NATIONAL AFFAIRS

punctuated by more roll calls and endless parliamentary infighting.

Conceived in Iniquity. The uproarious debate dredged deep into a treasury of the vehement, sonorous and shamelessly corny phrasing which is the tribal language of U.S. politics. Cried Georgia's sandy-haired Congressman William Wheeler: " [the bill] is conceived in iniquity and nurtured with the milk of corruption . . . [It] promises ... in the name of liberty [a] most reprehensible form of slavery . . ." "FEPC," bawled Alabama's George Mclnvale Grant, "stands for Tree Enterprise Perishes Completely . . .'"

Tennessee's ex-G.I. Pat Sutton held up a large photograph of a Negro boy eating a piece of watermelon. The boy, he explained, was happy and he did not want FEPC. But New York's Congressman Donald O'Toole, who reminded the House of early U.S. discrimination against the Irish Catholic, vehemently upheld FEPC. "We are [God's] creatures," he cried, "and we are entitled to receive from each other the love He bade us give." Harlem's Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, pilot of the Administration bill, quoted Daniel Webster in railing against the McConnell substitute: "A law without a penalty is simply good advice."

Watered Down. His anxiety was well founded. When the groggy debaters were shut off at 2:30 a.m., the Southerners began the final phase of their strategy: to soften the McConnell substitute bill even further with weakening amendments and then to vote for it. In the final showdown at the end of 15 hours they triumphed; the next morning the House perfunctorily approved the McConnell bill, 240 to 177. FEPC had been deprived of its teeth; if the bill became law (it seemed more probable that it would die in the Senate), it could be enforced only by mediation, conciliation, and telling an offender that he should mend his ways.

The Senate, which likes to go home to dinner, also got stuck with some nightwork. Wisconsin's rash-talking Joseph R. McCarthy rose and swung the tails of not one, but 81 Communists and party-liners (or so he said) in a wild attempt to decapitate both Harry Truman and Dean Acheson in one horrendous swing.

In a 5 1/2 hour speech he read case histories of all his exhibits, cried that 80 of them were employed in the State Department, that one card-carrying comrade was a presidential speechwriter. He refused to name one name. And his story was also weakened by the fact that he had been using all kinds of differing figures for weeks: first he had said there were 205 disloyal employees in State, then 57, before settling on 80. By demanding a quorum to listen to him, he forced a dragooning of members back to their seats for a night session for the first time in almost five years.

Two days later the Senate voted unanimously to investigate McCarthy's charges. Republicans hoped they might turn up another Alger Hiss case; Democrats felt that they didn't dare stifle an inquiry --and besides, they said confidently, they weren't worried.

Was there any fire at all below Joe McCarthy's smoke signals? Maryland's thorough and careful Democratic Senator Millard E. Tydings, chairman of the investigating committee, promised "neither a witch hunt, nor a whitewash."

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