First Impressions
November 21, 1943. There was a soft warm haze over the city when I got into Union Station at 4 this afternoon. In it the Capitol loomed up massive and domineering across the Plaza. Behind me as I stood in the doorway looking out the great station echoed with the fretful rendezvous of trains, the murmurous clatter of many feet, the hectic excitements of arrival and departure, while down from on high magnified ten times over came the imperious voices of women calling the place-names of America. Around me in unceasing flood passed the travelers. Daily they come in their thousands and daily the city absorbs them, vomiting forth other thousands to make room. Night and day unceasing, humanity on the move, closing in on this focus of its hopes, desires, ambitions, fears and worries from all over America and all over the earth.
I for one am here to see what I can, and appraise it as best I can; disillusioned like all Americans about their ruling heart, not too certain that it is taking us in any very worthwhile or consistent direction, yet possessed still of some inner faith and certainty of its essential and ultimate purposes. We muddle, we blunder, we fall on our faces, and we survive; how, or by what peculiar grace, no man can say exactly. This is where it is done, however, and this is where I shall watch it, fascinated I know, encouraged perhaps—perhaps even, now and then, inspired.
November 22, 1943. This afternoon I visited the House, which had suspended regular business to eulogize two dead members. I was there for the opening benediction, a long, lugubrious affair during which Minority Leader Joe Martin of Massachusetts, a little, dark, shaggy man, nervously and audibly jingled the coins in his pocket. I left soon after to go over to the Senate and listen to a portion of the debate on the bill to make it easier for soldiers away from home to vote. This was distinguished chiefly by the wary way in which everyone circled around the issue of the poll tax, of which the Senate is apparently highly conscious1.
The House guards are informal, hasty, unconcerned; slap your pockets, slap your coat, and pass you. The Senate police are much more formal, making you get in line, spreading your coat out on a table, challenging servicemen to show their furlough papers or passes, and generally being more officious. It is much easier to get a good seat in the House gallery than it is in the Senate, which does not seem to be any too well constructed from an audience standpoint.
November 23, 1943. The Hill fascinates me, and I went back there again this afternoon to find that the House had given up its mourning to take up the anti-subsidy bill—more properly, the bill to continue the Commodity Credit Corporation and prohibit the use of its funds for farm subsidies. A large crowd was in the galleries, and nearly 300 members on the floor. A man in back of me asked the guard to point out Rep. Clare Boothe Luce of Connecticut and when he did, sucked in his breath in audible surprise. “Is that Representative Luce?” he said. “Isn’t she an attractive thing! My, my, isn’t she an attractive thing!”
It was a rather lively, acrimonious affair this afternoon. The Administration, which found death a godsend yesterday in delaying a showdown on the subsidies it desires, profited from it again today. Late in the afternoon Majority Leader John McCormack of Massachusetts, who gives the impression of being a rather slow but generally able man, arose to remark reasonably that a delegation was preparing to leave to attend the funeral of one of the deceased. Would the House, therefore, consent to limiting debate on all amendments to 10 minutes so that a vote might be taken at 5:15? This at once provoked a lot of argument in which John Rankin of Mississippi, a little man with bushy hair and a hallelujah voice, had his say at some length to demand an end to debate on the amendment then pending, and an immediate vote. A voice vote was taken. Administration men promptly demanded a standing vote, which was taken. After that Administration men demanded a teller vote, in which members walk up the aisle to be counted. Meanwhile time marched on. Finally that got settled, and late in the day, despite some neat parliamentary maneuvering, the final vote was taken and subsidies were snowed under. It was an interesting example of strategic politics.
November 26, 1943. This morning I visited the Senate Committee on Insular Affairs for a while. Senators Allen Ellender of Louisiana and Dennis Chavez of New Mexico were present; later Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio came in. The issue is how far to go in giving Puerto Rico independence [ultimately extended, in 1952, to her present “commonwealth” status under the U.S. flag], and the committee shows a great reluctance to move too fast on the bill under consideration.
Taft is taller and larger than I had supposed him to be, with a bare, scrubbed-looking face, intelligent eyes, a pleasant smile, a thin-lipped mouth and the flat yet curiously attractive voice made familiar in the last campaign. He made frequent remarks to his colleagues which provoked their laughter, and seems to be well liked and respected. He is a very positive personality, despite the rather jocular and patronizing manner in which he was described by press and politicians alike in the preconvention battles of 1940. Either he has gained considerable assurance since, or the jocularity was all part of the careful reduction of one Republican candidate, the Senator, and the building up of another, Wendell Willkie.
December 2, 1943. Today I was assigned to the Senate staff of United Press and moved into the Senate Press Gallery, I hope to stay. Nothing could be a better break for a newspaperman and nothing could please me more. It is exactly what I wanted.
The afternoon I spent in the front row of the gallery directly above the Vice President’s desk. Henry Wallace, a weak but unmistakable voice from below adjuring the Senators to be in order or directing a roll call, was in the chair. Before me in their majesty sat the Senators of the United States. It very soon became apparent that, as I had expected, they are only human beings after all.
First impressions are not very good and I expect to revise them soon, but as of today this is how some of the members stack up from a frontrow seat:
Taft continues to impress me as one of the strongest and ablest men here, one of the men who act consistently as though they think what is being done here really matters to the welfare of the country. He is quick in debate and quick in humor, as when Joe Guffey of Pennsylvania, a stocky, sarcastic gentleman, started to launch into a speech about all the soldiers who are going to vote Democratic. “Vote!” cried Taft hurriedly in an attempt to shut him off, “Vote! Vote!” The cry was taken up at once and echoed back and forth on the Republican side while Taft laughed heartily at Guffey’s patient annoyance. It soon becomes apparent that Taft, perhaps more than any other, is the leader of the powerful coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats which has things pretty much its own way right now. This makes him, in terms of actual strength on the floor, one of the three or four most powerful men in the United States Senate at the present time.
Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts looks somewhat supercilious, and when he rises to speak it is with what seems a tacit assumption of superiority. He is a young man, forceful, apparently not too well liked.
Gone are the days of Pass the Biscuits for Pappy O’Daniel of Texas, apparently, for a sadder or more troubled-looking man I have yet to see in Washington. Something has him bothered, and he sits at his desk lonely and unloved as though he hasn’t a friend in the world. Maybe he hasn’t, although such an aura of hillbilly good nature has surrounded him in the press that one wonders what’s wrong.
Allen Ellender of Louisiana is short, dark, swarthy, given to talking with his hands in quick, erratic gestures. He laughs a lot, sometimes without much provocation but always with a hearty awareness of the galleries.
