Congress again—for better, for worse

JAY FRANKLIN

Back from their home districts come the members of both houses, bearing echoes of the voice of the people

THE RETURN TO WASHINGTON.—The first non-skid Congress to assemble under the recent Lame-Duck Amendment will, as it happens, supply the first rough test of Roosevelt's free-wheeling with our national political machinery. When Congress reconvenes on January 3, 1934, it will be, physically, identical to the Congress which held the famous ninety-nine-day session last spring. Chemically it will be as different as day and night. It will have ceased to function as a deliberative assembly and will, instead, have become a representative political body. Its leaders will no longer voice the ambitions of political cliques or the decisions of political machines: they will voice popular demands, popular fears, and popular moods. It will be the New Deal's blow-off—possibly the biggest blow-off in our history.

For when Congress troops back to Washington it will reflect both the state of the nation and the mood of the country. At time of writing, both are as low as a pre-crash Congressman. NRA has driven prices up faster than it has created new purchasing power to meet those prices, with the result that the consumer—both the farmer and the industrial worker—is getting gypped. The Johnsonian "cracking down" and "eagle-snatching" is not popular. While people, in a general way, feel that it is a good thing to have industry put into Federal harness, the epidemic of strikes, chiseling, and industrial double-crossing has caused many a man to brand the Blue Eagle as cuckoo. AAA has not succeeded in establishing a parity between farm prices and industrial prices. The farmers are sore and they are politically potent. Milo Reno's farm strikes and the general agrarian movement for inflation prove that the situation on the farm front is still critical. At least ten million workers are still unemployed, the relief rolls are still disastrously high, and the spectre of eviction has not been allayed, not even within the shadow of the White House.

Congress has been back in the districts since last June, listening to the grass-roots. The old political lights have gone and every Congressman wants to be reëlected. The bosses have been discredited, manufacturers have gone bankrupt, bankers have skipped the country, editors have guessed wrong, Chambers of Commerce have gone sour. The voice of the people is the Congressman's last resort, and Congress will reconvene with that voice whispering in its ear and with blood in its eye. In 1934, every single Congressman must stand for reëlection, stripped of the artificial support of a Presidential contest. Nearly every "New Deal" Democrat west of the Mississippi faces defeat. Nearly every orthodox Republican finds himself faced by the staggering fact of Roosevelt's universal popularity. Under these circumstances, a touching and well-nigh universal enthusiasm for the people is the safest policy.

On this account, the center of interest at Washington will shift from the Senate to the House of Representatives and, for the first time since the days of "Czar" Reed, the House will become the real battleground of American politics.

A HOUSE DIVIDED.—The struggle in the House will be between the conservatives and the radicals, rather than between the Republicans and the Democrats. The Democratic Speaker Rainey and the Democratic Floor-Leader Byrns will be more concerned with subduing their own wild-eyed colleagues than with battling such dignified Republican lawyers as James M. Beck in the field of constitutional law. The Eastern Republicans will be far more eager to denounce and disown such a Republican as Representative McFadden of Pennsylvania with his extraordinary bill H.R.4747 with its impious proposal to give the government power to control credit in the interest of stabilized wages, through manipulation of the interest rate.

The Republican higher command is following the strategy it adopted during the World War: no opposition to the President and wait for the breaks. The real leader of the conservatives in the House will be Representative (former Senator) James W. Wadsworth of New York, the Republican Party's "build-up" for the Presidency in 1940. (The G. 0. P. strategists seem to have decided that 1936 will be too risky to warrant more than a pro forma candidacy.) file best advance tip on the present Congress is to watch Wadsworth—intelligent, courageous, agreeable, gentlemanly and conservative, he is the Republican equivalent of Franklin D. Roosevelt. At present, he is held down to three committee assignments. of which Banking and Currency is the most important, but he will be given the news-breaks and will be found marshalling the counter-revolutionary forces in the battle to keep America safe for the profit system.

In this battle, the Eastern Republicans—Wadsworth and such men as Treadway of Massachusetts, Bacharach of New Jersey, and Bob Bacon of New York—will find their real allies among the conservative Democrats of the East and South, led by Byrns and Rainey. Their enemies will be the Progressive Republicans and the "New Deal" Democrats. In the last Congress, the radicals broke the old gag law and secured a House Rule by which one-third of the House could force a Committee to report any pending bill for action. This rule broke the old dictatorial rule by which the Committees could refuse to let the House act on any measure unless a majority of the Congressmen specifically demanded it. During the miraculous special session last spring, the Democratic leaders made a determined effort to reëstablish the old gag-rule. The next session will see this effort renewed, and the first major battle will take place between the "gag" and "anti-gag" gangs—which means the conservatives and the radicals—inside the Party Caucuses.

