A Feudin’ Son of Tennessee
March 16, 1944. OPA went into its second day before the Banking and Currency Committee today, having been introduced yesterday by the skilled, charming and capable Chester Bowles. A big earnest man with a big earnest face, who talks out of the right side of his mouth and has a brief but pleasant smile, the OPA Administrator has the Senators eating out of his hand nearly all the time. He is so reasonable about it, intelligent and sincere; plus the personality. He has not been a success in advertising for nothing. His appointment to head the nation’s storm center was a stroke of genius of some sort. Even people like New Jersey’s capable but extremely conservative Hawkes go out of their way to compliment him on his testimony. Only Taft, the eternally obdurate, sticks to his guns and continues to ask questions. They are asked with more tolerance than most witnesses receive, however.
The agency’s life runs out in June, and legislation has been introduced to continue it for another year. It will undoubtedly pass, although it may be somewhat amended to satisfy Republican objections.
The subsidies issue was raised again, this time by Francis Maloney, who pointed out in his blunt, good-humored and able fashion that there is going to be another drive to do away with them by tacking on an amendment to the Price Control Act. This simply means, he said, that the bill will go to the President, be vetoed as was the Commodity Credit Corporation bill, and OPA will then be extended by simple joint resolution in the same manner as the Commodity Credit Corporation—subsidies will simply be continued by the transfer of other funds. What right the Executive has to do something which a majority of the Congress doesn’t want is, of course, another question and beyond the purview of the gracious Mr. Bowles.
McKellar took up his recurrent feud with the TVA on the Floor this afternoon. When the Appropriations Committee got ready to report out the Independent Offices Appropriations bill the other day, it included at his insistence several amendments designed to provide that TVA profits, instead of going back into the agency’s revolving fund, should go into the Treasury and then be filtered back by Congressional appropriation. Also, Mack wants all executive appointees earning more than $4500 a year confirmed by the Senate. Cries of “Politics!” and “Patronage!” have been leveled at his head, and in reply he has once again concentrated his fire upon David Lilienthal. The battle was not completed today and will go over to Monday. Old Mack was in a pow’ful tempuh and made one of his hell-for-breakfast speeches, full of anti-Lilienthal quotations from Dr. A.E. Morgan, former TVA chairman, and George Norris of Nebraska. Morgan referred to Lilienthal’s “smart strategies,” and when bald Lister Hill of Alabama arose to read a telegram from Norris praising Lilienthal, McKellar’s voice rose softly in pious triumph. “You see?” he cried. “You see? He will not defend himself, but gets othuhs to dew it. Smaht strategies! Smaht strategies!” And this is the man I used to think was “not shrewd.” Over and over again I am learning not to judge politicians at first glance.
March 17, 1944. Bennett Champ Clark got his omnibus veterans bill (the “GI Bill of Rights,” the labelers call it) approved by the Finance Committee today, and next week will introduce it for himself and as many others as can get on board. The number to date is about 80. It includes everything but the kitchen sink, and its effect upon the portly B.C.’s chances for re-election is not overlooked on the Hill. He is apparently heading into a stiff fight, although Harry Truman, who is supporting him, thinks he will win. It will be close, though, Truman admits, and there is some chance that Forrest Donnell, the Republican governor, may get the seat. B.C., the story goes, hasn’t been answering his mail—and that counts, heavily.
The Republicans had a meeting the other day and emerged with Vandenberg as conference chairman, White floor leader, and Taft chairman of a steering committee of nine members. Wherry remains as whip and Harold Burton as secretary. The great Van made a valiant reference to “taking over the Senate,” a prospect that is coming more and more to fascinate the minority. Twelve seats will do it—just. That will give them control of committees, which of course is more than half the battle, but it certainly won’t give them voting control. There are as many mavericks on the Republican side as there are across the aisle, and unless they change a lot it seems unlikely that they will stand still long enough to be counted.
March 18, 1944. Jim Murray of Montana has issued another report from his subcommittee of the Military Affairs Committee, this time on war-contract terminations and the disruptive effects they may have on the economy unless carefully handled. It is a sound job, carrying the name of one of the busiest men in the Senate. We are always seeing him sprinting down the hall in the Office Building on his way to some committee meeting, a tall rangy man with his arms swinging widely as he strides along, a rather pinched, chipmunk-cheeked face, dark clothes like a preacher, an air of intense preoccupation. Although the Congress is not moving fast enough on contract termination, it is probably moving a lot faster because Jim Murray is pushing it than it would otherwise.