Alben Barkley, the Majority Leader, acts like a man who is working awfully hard and awfully earnestly at a job he doesn’t particularly like. Sweat almost visibly stands out at times on the man the President once addressed as “Dear Alben” in a famous letter. [A designation mockingly used by his enemies ever after.] Reasonably capable, though, I would say, and all in all a good man if not a great leader.
Guy Gillette of Iowa and Hugh Butler of Nebraska vie for the title of Most Senatorial. Both are model solons, white-haired, dignified, every inch the glamorous statesmen.
Chavez of New Mexico, looking like a smaller edition of Irvin S. Cobb, is able and earnest, a better-than-average Senator. Someone referred to him in print somewhere the other day as “suave.” He is, but it seems to me that a good deal of the traditional dispassionate cynicism of the Hispanic peoples enters into it.
John Danaher of Connecticut already impresses me as one of the three or four ablest men in the Senate. Short, chubby, balding, with a round, earnest, serious face and an obvious lisp, he looks like some intent little teddy bear when he gets up to speak. But what he says makes sense and what he does makes more.
The topic under debate today was the soldier-vote bill. As interpreted for me by one keen reporter, the fight boils down to the fact that the Democrats think they can win the coming Presidential election if they have the soldier vote and the Republicans think they can win if they can manage to cut it off. Seen in that light—as Ed Moore of Oklahoma, a little old dried-up oilman, put it, “Of course it’s a partisan bill, and we all know it”—it becomes rather less of a patriotic contest than the public has been led to believe.
I would say that on an average more backslapping and handshaking are done in the United States Senate than in any other comparable area or body of men in the world.
December 3, 1943. Today I covered the Judiciary Committee hearing on the bill to affirm the intent of Congress that the insurance business shall not come under the Sherman or Clayton anti-trust acts, and got another name to put near the top of my already-expanding mental table of ratings for Senators—that of the sharp-eyed and sharp-minded, soft-spoken, shrewd and hard-hitting Democrat from Wyoming, Mr. Joseph C. O’Mahoney (“Oh-Mah-huh-nee”). So capable is the Senator, so logical and so resourceful and so keen, that I came close to giving him straight A on the basis of just one performance. He is conducting a brilliant one-man tour de force in an attempt to show that the insurance business is run as a monopoly from the top. By the simple device of asking gentle questions and quoting from the constitutions and bylaws of the major insurance firms, he pretty well tied up the witness in his own evasive answers. The Senator appeared before the committee himself only as a witness, is conducting his battle by himself, and does not have the support of the committee, its chairman, Fred Van Nuys of Indiana, or of any sizable number of his colleagues. He may be beaten on it, but it’s a good show and he is a good man.
This afternoon on a vote of 42–37, the Senate threw out the soldier-vote bill offered by Scott Lucas of Illinois and Theodore Francis Green of Rhode Island and substituted a milk-and-water version providing that the states shall do what they can to extend absentee balloting to their men overseas. In effect this simply cuts off the soldier vote. Few of the men abroad are going to have time or interest to secure ballots from home. The President’s propitiatory gestures on the measure are good but they have come too late. The coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats is in the saddle now.
December 4, 1943. Gradually the outlines of Congress’ work are becoming clear. What the Congress is, essentially, is a bill-machine: bills are introduced, they are considered, they are debated, and they are passed. A secondary function which in recent years has assumed increasing importance is the investigating power: to establish by special resolution committees which are empowered to subpoena witnesses, place them under oath, and get the facts for the public record. The outstanding example of this function is the Senate’s Truman Committee to investigate the war effort. Sometimes investigative committees are empowered to originate legislation, but more often their duties are confined exclusively to fact-gathering. The regular standing committees of both houses, such as Agriculture, Foreign Relations, and so on, perform much the same function with regard to the bills that come before them. At the conclusion of their studies the committees issue reports disclosing, discussing, commending or condemning. Out of the reports legislation frequently comes, introduced by designated members of the committees or by other interested members.
The course of a bill is a basically simple process which can be complicated by a lot of side issues. The bill itself may be introduced by any member at any time about anything. Four things can happen to it:
If it is a Republican bill it will automatically be killed in committee and some Democrat will introduce a Democratic bill to do the same thing. [A process, I eventually found out, which is exactly reversed when the Republicans come to power.]
If it is utterly wild, or if the committee chairman or some other powerful influence such as the White House is against it, it can simply die in committee. The chairman never brings it up, it stays in the files, and at the end of the Congress in which it was introduced it automatically dies. This happens to the great majority.
If it manages to clear the committee hurdle and is “reported out” by the committee and placed on the “calendar,” or printed list of bills awaiting action, and still arouses strong opposition, it can also die an automatic death. Somebody objects, or the motion to consider is voted down. It stays on the calendar and at the end of the Congress it goes into the wastebasket. Hundreds more are taken care of this way.
If a bill embodies a principle upon which there is general agreement (and no committee ever really bothers with a bill unless there is a good indication that it will pass in some form or other) then it goes through a standard process:
The first step is hearings. These may be open, in which case the press and the public are present and privileged to report what goes on; or they may be “executive,” in which case the press and the public are barred and the press is privileged to report only what it can dig out of individual members. (This is usually sufficient.) Hearings may last a week or they may be scattered over a year or longer, depending upon the purpose for which they are being held. Usually the purpose is to get the best public advice on the bill, but sometimes it has to do with making headlines for both members and witnesses. Witnesses consist of people the committee has invited to testify and people who have asked that they be allowed to testify. Nearly all represent some organized group with special interest in the legislation.
At the conclusion of the hearings the committee goes into executive session to study the bill. If the committee accepts the bill as it stands, it may simply add a few “committee amendments.” If the committee wants to take the basic principle and write its own bill, it will strike out everything after the “enacting clause” (carried at the head of all bills and consisting of the words “Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled …”) and insert an entire new measure as the committee amendment. Whichever is done, the next step is to “report it out”—send it to the floor with a formal report stating the aims of the bill and giving a digest of its provisions. The bill then goes on the “legislative calendar” of pending bills, where it may die the aforementioned natural death. If it is a major bill, however, answering a pressing and obvious need, agreement on the best time to debate it is reached between the majority and the minority at which time it is “called up for action.”
After a bill has been called up, the committee amendments are considered first. If there is general agreement, they may be adopted or rejected by simple voice vote. If there is controversy a member may ask for “the Yeas and Nays”—a roll-call vote. The presiding officer asks for a show of hands. If there are enough (one-fourth of the members present), the presiding officer directs the clerk to call the roll. After the committee amendments have been disposed of, the bill is open to amendment from the floor. Any member may introduce any amendment; this is debated and disposed of, again either by voice vote or roll call, depending on the amount of controversy. After all floor amendments have been offered and disposed of, the presiding officer announces the “third reading of the bill” and the vote on final passage. Once again it may be voice vote or roll call. If a completed bill fails of passage—an extremely rare event—it is “recommitted” or sent back to committee, where it usually dies.
