Majestic Minimum

Washington wits have long remarked that the Senate is called the upper House because it ups appropriations authorized by the House of Representatives. Last week the Senate was upping White House proposals. Since the Democrats' thin margin of control did not promise victory for a separate Democratic program, they adopted the strategy of molding President Eisenhower's program to their own expansive fancy. The day after the Senate multiplied Ike's housing program nearly sixfold (see above), it upped the Administration request for a 90-c--an-hour minimum wage (v. the present 75-c- floor) to $1, and shouted the bill to passage. Estimated additional wages to some 2,100,000 workers: $560 million a year. West Virginia's Matthew Neely adjudged it "a majestic measure of humanity." Last week Congress also: P:Passed. 409 to 1 in the House, unanimously in the Senate (and President Eisenhower signed), a new 8% postal pay-raise bill which corrects many of the "inequities" cited by the President in his veto of a higher, 8.8% bill (TIME, May 30). Annual cost: $164 million.

P:Voted, in the Senate, to spend $8.6 billion in fiscal 1956 through the Veterans Administration, the Departments of the Interior, of Labor and of Health, Education and Welfare and other agencies, after upping the White House request for medical research from $89 million to $112 million.

P:Approved, in the House, construction of a new $36 million Smithsonian Institution building on Washington's Mall, to be called the Museum of History and Technology, after listening to Michigan's ratchet-tongued Clare Hoffman admit to the "overpowering" thought, upon visiting the Smithsonian, that "after all, I do not as an individual amount to very much in this world, never did and never will."

P:Ordered, in the House, the motto "In God We Trust" to be inscribed on all new greenbacks, although that is not the official national motto ("E pluribus unum" is). "In God We Trust" has been used on coins for almost a century, never on bills.

P:By House action, told the Agriculture Department to stop predicting apple prices.

P:Agreed, by 353 to 13 in the House, to allow $75 million for speeding completion of the Pan American Highway; a reversal, under Administration pressure, of last month's action striking out the funds. The road, still impassable through 25 miles on the Mexico-Guatemala border, 135 miles in Costa Rica and Panama, may now be ready in three years.

P:Ordered the Veterans Administration to pay for home treatment of Albert Woolson, 108, in order to spare him the 165-mile trip from his Duluth home to the nearest VA hospital. Woolson, at 17 a drummer boy in Minnesota's 1st Heavy Artillery Regiment, is the Union Army's lone Civil War survivor.

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