peacetime alliance with European nations in U.S. history, and a $1 billion program to help arm the alliance. After a seizure of quibbling, Congress authorized a generous $5.4 billion appropriation for EGA. The hobbling "peril-point" amendment was struck off the reciprocal-trade program, and the authority extended two years. The 81st also gave U.S. defense all that the President had asked--and decided that he had not asked enough. It appropriated a $15.6 billion defense budget, a record for peacetime, adding funds for an extra ten groups to the 48-group Air Force requested by the White House. It strengthened the powers of the Secretary of Defense, created a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, increased the pay of all military ranks.

In fact, the 81st Congress spent more money than any other Congress in peacetime history. It whittled no significant amount off Harry Truman's budget at any point, but it added a few hundred millions here & there. It gave raises to just about everybody--the President, the Cabinet, high Administration officials, postal and civil-service employees. Its total outlay in cash, contract authority, tax refunds and debt service amounted to a whopping $51 billion.

In a time of great prosperity, it went beyond the President's deficit-spending policy in forcing the nation to live on borrowed money. The expected deficit for this year is $5 billion (Harry Truman had estimated it at $873 million). The deficit might yet prove to be the most dangerous bequest of the 81st Congress to a nation which was already $256 billion in debt.

Better Sense. In spite of imposing Democratic majorities, Harry Truman commanded no stable following in either House. Politically, Congress was considerably more conservative than the President. His leadership was frequently overturned on critical issues by a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats, an unstable alliance which provided no consistent leadership of its own. A Republican-Dixiecrat coalition filibustered and voted to death his civil-rights program. A wider coalition of Democrats and Republicans crushingly repudiated another major Truman election promise: repeal of the Taft-Hartley law. The Senate rejected three of his personal appointees. Congress ignored his request for compulsory health insurance, refused to try the Brannan plan even as an experiment.

In its refusals, Congress often showed better sense than Harry Truman in his requests, and sometimes it saved him later embarrassment. When he asked for an anti-inflation program (including wage & price controls, Government authority to build steel plants) at a time when deflation was obviously in progress, Congress brusquely threw it overboard, lock, stock & barrel. His demand for $4 billion in new taxes was similarly ignored; so was his request for $800 million for universal military training.

New Strategy. By midterm, the Senate was so demoralized that no major appropriation bill had been passed. Harry Truman was direly threatening to get on a train and take his case to the nation again; Majority Leader Scott Lucas was in the hospital with gastric ulcers.

It was then that the Administration devised a new strategy suggested by canny old Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn: 1) keep Congress in session, let it talk itself out, hold its nose to the grindstone, and blame Republican obstructionism for Congress' inaction; 2) let Congress know that if it got down to work on what was left of the Truman program, it could go home.

The strategy worked. By session's end, the 81st had raised the minimum wage from 40-c- to 75-c- an hour, expanded crop insurance, authorized increased spending for public power systems, restored the Commodity Credit Corp.'s authority to build grain storage bins and (with G.O.P. support, notably from Ohio's Taft) passed a slum-clearance and public-housing bill. In the closing minutes, the 81st enacted a portmanteau farm compromise put over by former Agriculture Secretary Clinton Anderson, and designed to redeem Harry Truman's vague and grandiose promises to the farmers.

There were some failures. The 81st Congress had meanly failed to liberalize D.P. legislation. It had approved six executive reorganization plans submitted by Harry Truman, but ignored the basic reforms outlined by the Hoover Commission. It had failed to authorize funds for President Truman's Point Four program for foreign investments.

Profitable Failure. Politically, the White House inner operatives thought they could make as much capital out of some of their failures as out of their accomplishments. Truman's inept fight for the repeal of Taft-Hartley and for civil-rights legislation had confirmed him, they argued, as the champion of labor and the Negro. What they meant was that labor and the Negro might have no grounds for gratitude to Harry Truman, but might still prefer him to his opponents. Crowed one Fair Dealer with satisfaction: "We haven't lost a Negro vote. We haven't lost a labor vote. We haven't lost a farmer vote."

By the touchstone of the Taft-Hartley law, the 81st Congress was closer political kin to the 80th than it was to Harry Truman. By the touchstone of what his political opponents had said he could or could not achieve, Harry Truman had won quite a bit, though it was not nearly as much as he had asked or as he had promised to get. Said he, perhaps mindful of the do-nothing days of early summer: "You know, I'm happy about the record of Congress. It accomplished more than I expected."

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