Bills may be introduced in one house, passed, and sent to the other, or similar bills may be introduced simultaneously in both houses. If the first procedure is followed, the house receiving the bill usually goes through the same procedure of hearings and rewriting and amending as the originating house. It then passes its amended version and the originating house asks for a conference. The bill then “goes to conference.” Conference consists of a certain number—usually 3 or 5—from each house. They are empowered to rewrite the bill once again on the basis of the best available compromise they can work out on the basis of their conflicting viewpoints. When they have finished, the “conference report” is sent to both houses. It cannot be amended and must be accepted in toto. If it is accepted by both houses, the bill goes to the President. If it is rejected, the conferees are discharged, new ones are appointed, and the bill goes back to conference until something acceptable is agreed upon. All major bills are written in conference by a handful of men after both houses have finished debate.
If similar bills are introduced in both houses at the same time, the house which concludes action first sends its bill to the other. The second house passes its own version, strikes out all after the enacting clause of the other bill, and substitutes its own version as an amendment. The first house then asks for conference, and the same procedure is followed.
When the bill reaches the White House the President may either sign it, permit it to become law without his signature if he doesn’t like it but finds it politically inadvisable to block it, or veto it. The bill may be passed over the President’s veto by a two-thirds vote of both houses, in which case it becomes law in spite of him.
December 5, 1943. Joe Guffey and one or two other Administration supporters have come out with statements strongly critical of the “unholy alliance” of Democrats and Republicans who voted down the GreenLucas soldier-vote bill. Apparently the split is getting to the point where really bad blood is going to develop.
At noon I went over to the Supreme Court for an hour or so to help our man there. It was a good chance to get a close-up view of the Honorable the Chief Justice and the Honorable Associate Justices of the Supreme Court, as their marshal (a gangling tow-headed kid on whose lips the stately words sound slightly incongruous) refers to them in the traditional prologue. They have quite a system, I found, particularly with someone they don’t like. First Felix Frankfurter, pedantic and perky, pops a long, involved question. Before the lawyer has time to answer Robert Jackson, gracious and reasonable, leans forward and pops another. In the midst of the lawyer’s confusion sandy-haired William O. Douglas contributes a bored and amused summation of what he really means to answer. Stanley Reed asks sharply if that is so, Frank Murphy stares at him with haloed disapproval, Wiley Rutledge looks disconcertingly thoughtful, Hugo Black leans over to murmur to Harlan Stone, while Owen Roberts gives the poor man an icy, appraising look. When he is sufficiently limp under all these flank attacks, Stone leans forward in a deceptively gentle, grandfatherly fashion and asks him kindly if he didn’t really mean something entirely different, implying politely that he is obviously no lawyer at all, has no idea what the score is, and really ought to go back where he came from and raise hogs. It’s a good show the nine gentlemen put on. In sum total they make a very good impression, and somehow one cannot help but feel that the law, whatever shots of adrenalin they may give it, is still quite safe in their hands.
Back in the Senate Office Building, the Banking and Currency Committee was conducting a hearing on the subsidy bill sent over by the House. As usual Taft was dominating the proceedings. Sober little Danaher was there, and George Radcliffe of Maryland, a kindly, fatherly old soul; Burnet Rhett Maybank of South Carolina, in his early forties, handsome, with sharp, intense eyes; John Bankhead of Alabama, old, bald, slowing with age and fanatic on cotton; Barkley, who really made a great deal of sense; and Arthur Capper of Kansas, a dried-up little old man who is going to blow away someday in a Washington high wind.
December 7, 1943. We got our fireworks right off the bat today when Harry Byrd of Virginia, a red-faced, cherubic gentleman normally not concerned with much of anything except paring the Federal budget, rose to condemn Guffey’s statement on the soldier vote in the most scathing terms. The Pennsylvanian’s charge of an “unholy alliance”—of Republicans led by Joe Pew [of the Pennsylvania Sun Oil family] and Southern Democrats led by Byrd—was pretty well ripped to shreds by the Senator from Virginia. Josiah Bailey of North Carolina followed and made a colorful oration in which the Stars and Bars waved freely overhead and the threat of a new secession, at least from the Democratic Party, was freely voiced. There is a very real bitterness on this issue, and it began to come into the open today. Bailey looks like a professor or a deacon and is a good orator, rather than speaker, with a mild, dignified, schoolteacherly manner and a tendency to bite in the clinches. “Pennsylvania has produced some fine men,” he remarked thoughtfully at the end of his speech, “Ben Franklin, William Penn. And then it has produced some others—Thad Stevens, Boies Penrose, Mr. Vare—and the junior Senator from Pennsylvania.” The Republicans listen with attentive politeness and wellconcealed delight these days while the Democrats fall apart across the aisle. All they have to do is sit tight and rake up the pieces.
There was apparent today the sometimes rather frightening fact of just how much democracy is founded upon good will—sheer human liking and ability to get along together. Out of the complex personalities of 96 men are rising prejudices and dislikes which could, under some circumstances, seriously handicap the country. In fact, they are handicapping it right now, and the tendency is increasing. So much depends, in a democracy, upon Joe liking John and John liking Bill; let the trio fall out and see how far we get. It was apparent this afternoon that mere dislike is turning, in some cases, into active hatred as the soldier-vote issue becomes embroiled in the growing general bitterness between the White House and the Hill.
Into this atmosphere Barkley tried to insert the House resolution extending the statute of limitations governing when the Pearl Harbor court-martials must be held to one calendar year after the end of hostilities and the ratification of the peace treaty by the Senate. He was at once chopped down by as neat and effective a piece of legislative axing as I have seen so far. Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri, a portly, tendentious and intelligent soul, swept aside Barkley’s well-meaning but ineffectual arguments and rammed through a revision giving the War and Navy departments only six months to prefer charges and get the court-martials going. It went back to the House, was accepted, and presumably will determine the course of events in that affair from now on. Clark charged openly what everyone on the Hill claims to know for a fact, that the Administration is deliberately trying to string out the trials as long as possible for fear that evidence presented will lead into some very high places at the other end of the Avenue.