March 19, 1944. Canny old Jack Gamer has spoken up in Texas, urging upon his fellow citizens the necessity for returning all their incumbents to Congress. That way, he says, lies control of committees and speakerships and other pleasant emoluments of the righteous political faith. As one practical answer to the system of seniority, his program seems sound. Certainly it has given his state a powerful hold on the government.
“Theodore Gilmore Bilbo,” remarked the Washington Times-Herald the other day with admirable candor, “is a pipsqueak.” Whatever he is, it is certain that the wizened character from Mississippi has managed to make himself the most hated man in the District in the short month he has been chairman of the District Committee. Under an old law passed in 1934 Washington’s “alley dwellers” were to be moved out within 10 years. Bilbo’s first act as chairman was to announce to 20,000 Negroes who had never heard of the law that they would have to vacate by July 20. If they didn’t have any place to go, Bilbo told them blandly, they could go to the Virginias and Kentucky and find homes. If they didn’t have anything to do, he was sure the farmers in those regions would help them out. Really, Bilbo said with unctuous self-righteousness and a characteristic sardonic cruelty, he was the Negro’s best friend. “I’m getting him used to moving,” he said, “so that after the war he will be ready to move to West Africa.”
March 20, 1944. Forty-two governors have responded so far to the President’s query on the soldier vote. Four say definitely they can validate the Federal ballot; 10 expect their legislatures to take favorable action; 9 evade the issue; and 19 refuse flatly to cooperate. It is quite possible that Mr. Roosevelt’s political cuteness has been the deciding factor to drive some waverers into the opposite camp. Anyway, the returns are sufficiently varied so that he can now do anything he wants to and still be able to make out a politically good, if morally specious, case for it.
The poll-tax issue has suddenly come alive again; an “informed source” has been sending up trial balloons in the press today. The story even includes some reference to Barkley’s willingness to press for action on a bill “within a couple of weeks.” If so, a filibuster is inevitable. John McClellan stated it succinctly the other day. “They’ve been given fair warning that we will filibuster if they bring it up,” he told me frankly. “So they can’t charge us with interfering with the war effort. They know what the result will be if they force the issue. They can’t blame us for what happens.” The principle may be questionable, perhaps, but the logic is unimpeachable.
After the session this afternoon we went down on the floor to talk to McKellar about his amendments to place tighter controls on TVA’s use of funds, which will probably come up tomorrow. The Senator, fingering his Phi Beta Kappa Key and surveying us with drooping eyelids over his little uncommunicative eyes, was at his blandest. He didn’t expect a bit of trouble, really; everything looked fine. Did he know that Boss Crump of Memphis, his bosom political buddy, had come out against him on this issue? Yes, he had seen that. Of course that wouldn’t mean any permanent break, would it? “Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no!”—in the heartily scoffing tone which implies that the questioner is slightly touched—“At least Ah hope not. Mistuh Crump and Ah ah ve’y deah friends. Ve’y deah friends. Oh, no! At least”—thumping the questioner jovially in the chest—“Ah said Ah hope not.” “He’s a devil, that McKellar,” one of his former constituents in the Press Gallery remarked the other day in grudging admiration. It was a true word. Seventy-five years old and the toughest in-fighter in the Senate, shrewd, tricky, unscrupulous and ruthless—a feudin’ son of Tennessee.