This morning the Interstate Commerce Committee held a hearing on the Wheeler-White bill to revise the powers of the Federal Communications Commission. Fourteen Senators were on hand at one point, including Cotton Ed Smith, Ernest McFarland of Arizona, Albert Hawkes of New Jersey, James Tunnell of Delaware, intense little Homer Bone of Washington, and Chairman Burton K. Wheeler. The last interested me most, and in his questioning of the witness confirmed an impression gained from several prewar radio addresses with which I did not agree: he is a very able man, and his views on foreign policy have little to do with his stature as a Senator, which is considerable. In fact, so amiable is he, with such a good sense of humor, that it is hard to reconcile the bitter partisan and the calculating politician who is undoubtedly biding his time in preparation for the reaction he believes to be inevitable.
Cotton Ed has a certain quality about him which is solid and rather impressive—the solidity and impressiveness of an old moss-covered ruin. His years are beginning to tell, and his colleagues evidently consider him quite a character, for they begin to laugh the moment he begins to speak. Usually what he says is funny, so it all works out all right in the end.
Lodge stacked up better today in debate. He gives the impression of a controlled and predatory bird, swooping down decisively upon his points and driving them into the other fellow with a crisp and rockbound air.
December 8, 1943. The Senate took up the Deficiency Appropriations Bill today, some 300 millions; after a long involved quibble in which Lodge and Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, with witty interpolations from Danaher, argued back and forth about whether or not to amend it to provide that 10 per cent of surplus funds held by the armed services be impounded as an emergency fund for them, it went like lightning through several hundred amendments and finally got itself passed around 5:30. Lodge went down to defeat 56 to 18, a vote which seemed to be to some extent personal.
McKellar is a slow, bumbling, absent-minded typical Senator, likable enough but a trifle slow on the uptake, well-meaning, reasonably honest, shrewd but not in the way some people are shrewd.
Late in the afternoon Richard Russell of Georgia, Happy Chandler of Kentucky and the handsome gentleman from West Virginia who bears the romantic name of Chapman Revercomb, got into a three-way fight on Russell’s proposed amendment to grant the Surgeon General an emergency fund with which to subsidize doctors and send them into areas whose medical men have gone into service. Revercomb said it was the opening wedge for socialized medicine, Russell and Chandler said it wasn’t. McKellar backed Revercomb, and the irrepressible Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska stuck his oar in at considerable length. Warren Austin of Vermont, a dignified, pink-faced, well-fed gentleman with a rather humorless manner and a rich, deliberate voice, also participated from time to time. The amendment was beaten.
Black-clad Senator Hattie Caraway of Arkansas, adhering to her standard ritual, came in with her big black handbag, fumbled in it for her glasses, put them on, sat for a while, read the paper, voted “No” on a few amendments and then walked out.
December 9, 1943. Cotton Ed Smith arose today to uphold the honor of the South, white supremacy, the Constitution, Southern womanhood, Southern Democrats, and the poll tax. More or less incidentally he nominated Harry Byrd for President—after having said repeatedly, according to press gallery gossip, that he wouldn’t vote for Harry Byrd for dogcatcher, let alone President.
It was an old man’s speech, the sort of speech that is beginning to mark the end, at last, of an era. There will not be many more such, filled with hell and damnation and a dirty story or two thrown in for good measure; presently, when Cotton Ed is gone, there will probably be no more. He is an old man and uncurbed any longer by the hesitancies of youth and middle age which once, in all probability, placed at least the minimum restraints upon his sentiments and tongue. That sort of thing is an echo of another day, an antique, as it were, brought forth at rare intervals and placed upon the counter; a rather obscene old book which somebody found somewhere and offers for a limited showing to a group of select customers. Byrd squirmed, Chandler played his usual stooge for the old man, and the Republicans listened attentively while a little more animosity was set afloat on the Democratic side. Taft seemed to take heart from it all and sounded quite like the future candidate when he rose to dispute Tydings of Maryland on a bill to establish a Filipino Rehabilitation Commission; coming, as he sometimes does, dangerously close to the line that separates the man of argument from the man of arrogance. Tydings, who is a thoroughly capable and logical man, got driven temporarily off base by Taft’s attack, and got over into such flimsy defenses as “the Army and Navy want it,” “it is necessary to the war effort,” and all the other old turkeys which are trotted out when no real justification exists for a thing. Taft demolished his arguments without any trouble and Tydings accepted with relief Taft’s suggestion that it go over to Monday for further clarification.
After the session we went down onto the floor for our regular chat with Barkley, who is rapidly rising in my estimation. He is a good politician and a good-natured, easygoing man. I suspect he deserves his E for Effort. Certainly he has no simple job, and in fact frequently remarks these days that he does not rise “to make any comment because of any weight or influence I expect to carry with other Senators.” He gains by admitting it, when all is said and done.
The Second Civil War seems to be three-tenths personalities, six-tenths bluff, and one-tenth real. Nonetheless, there are genuine animosities here, and the whole situation is not good from the standpoint of the peace legislation which will presently be tossed into it.
December 10, 1943. Going downtown this evening after a rather relaxed day we got into a discussion of the “top men of the Senate.” We finally concluded that the problem was highly complicated by the fact that, as one veteran reporter remarked, “What the hell, they’re human.” That’s just about it. You start looking at somebody objectively and before you know it you’re beginning to think about what a likable old cuss he is and that in spite of everything he’s still a good egg. Even Cotton Ed gathers a little saving grace by this process.
Interstate Commerce Committee goes on and on with its hearings on the bill to revise the powers of the Federal Communications Commission. E.K. Jett, chief engineer of the FCC, testified this morning and made an excellent impression. Jim Tunnell of Delaware was acting chairman, assisted by Ed Moore of Oklahoma smoking his usual cigar and making his usual brief for the system of free enterprise which gave him, for one, all those oil wells in Oklahoma. There is something very typical about Mr. Moore, with his wrinkled, round, flat face, his unkempt hair and his wizened smile. No one from California needs to be told that he is from Oklahoma. The face is quite familiar.
McFarland contributed his customary slow, easy, humorous questioning. The Senator from Arizona is a pretty honest and pretty decent fellow. If an issue is good he will generally be found supporting it, and if it is bad he will generally be found opposing it. His instincts are right and he follows them with considerable diligence.
This afternoon most of us hung around the beautiful Caucus Room, with its massive oak tables, high ceilings, marble walls, tall windows and innumerable microphones and amplifiers, to listen in on the Van Nuys hearing on the liquor shortage, hard to explain to Senators whose states are producing grain surpluses. Homer Ferguson of Michigan, his silver hair rumpled above his earnest dark eyes, was industriously questioning the witness. The Senator is a good-hearted, idealistic soul with an outstanding talent for cross-examination. He made his great reputation in Michigan as a one-man grand jury, and on the strength of it came to the Senate last year. He has been investigating ever since. He is not so incisive or knifelike as O’Mahoney—his edges, so to speak, are rounded instead of square—but he does a capable job of it. Van Nuys, boiling with indignation because the head of Seagram’s has refused to come down from Canada and testify, is apparently going to do dire things to the industry in retaliation. Or, more likely, it is all going to fizzle out into one of those gentle pops with which the gentlemen occasionally favor us.
December 11, 1943. Guffey, apparently irrepressible, has issued another statement attacking opponents of the soldier-vote bill; and the ill and ancient Carter Glass of Virginia, absent from the Senate since his last election a year ago, has written to Lucas supporting it. The issue is not dead by any means, and it seems likely that we shall see more activity on it before long.
December 12, 1943. There are minor isolated things about the Senate and the gallery, all of which contribute to their color, which I want to put down here before they become so much a part of everyday routine that I don’t even notice them any more.
In the big oblong chamber with its emergency superstructure of frank ungainly steel put up a couple of years ago to support the cracking ceiling, a kind of sickly, sea-green light prevails, as though its occupants were debating at the bottom of a tank where little pageboys dart like minnows. Sometimes this becomes so overpowering on the eyes that the outlines of the desks begin to fade out and all you see before you for a second, before you shake your head and snap out of it, is row upon row of white papers, neatly circled against a murky and impenetrable background. It is a strange feeling. [Changed now, following the postwar remodeling of the chamber which left it light beige, brightly lit, and handsome.]
Sometimes late in the afternoon, looking down across the chamber to the farther door beneath the clock, you can see behind it a blazing streak of sunlight on the floor beyond, casting its bright reflection on the swinging glass panels as the Senators pass in and out. It is as though a glowing welcome were being prepared, a great burst of glory in which some hero, impossibly gallant and fine, might enter on a wave of light and the distant applaudings of a million hands. But no, sad luck: it’s only little Raymond Willis of Indiana, wandering in like some fugitive gnome, or Bob Reynolds of North Carolina, with his plastered hair and puff-eyed face, or Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, huge head wreathed in a pleased, complacent smile.
Visitors get herded into the galleries like sheep, sit a while hearing a debate whose origins and outcome they have no time to discover, and are herded out again bored and wondering. Their attention is diverted easily by the men they recognize, and to Mrs. Caraway they always pay the tribute of a lively interest. Servicemen sit more quietly and listen more attentively than others, seeming to strive to find here some portion of that glory for which they are told they fight.
Members of the House come in sometimes and sit on the couches that line the walls at the back of the chamber. Now and again former Senators come in and take their old accustomed places, listening with wistful interest to the proceedings on the floor.
When the Yeas and Nays are demanded, the Clerk goes down the list calling “Mr. Aiken! Mr. Austin!” and so following, in a loud challenging voice. Senators who come in after the call has begun wait patiently until it has finished and then rise to be recognized. The Chair then calls them out by title, “The junior Senator from Michigan!” whereupon the Clerk cries reprovingly, “Mr. Ferguson!” and the Senator votes. Then the Clerk reads those voting in the affirmative, followed by those voting in the negative. Then he adds them up and passes his tally up to the VicePresident’s desk; the Chair announces the decision. Then we scramble up the steep gallery stairs and stream into the press room like something out of a movie, and the air is filled for half an hour with the loud excited clatter of typewriters and teletypes and the urgent ringing of telephones. Around the large table in the main press room, where the big mirrors stretch toward the ceiling and where in winter the fire is always lit, members of the fourth estate play poker in the best Hollywood tradition.
In the subway between the Senate and the Office Building, the operators must make close to a thousand trips a day, back and forth and back and forth along their block-long railway. The walls are painted a light, cleanlooking gray; it is as though you were being whisked along the passageways of some sanitary modern hospital. Frequently Senators arrive at one end or the other to find the cars in transit, whereupon they apply themselves to the bell For Senators Only and the air resounds with three imperious clangings. In the same fashion, and with the same three rings, they are wont to summon recalcitrant elevators, which must take Senators where they want to go first, and only then attend to the needs of lesser breeds.
Whenever a message is sent to the Senate from the House or the President, the messenger stands just inside the doorway while the Chair asks the Senator speaking to “suspend for a moment while the Senate receives a message from the House of Representatives.” The Chair stands, the messenger bows from the waist. “A message from the House of Representatives!” says a Senate clerk. The House messenger describes it (“Mr. President, the House has passed Senate Bill No. So-and-So, and has passed various and sundry enrolled bills to which the Speaker has affixed his signature”). The Majority Secretary takes the message and brings it to the Vice President’s desk. The interrupted Senator resumes speaking.
When you get off the elevator from the gallery onto the first floor it is as though you were entering a mosque; innumerable archways greet the eye, and an intricate brown design combining flowers and heros runs endlessly over the walls.
Whenever a quorum is demanded on the floor the Clerk goes down the list, calling each name. Meanwhile throughout the Senate side and in every committee room and office in the Senate Office Building, the two sharp rings of the quorum bell resound. Senators come in slowly from the hallways, are recognized and answer, “Here!” If the list is exhausted without a quorum of 49 being found, the Clerk goes through the roll of the absentees until it is.
There is frequently a lot of talking and visiting on the floor, and quite often the Chair is compelled to pound for order. It is always granted promptly, although the conversations are apt to continue sotto voce in little intimate huddles around someone’s desk.
Legislation is followed by the press with more than professional interest: in a very real sense the press is an active part of the lawmaking process. Bills become living things, and arguments about them rage on the sofas and around the card table during slack periods in the Press Gallery. The press, by and large, combines a deep cynicism with some of the truest idealism to be found anywhere.
No one could do a really thorough job of reporting the Senate without the invaluable assistance of the gallery staff, who obtain copies of bills, distribute statements and speeches, keep tab on complicated parliamentary procedures, keep the list of committee hearings, furnish copy paper and reference books and in general keep the press supplied with whatever it needs.
December 13, 1943. We spent the afternoon today over in the Office Building getting personal opinions on the McKellar-Butler squabble. Butler, dark eyes set in a dark face under the Senate’s most Senatorial head of silver hair, has drawn a good many sparks with his assertions in The Reader’s Digest that we are buying Latin American friendship to the tune of $6,000,000,000. McKellar has taken it upon himself to reply, and today asserted for an hour and a half that the figure is only $300,000,000. Butler is of course on his high horse now too, promised this afternoon that he will furnish a supplemental report in a few days, and the whole argument is resounding down the long corridors of the Office Building. It was against that background that we set out to get comments from various people. The first we talked to was the far-famed and ill-legended senior Senator from North Dakota, the Honorable Gerald P. Nye.