March 21, 1944. McKellar swung into his second day of battle today against David Lilienthal, the man who wasn’t there. Although absent in Tennessee and necessarily silent, the TVA chairman managed to give the Senator quite a fight. Or at least McKellar acted that way. The air was empurpled with denunciations and derogations. From time to time some particularly apt phrase would occur to the Senator and he would repeat it with loving emphasis. “His eely, oily, ingratiating, insinuating ways,” he cried once; and struck with it, paused for a moment and then went back over it with tender care: “His eely—oily—ingratiating—insinuating—ways!” It was a valiant contest, all right, only interfered with by Lister Hill, who took TVA’s side of the discussion in a speech that managed to knock the props out from under Mack pretty well. This was particularly true when the bald, slender Alabaman challenged McKellar to produce evidence of the attacks which he claimed Lilienthal was “making against me night and day in my state.” Mack attempted to duck this by quoting Dr. A.E. Morgan, but Hill kept returning to it with gentle persistence. Finally in desperation Mack left the floor, returning with a huge scrapbook full of newspaper clippings. Through it he hunted in vain for substantiation. Everything he read somehow failed to mention him by name, or even, in fact, by any very direct implication. He eventually sat down in frustrated anger and closed the book. Connally came to his defense at one point, asserting that “every Senator knows the sort of sly, insinuating, creeping” (this with the famous Connally gestures, the arms drawn in toward the sides, the shoulders hunched, the hands jabbing forward stealthily at appropriate intervals) “attacks which the Senator refers to.” Hill hunched and gestured right back. “Of course,” he said blandly, “if this is one of those attacks where the knife goes into a man—” (his hand darted forward and the knife went into the man) “where he gives it a twist—” (he gave it a twist) “then I should certainly be against it, and so would every Senator.” It was a perfect physical parody of the senior Senator from Texas, done with just the right amount of exaggeration. When all was said and done, although in all probability none of the votes McKellar claims he has were changed by it, Hill’s speech had both defended the TVA and exposed Mack’s opposition for what it is, simply a feud against Lilienthal who apparently hasn’t yielded to pressure the way he was expected to.
McKellar cautioned his colleagues, of course, that he wanted them to vote “purely on the merits of the case and not because of any resentment they may feel concerning Lilienthal’s attacks on me.”
Midway in the afternoon I went over to the District Committee room, just off the floor, to cover a brief meeting of the Finance Committee. The bill under discussion was H.R. 4410, to extend for 90 days the duty-free importation of feed grains. After the government witnesses had unanimously testified against it on the ground that Canada was taking advantage of the tariff moratorium to boost the price of her grain to American purchasers, the committee asked them to leave and prepared to reach a decision. It was a rather instructive study in a certain type of legislation. Everyone agreed that it was a bad thing for Canada to gouge the United States, and everyone agreed that it probably wouldn’t increase our grain supplies enough to make it worthwhile. But heavy-jowled old Dave Walsh of Massachusetts, speaking in his deep, soft, hurried voice, said that the governor of Massachusetts had written him that the farmers wanted it; and Bob Taft pointed out that the Quaker Oats people were very anxious to have it go through, with an amendment permitting importation of rolled oats for human consumption; and Walter George kept coming back in the midst of a logical statement against it to the fact, stated rather wistfully, that “the poultry people are certainly desirous of having it go through”; and thin, gray Peter Gerry of Rhode Island, encouraged by his closest crony, Harry Byrd, emphasized that the farmers certainly did want it, all right; and John Danaher, while admitting it wouldn’t do much good, agreed; and then too, as Walter George pointed out once more, “the poultry people are certainly desirous …” “I move the chairman report the bill out favorably to the Senate,” said Dave Walsh briskly. The motion was approved.
March 22, 1944. Ed Johnson spoke in Chicago last night, formally breaking at last with the President after months of increasingly open criticism. It was an excellent speech of its kind, from the last Democratic officeholder left in Colorado. He has just gradually gotten fed up, and being like Barkley an honest man he has finally cut loose and said so. “That’s one thing about Johnson,” somebody remarked today. “He says what he thinks.” It is an admirable trait. The big, slow-spoken Westerner may be a portent. If so, he is one of many.
The Democratic National Committee is apparently beginning to feel that it is fighting with its back to the wall. The Second District of Oklahoma has suddenly become a formal battleground. The Committee has decided to stop the Republican trend if it can, and all the rabbits are being pulled out of the hat. The most significant is Barkley, who has finally agreed after much beseeching to go into Oklahoma and speak for the Democratic candidate. Elmer Thomas, worried about his own chances for re-election as Senator, is already in the district stumping it for the party, and from the House the very able Mike Monroney has also consented to participate. On the Republican side Senator Moore has left for home to throw his slight figure and dry, flat voice into the battle. Like Willkie in Wisconsin, the Democrats in the Second Oklahoma District have decided to make that district the Symbol. It will become clear next Tuesday whether they have made the right choice.