Mr. Nye is just about what one pictures him from his reputation and the things one has read about him: a shrewd, forceful, very political man, with an attractive, easygoing manner and obvious intelligence. Like Wheeler, he too is waiting; shrewdly, with what seems to be a deep personal conviction—perhaps more about his own future than about isolationism’s—and with a friendly, down-to-earth manner that covers it up almost entirely.
Coming down the hall from Nye’s office we ran into Lodge, who is a much bigger man than I had judged him to be, looking down from the Press Gallery—at least 6 feet 4 and heavy in proportion. On close contact he also makes a most favorable impression, friendly and matter-of-fact and intelligently humorous. When we began asking questions he grinned and remarked smoothly that in the days when he was here in the press—he is a newspaperman by profession and spent several years on the Hill before returning to Massachusetts to run for Senator—he used to know all the inside dope, but now that he is here as a member of the government he has to ask the press for everything he gets. [Twenty years later, this child of the Roosevelt era can still remember the shock of Lodge’s casual “member of the government.” It was the first realization that “The Government” consisted of something more than just the inescapable, all-pervading personality that sat at 1600 Pennsylvania.]
We saw then Ed Johnson of Colorado, a great bull moose of a man with a tolerant face, heavy eyebrows, and an aura of solid common sense. He is a member of the Military Affairs Committee, and we were trying to pump him about General Patton, who continues to be an issue because of the slapping incident. As Johnson said, “ugly stories are going around,” but he would do no more than hint at them. He seems to be a thoroughly competent legislator, unruffled by the shifting currents of politics through which he seems to pass untroubled on a sure course of his own.
This morning I covered the Education and Labor Committee hearing on two bills, one sponsored by Chairman Elbert Thomas of Utah and the other by Claude Pepper of Florida, to give returning servicemen funds to continue their educations. Pepper is extremely liberal with the United States Treasury and extremely conscious of the fact that he came up by his bootstraps through Harvard and Phi Beta Kappa. He is one of the plainest men alive, but is intelligent and on the whole capable, I think. The witnesses included Major General Osborn of the Morale Division Special Services, a keen hawk-faced man whom Pepper heckled a good deal, and Colonel Francis Spaulding, also of the Morale Division and former Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Harvard—that perfect academic type, smooth as butter and sharp as a knife, ingratiating, reasonable, courteous, shrewd, ambitious. There is such a thing as a Typical Dean of the younger, more pragmatic type, and Spaulding represents it. It was an interesting fusion, this combination of the army and the academic. He gave Pepper as good as he got, with of course consistent suavity and courtesy and from time to time a gently acid irony, all in the best tradition of the little boy who didn’t work his way through Harvard talking to the little boy who did.
December 14, 1943. Education and Labor dragged on today, beginning to get out of the novelty class for all concerned and into the category of stout toil and earnest application. Thomas of Utah was again in the chair, a courteous, soft-spoken, precise old man who acts like what he is, a scholar in politics. It is with accommodating politeness that he accedes to the witnesses’ desire to discuss his bill instead of Pepper’s, but aside from that rather natural bias he seems to conduct the hearings on a fair and intelligent basis. He was flanked today by Raymond Willis of Indiana, a dumpy, sleepy-looking man with a face all folded in and wrinkled upon itself and a rather apathetic approach to life, and the press’ fair-haired boy Joseph Ball of Minnesota, whose recent international-cooperation resolution has given him an aura of St. George versus the Dragon which may or may not be warranted. He is a huge young man, slow-spoken and slow-moving, with prematurely gray hair and a good-natured scowl occasionally alleviated by a skeptical and fleeting smile. Willis’ questions were routine, Ball’s more pointed. I should say offhand that Willis is not hard to catalogue but that Joe Ball will take some study before it becomes clear whether or not he lives up to his reputation or just profits from an appearance indubitably earnest and idealistic.
The afternoon went very slowly on the floor. Another Truman report, this time on transportation, has come out, and Jim Mead of New York and Ferguson both felt called upon to make speeches about it—both upholding it, of course, being committee members. Taft, Barkley and Bankhead have been named a special subcommittee of the Banking and Currency Committee to try to work out some compromise on the subsidy fight, and much of today’s significant activity took place off the floor in the cloakrooms.
December 15, 1943. This morning the hearings on the veterans education bills came to a close, distinguished chiefly by one of the witnesses’ candid admission that a good deal of the problem is the fight between the Veterans Administration and the U.S. Office of Education as to which one is going to administer the thing. Kenneth Wherry made his usual rather disruptive appearance, coming in late, chewing on his lip darkly for a couple of minutes and then proceeding to jump all over a perfectly inoffensive witness.
Debate got rather dramatic this afternoon when Moore read a long speech explaining why he voted against the Green-Lucas soldier-vote bill. He incidentally took occasion at some length to light into Roosevelt and the 1940 Democratic Convention, at which he was a Democratic delegate. He is now a Republican Senator, which perhaps explains something. Scott Lucas thought it did when he got up to reply with the most personal, below-the-belt, viciously specific speech I have yet heard in the Senate. He went so far, in fact, that Wallace White of Maine, who is acting minority leader in the absence of Charles McNary of Oregon, rose to make a point of order about one Senator impugning another’s motives. He was upheld by John McClellan of Arkansas in the chair. Moore, who seemed rather baffled by the violence of the reaction he had provoked, attempted feebly to reply from time to time but Lucas refused to yield the floor and kept right on talking. Lucas became extremely bitter toward the end, telling Moore that “a one-armed veteran from Italy may run against you in the next campaign in Oklahoma, and he’ll wave that one arm in your face and tell you about it” (Moore’s vote for the substitute bill). It was an ugly display of dirty linen in public. There is a lot of bad feeling here, and no mistake. Under the surface amicability, a lot of things are festering.
The day ended with Bill Langer of North Dakota well launched upon a one-man filibuster to block a complicated piece of legislation to prevent private suits against frauds in government contracts. It was a humorous, disgraceful, saddening spectacle all rolled into one. The man ranted and raved and pounded and roared. He had abandoned his text and was well into the pages of the Saturday Evening Post when White finally rose and asked him to stop, with the promise of the floor tomorrow. During most of his speech three Senators were on the floor: White, minority; Mead, majority; and the gentleman with the handsome head and soothing voice, Harold Burton of Ohio, working away industriously at his desk, apparently oblivious of the racket in the room.
December 16, 1943. Langer’s filibuster collapsed this afternoon after a couple of hours. He eventually ran dry, moved to recommit the bill, lost the motion, the bill was passed by voice vote, and so ended the valiant stand of the Senator from North Dakota. He is an odd character, the maverick of the Senate, so proud of being turned out of the governorship of his state that he lists it in the Congressional Directory like an accolade. If his ideas have any value no one will ever know it, for he presents them at the top of his lungs like a roaring bull in the empty chamber, while such of his colleagues as remain watch him in half-amused, half-fearful silence, as though in the presence of an irresponsible force they can neither control nor understand. In some ways this Congress is a strange, strange thing, composed of the symbols of a people’s erratic will.
December 18, 1943. I interviewed Van Nuys this morning to get a weekend story on the liquor shortage, and found him a pleasant and friendly old man. I am beginning to think the chief requisite for United States Senator is personal amiability: it seems to be the one characteristic I find common to almost everyone. Van Nuys is no exception, and in addition seems to be honest and sincere in his approach to the problem before his committee. I think he is quite interested in developing some constructive legislation to solve it.
Going over to the Office Building to see him, it occurred to me what an institution a Senator is. They sit in their offices like a lot of independent little principalities, owing no subservience to anyone but their people, not possessed of too much loyalty to one another, only uniting from time to time on the issues that touch their particular boundaries. From them, stretching out into the depths of the country, run the long lines of power to the folks back home, the county committees, the state conventions, the friends, the acquaintances, the clubs, the people. It is a curious and rather moving thing, one of those features of our life in this land that sometimes amuse the mind and sometimes touch the heart.
This afternoon the Senate took four temporary recesses before the House would agree to a compromise on the subsidy fight and accept a proposal to continue the life of the Commodity Credit Corporation. Finally it did, and with that out of the way Barkley offered a concurrent resolution to adjourn sine die after next Tuesday’s session, and a resolution to convene the second session of the 78th Congress at noon Monday, January 10. Both went through unanimously, although Pat McCarran of Nevada made some objection, wanting a recess to January 19 which he did not get. He too is an interesting character, with his huge square figure, his diamond ring, his perfectly tailored suits, his cynical face like one of Hans Holbein’s, and his shock of white hair swirling upward like a cockatoo’s.
It was an odd feeling to realize when the resolutions went through that in the normal course of things, with the single exception of the President calling a special session, no one on this earth could tell those men whether they could or could not take a vacation, or how long or how short it could be. Three sovereign branches: it comes out from time to time.
December 19, 1943. Twenty-five members of the House have issued another statement on the hard-dying Green-Lucas soldier-vote bill. Obviously the Congress cannot let things ride as they are at present. Some attempt must be made to facilitate the soldier vote.
December 20, 1943. Handsome, dynamic, suave, striking, forceful, dramatic, incisive—and all the other adjectives customarily fawned upon him by an idolatrous press-agentry—General Brehon B. Somervell got put on the griddle by the Truman Committee this morning and emerged from the ordeal still handsome, dynamic, suave, etc., albeit a trifle limp. The subject at issue was the ill-fated Canol Project, a wild dream that did not come true of oil in the depths of the Canadian Northwest begun, apparently, on a nod from Brehon B. and now become a great bone of contention between the Committee and the War Department. The committee damns it up and down while the War Department is as usual scrambling desperately to save face instead of having the guts to admit a mistake frankly and go on from there. All the desperate assertions of an embarrassed incompetence have been hurried forth to justify the thing, but the committee is unimpressed. In all this controversy Brehon B. occupies the central spot and today, his three stars glittering, was brought to book. Not much was gained by the whole business.
As a matter of fact, the committee got off base somewhat by concentrating on the project itself instead of on the way it was handled, which of course is the main issue in almost everything done by the Army. Few intelligent people can disagree with most of the objectives. The fault lies in the wasteful, sloppy, irresponsible methods.
The general was supported in his important mission by four brigadiers and a small covey of majors. At one point he asked for a glass of water and handed his glass to a brigadier. The brigadier promptly handed it to a major. The major looked around desperately for somebody lower down; finding no one, he filled it up and returned it to the brigadier, who returned it to the general. All very correct, right in line with regulations, and strictly conforming to the chain of command. I was glad to see that the finer things of life are still being treasured in the service.
Eight members of the committee were present, including Ferguson, Ball, Truman, Owen Brewster of Maine, Carl Hatch of New Mexico, Harley Kilgore of West Virginia and Tom Connally of Texas, who rose from a sickbed, so he told us, to attend. He and Hatch defended the general capably; others were more critical. Truman has very thick glasses, a conservative appearance, and a quick, humorous way of speaking. He seems to be a generally good man, probably deserving of his reputation. Brewster is bald and quiet, asking a few polite but loaded questions in a subdued voice from time to time. Kilgore, who handled most of the questioning and lit into the general rather thoroughly, seemed to be a capable man with a sense of humor, a sensible line of questioning and considerable common sense.
This afternoon I decided to do a piece on Senate Resolution 100, urging the State Department to negotiate with the British to permit passage of food to Occupied Europe, and S. Res. 203, urging the President to establish a commission to help save the Jews. Both were reported out today by the Foreign Relations Committee, and both are to be placed before the Senate tomorrow in an attempt to get unanimous consent to suspend the rules and pass them before the Christmas recess. I went around to see Gillette and Taft, an interesting duo who were at swords’ points on the soldier-vote bill a couple of weeks ago but have managed to get together on the humanitarian issues.
Gillette on close inspection is a nice fellow, friendly and voluble, impressively handsome with a friendly twinkle in his eye. Interviewing Gillette you say, “Senator, I wonder if you would care to comment—” Then you say “Mmmhmm” for 45 minutes and you have your story. Interviewing Taft, you talk for 45 minutes and he says “Mmmhmm.” Then you go back and work it out on your typewriter and you have your story.
Taft is curiously quiet, at least on first acquaintance. Where is the dynamic fighter of the floor, I wondered, where the indomitable tilter at windmills and rattler of scabbards? Is all that fire banked in this quiet, silent, uncommunicative man? I know it is, but it is still rather a surprise at first to see the contrast between Taft the Man on the Floor and Taft the Man behind the Desk. I came to the conclusion finally that the silence which I took at first to be calculated politics is simply the shy nature of a man who takes a while to warm up and a certain amount of knowing before he will speak out. A bronze statuette of his father looks down encouragingly upon an aspirant son.
December 21, 1943. Today, in that atmosphere of lackadaisical inattention to everything but the business of getting through which apparently characterizes the tail-ends of sessions, the press became increasingly hard put to find anything to write about. Great stress was laid on personal interviews upon whatever subject could be thought up on the spur of the moment. This led me into my two most interesting so far. The first was with the determined and unyielding senior Senator from Montana, the Honorable Burton K. Wheeler. I found him pacing up and down his office like a nervous panther, and wrote most of my notes sitting at the desk while he ranged up and down behind me, editing and revising and furbishing his statements, taking out a word here and putting one in there with all the careful attention of a copy desk. From time to time an impatient smile would cross his face briefly as he told off some pet enemy with violent emphasis, but on the whole the impression I got was one of stormy moodiness, a rather grim humor, and not much tolerance.