Debate this afternoon lasted for four hours and 54 minutes, and still we didn’t reach a vote on the TVA amendments. Old Mack was at his most indignant, ranting and roaring one moment and sweet as a suckling dove the next. In the last few days, he remarked blandly, he had noted that the newspapers were “full of Lilienthal’s feud with me.” The matter has been exaggerated “out of all proportion to its true state,” he added, intimating that the whole thing was rather surprising. Lister Hill was again diligently determined to spike McKellar’s allegations, and was presently joined by John Bankhead, unhappily but doggedly opposing the man who once, untold years ago, was his roommate in college. Barkley also arose to condemn Mack’s position. Even if Lilienthal had attacked McKellar and every other member of the Congress, Barkley roared in some wrath, he would not vote to punish the entire Tennessee Valley because of one man. Bob La Follette and George Aiken also came to the agency’s defense. Rankin came over from the House, “lobbying on the right side for once,” in the dry words of one reporter. Homer Bone, the liberal Washington Stater with the crutches, the drawn, unwell-appearing face and the uproariously flamboyant line of chatter, finally got up and said he was going to make a point of order against every one of Mack’s 16 amendments on the ground that they are legislation in an appropriations bill, something that is against the rules of the Senate. This was late in the day, and after some consultation back and forth between Barkley, White and McKellar, it was decided to go over until Friday—skipping Thursday for no good reason, apparently—except that, as Barkley said, “we just didn’t feel like working.” Either that, or both sides expect to do a lot of digging for votes all day tomorrow, which is more likely.
McKellar’s opposition is picking up considerable strength, principally because his attack on TVA is so openly and blatantly dictated by his personal hatred for Lilienthal. As he does with everything, he is trying to put this on a personal basis—demanding that Senators vote his way out of personal friendship—and it is just possible that he may succeed with this tactic. But Barkley assured us after the session, “We’re picking up quite a lot of territory—territory we didn’t expect to get.”
March 23, 1944. The inside story of Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s very hush-hush huddle with the Foreign Relations Committee yesterday is gradually coming out. Apparently it was simply one more attempt to pile words upon words to create a foreign policy. His pious and empty 17-point statement yesterday served, if anything, to make the fog which envelops the huge old pile of fantastic architecture housing the State Department even more dense and impenetrable. His chat with the Senators evidently did even less to dispel it. Questioned about it today at his press conference, he remarked blandly that he is “glad, at last, after two years of expounding foreign policy, that people are waking up to the fact that there is one.” If they are waking up to the fact that there is one, which seems doubtful, they are also more than awake to the fact that whatever it is, it is being deliberately withheld from them.
Chairman William Davis of the War Labor Board came up today for the OPA hearings, a short, stocky man with a square stocky face topped by gray hair, a slow, drawling, unimpressed voice and a tendency to handle tendentious Senators as though they were unruly children. “Just a moment, please,” he told Taft in unhurried reproof once. “Let me finish.” The Ohioan, in fact, became quite heated over the Little Steel formula and the railway labor case. Dr. Davis backed out of that gracefully by pointing out that WLB was deliberately kept out of the picture, and then went on to expound his theory of how the Little Steel formula could be broken and still remain unbroken. It was all rather involved and put Taft in a stew from which he only barely managed to rescue himself and regain his good temper. Davis continued to talk on through the Senator’s frequent interruptions, unmoved, unhurried, unimpressed. He makes an excellent impression, takes a middle-of-the-road view of things in general, has a good sense of humor, and handles himself with the instinctive but quietly unassuming arrogance of a man who knows exactly what he is talking about. One begins to see why he manages to hang onto his job the way he does in spite of storms and tempests.
McKellar tried strategy today. The Appropriations Committee was called into session this morning, and from its meeting Mack emerged with the news that it had decided to drop all of his TVA amendments with the single exception of the one requiring the agency to turn its funds back into the Treasury—everything but the one that would really deal it a body blow, in other words. This will probably pick up a few votes. Homer Bone is still going to raise his point of order though, he told me, explaining that TVA was by court decision virtually a private corporation and as such could not operate efficiently if it had to come running to the Hill every time it wanted to do something, and also emphasizing Jim Mead’s point that in years of auditing by the General Accounting Office no irregularities have ever been discovered. And Lister Hill, while “delighted” at the amendments dropped, still doesn’t like the one retained and will fight it on the floor. We shall see tomorrow whether McKellar still has his votes.