The Senator is understandably bitter, and the vigor of his denunciations reveals that he has not modified in the slightest degree the opinions he held before the war and during its early stages. He swung out freely at “internationalist-minded crackpots—be sure and include that in your story” and “the same gang which wanted us to get into war and is now trying to smear everyone who wanted to stay out.” He did praise the President’s conferences with other Allied leaders, and he did favor the President’s attempts to begin work now on a postwar peace plan, but for the rest his statements were angry, embittered, and gave no quarter. He has had a rough time of it in recent years, giving and receiving haymakers on all sides, and it has left its mark.
Later on I stopped in to see Joe Ball, who represents the other side of the picture, and found him slow-spoken, friendly but not too communicative, not much concerned with any over-all program but apparently content to go along until an issue arises that appeals to him. He then attempts to get behind it and put it over. He is no match for Wheeler in out-and-out legislative rough-and-tumble, I should say. The old man has been here a long time, knows all the tricks, and fights with a skillful partisanship I don’t think Ball could ever muster. Nonetheless, I am inclined to think that the young Minnesota Senator is one of the hopes of the nation, providing he can eventually gain some positive strength of the only sort that counts when the chips are down—votes.
The Senate met at 12 and recessed at 12:46 after disposing of routine business. White and Barkley agreed to block anything more, and Gillette’s Jewish and food resolutions were held over until January. A few committee hearings and now and again a prepared statement are probably all we shall get out of the Senate for the next three weeks.
This morning I continued in pursuit of a story on what Burt Wheeler terms “internationalist-minded crackpots,” and talked to Harold Burton of Ohio, whom I liked a lot. There is something franker and more forthright about him than about many here, and his ideas, while not startling in originality, are sincere and honest. He’s a nice fellow, compactly built on a small scale, with a handsome head, silvering hair, and bright eyes set deep in very dark circles of flesh. He laughs a lot as he talks and seems to look upon the world with an idealistic generosity concerning other peoples’ motives. He seemed not at all displeased with the fact that the Connally peace resolution blanketed out the Ball-Burton-Hatch-Hill effort. “After all,” he said, “it includes the language of the Moscow Declaration [of 1943, expressing the Allies’ hopes for a postwar world organization] so really it’s even better than ours.” Like Ball, however, he said there was no over-all strategy on the part of himself and other internationalist Senators, no program of continuing legislation.
Wayne Morse thinks he may resign from the War Labor Board and run against incumbent Rufus Holman for the Oregon seat. The report is causing considerable interest in the Press Gallery.
Tomorrow I am going to beard the fearsome Langer in his den and ask him to comment on Willkie. That ought to be good for at least 45 minutes of roaring denunciation and a good story to boot.
December 23, 1943. Bill Langer, who is dumb like a fox, is not to be drawn out on Willkie, at least right now. “No, no comment. Nothing at all, no.” Then a bright friendly expression and a little silence. Then, “What’s the latest on this railroad strike? I am interested in that!” Inconsequential chitchat for a couple of minutes and another jovial silence. Then, suddenly, “Cigarette? Cigar?” I rose and left, politely; we parted the best of friends. He’s an odd character—that’s about the best anybody around here can do when trying to describe him, and it’s about the best I can do too. There is a disturbing sense about him, somewhere underneath the very smooth heartiness and the firm, lingering handshake, that here is a man of great violence and great anger. I have seen how it comes out on the floor; it dissipates itself into howling nothingness, but it is only luck that it does so. If it did not, here might be a man as dangerous in his way as Huey Long in his, one of those wild, harsh men out of the wild, harsh places of America, uncontrollable and elemental. He lacks the essential quality of appeal to the masses, but aside from that he was built for power—too much power. It is the nation’s good fortune that he will never achieve it.
Hugh Butler says he is going to submit his second report on Latin America right after the recess, ahead of the tax bill and everything else; and the rumor is going around with increasing persistence that the Republicans, faced with the problem of McNary’s continuing illness, are going to move White into the minority leadership. In a number of respects it looks like a lively session coming up.
December 24, 1943. A little perspective, perhaps, is a bad thing. I have been wondering about the Hill today, and the people who inhabit it and what they do, now that most of them have gone home and things have quieted down. Certain nagging thoughts keep coming back. The terrible slowness of the legislative process, for instance; the mountainous labors that bring forth mice; and, repeatedly recurring, the inertia of the men who should furnish leadership, who should enunciate principles even though action may not immediately follow. They are curiously voiceless, suffering from the subtle apathy which seems to creep upon them after their first few months on the Hill. Reading such things as Ernie Pyle’s classically simple book on the GIs and finding in it confirmation over and over again of my own personal observations while in the service—the great disinterestedness of the men, their wanting to get home, their lack of any definite purpose or goal beyond—a kind of desperation sometimes rests upon the heart. No one here is talking their language, no one here is inspiring them or giving them purpose. Nothing is planned to help bring forth tomorrow’s world, or if it is it will be referred to committee and hearings will be held and someday, if it is rarely lucky, it will appear upon the floor and become the center of a bitterly partisan fight that will presently rob it of all its heart and spirit; and ultimately, many months or even years from now, it will be passed, maybe, and maybe be approved. Perhaps that is why the young men here, those who are young in years and those others who are young in spirit, do not speak out in the living words of a living people to put into this war the heart and the hope so ominously lacking.
There are many men easily beaten on the Hill—too many men too easily beaten—not by any great conspiracy, not by any dark and devious opponents, just by the sheer ponderous weight of an institution moving too slowly toward goals too petty and diffuse.
O’Mahoney says Congress and the states could pass a constitutional amendment to facilitate soldier voting in ample time for the elections. So they could, in 30 days or less, if they would. But never, never, will they act so quickly; and never, never, will there be any real excuse why they should not.
One of the nicest men in the Senate came into the beautiful green room of the Office Building cafeteria while Helene Monberg of UP and I were indulging such dark thoughts this noon, and I said, “There’s a nice guy. I like him.” “He’s swell,” she said. “If we had 96 men like that in the United States Senate, you and I wouldn’t be sitting here saying the things we have been.”
Yet I have already seen in him too a certain indefinable inertia, the subtle influence of the Hill, the scarcely noticeable desiccation of ambition, force and will.
It is a strange place, the Hill, and it does things to the men who come to it with high hopes and gallant plans.
1 The Administration wanted to do away with this requirement for soldiers from the poll-tax states, at that time Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Maine, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia. The Southerners were violently opposed, because they felt removing the tax from their soldiers would be used to strengthen the drive to remove it from their Negroes.