March 24, 1944. Mack had his votes, as it turned out, 39 of them: not too many, but enough to overcome the 26 mustered on the other side. A dutiful group of his colleagues and a number of obliging Republicans fell obediently into line and delivered as promised. The McKellar method (which consists of two parts—first to wield that Appropriations Committee ax for all it’s worth and second to make a feverishly personal, sentimental appeal for votes on the ground of friendship) proved itself again. He got his amendment through and also another which would necessitate Senate confirmation of all government employees earning $4500 or more. The House has killed both before in previous years and the hopes of TVA’s supporters are now transferred there.
Homer Bone made his point of order, which under the rules is not debatable. Instead of ruling on it promptly as he should have done, Wallace delayed. McKellar immediately jumped up and asked that it be “considered.” Millard Tydings, remarking innocently as he so often does that “in the interests of clarification” he wanted to make a point of order himself, thereupon raised the point that the Bone motion was not germane to the subject under discussion. Wallace, suddenly waking up to the situation, ruled that Tydings was out of order, and McKellar again jumped up and appealed Wallace’s ruling to the Senate. There then ensued nearly an hour of parliamentary argument—simply an extended back-and-forth clatter about the rules of the Senate. Finally in exasperation the Vice President remarked that he regarded the appeal of his ruling as “a parliamentary trick,” and then the fat was in the fire. Old Mack surged to his feet roaring. The Chair had called his action a parliamentary trick. The Chair knew he was not the sort of man to trick people! The Chair knew he would never do such a thing. He regarded the Chair’s statement as unfair and unwarranted. More than that, it was downright damnable! He demanded that the Chair retract that statement! Wallace, who had tried without success several times to interrupt this tirade, remarked in some disgust that he would withdraw his remark. After an hour of this sort of thing the Senate voted 47–16 to override his ruling. Comments on the V.P. in the halls and elevators afterwards were scathing. No matter what he does, he gets it in the neck—and this time quite unjustly, for he simply got caught in the path of the McKellar steamroller and wasn’t nimble enough to jump aside.
Following that, Dick Russell’s amendment to ban transfer of appropriated funds from established agencies to executive-order agencies which have been in existence for more than a year, without direct appropriation by Congress, was brought up. The Republicans then did some interesting flipflops. First C. Douglass Buck of Delaware, a tall innocuous man with a little black mustache, offered an amendment to the amendment which would specifically exempt the President’s Fair Employment Practices Committee. This passed 37–31, nearly all the Republicans voting for it. Bennett Champ Clark arose in great indignation to denounce the pressure that had been put upon the Senate to retain FEPC. Lobbyist Edgar Brown, a tall ascetic Negro with a beard like Haile Selassie’s who is always hanging around the Capitol, had buttonholed him, Clark cried, and told him that “the Senate is going to exempt FEPC.” “Why are we?” Bennett wanted to know. “Because we want you to,” replied Brown with serene arrogance. This is no way to handle Bennett Champ, or indeed any Senator, and the reaction on the floor to this little story was immediate. Dick Russell also took occasion to point out scathingly to the Republicans, and he was joined by Walter George, that for a party which condemned bureaucracy they were certainly inconsistent in wanting to leave FEPC unchecked. This was a nicely calculated line of attack by a Southerner who wants to get rid of FEPC for reasons of his own, and it successfully embarrassed the Republicans. When Ed Johnson moved to reconsider the vote, the motion was upheld 30–28, and presently by a vote of 32–35, after being amended to put FEPC back in and widened by Styles Bridges to include agencies set up as subsidiaries of government corporations, the Russell amendment carried. The Republicans in the space of an hour had made a voting record on both sides of the Negro question. Rather inadvertently, all things considered.
Before the session ended at 7:14 the Senate had also come within an inch of requiring a General Accounting Office audit of some 30 government corporations. It failed by a handful of votes on Aiken’s motion to suspend the rules, the necessary two-thirds couldn’t quite be mustered. All in all, however, the Senate had done pretty well for one day in its drive against the Executive. On few occasions has it ever passed so many restrictive measures in one legislative session—a significant enough indication as to just how far the spurious good fellowship of the post-Barkley era extends on the Hill. No farther, apparently, than it does downtown.