The Southern Democrats, firing under the flag of truce labeled "supporting the President," against the wild men from the farms and slums, will be striking to maintain their old power against the possible regeneration of the Democratic Party. Their personal and political motives for this action will be natural, as can be seen from a glance at the Bourbon Democratic control of the Committee Chairmanships. Thirty-one out of forty-seven House Committees are controlled by the South, and these thirty-one include all of the "key committees," especially Rules (Pou of North Carolina) and Ways and Means (Doughton of North Carolina). Moreover, 220 Congressmen—a bare majority of the House— dispose of 870 Committee assignments between them, leaving only one Committee assignment apiece for the remaining 215 members of Congress. This Kreugerization of Committee control may be better illustrated by the statement that a little more than one-third of the members of the House control a little more than one-half of the available Committee assignments (Committee action on bills being decided by vote of Committee members)—an arrangement under which the House of Representatives amounts to a political holding company for the managers of the party in power.

The first fight in Congress will therefore be a struggle for advantage in the Committees, a struggle in which the Republicans will join forces with the Conservative Democrats against the radicals. The stakes of that struggle promise to he enormous. They consist of nothing less than the attempt to divert popular dissatisfaction with the NRA into a drive to eliminate the labor clauses and all Federal control from industry and to retain for industry the valuable exemption from anti-trust legislation.

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On the other end of the struggle, the wild men will he clamoring for monetary inflation as a cure-all—because they have been told that inflation will ease the payment of debts and also because inflation offers alluring channels for speculation to the clandestine Wall Street backers of the bull-throated money-musketeers from the Bryan Belt. No one has yet explained how inflation will put more money into the pay envelopes and salary checks.

In fact, the battle of the Seventy-Third Congress began early in November in the skirmishing around the "commodity dollar." R.F.C. gold purchases abroad, the secession of Messrs. Woodin, Acheson, and Sprague from the Treasury to the Sacred Mount of Sound Money, and the drum-fire of the inflationists vs. anti-inflationists indicated that the next session will be dedicated to monetary pyrotechnics.

So impressive was the display—Lew Douglas warning the middle class that they would, as always, pay through the nose for inflation; Henry Morgenthau, Jr., affirming that government credit was firm as the Rock of Gibraltar and bidding up the quotation on government securities with postal savings funds; Professor Irving Fisher rushing to the aid of the hard-pressed "commodity dollar" men; the United States Chamber of Commerce coming out for gold with bell, book, and candle; Mr. Morgan rushing down for a "purely social" tea at the White House— that experienced observers wondered whether there wasn't more in this than met the eye.

Indeed, the feeling grew that the Administration was following a policy of mystification in order to get everybody good and frightened, so that when the Presidential stork flew down the chimney with the "commodity dollar" baby, there would be a sigh of relief that it wasn't twins. Accordingly, and contrary to general expectations, it became apparent that, rather than await the thunder and surge of the "sound money" crowd in Congress, the President might present our orotund legislators with a monetary fait accompli, in which their view's, though always interesting, would hardly be significant. So long as the Administration can confront Congress with situations rather than theories, so long will it avoid the worst peril to democracy: the peril lest irresponsible legislation shall upset the national apple-cart.

A PROBLEM FOR THE PRESIDENT.—The Administration will have to steer a very tricky course between these opposing forces —between the radicals and conservatives, either of whose policies could wreck the New Deal. President Roosevelt, aided by the members of the reorganized Brain Trust, has been working hard to elaborate a program to put before the country and Congress. There will be a Roosevelt tax hill—rendered necessary by the availability of liquor for taxation—which will lake rank with the famous Lloyd George Budget of the pre-war era. The recapture of excess business profits and the elimination of huge personal incomes will he the essence of this hill. There will be a new bank bill—essentially the work of Adolph Berle; there will be new currency and credit measures—the product of Professors Tugwell, Rogers, and Warren. The battle will be joined between the "money-changers" and the New Dealers, to the accompaniment of ominous cheers from the mob.

For the decision in Congress will be achieved only under the pressure of active discontent among the people. Politics does not operate through pure reason, but through pure intimidation. The Farm Strike is only an advance warning of what is brewing, as the people face another winter of uncertainty, hardship, and rising prices.

It is for this reason that the Senate—hitherto the cynosure of political prima donnas—will, like the Supreme Court, take a back seat for the present. Political initiative to-day is coming from the people and will express itself first and most strongly in the popular branch of the legislature. Such prominence as remains in the Senate will be taken primarily by the little group of Republican Progressives and Liberal Democrats who are themselves popular political leaders rather than mouthpieces: Bob LaFollette of Wisconsin, George Norris of Nebraska, Bronson Cutting of New Mexico, Ned Costigan of Colorado, anti Bob Wagner of New York. Hiram Johnson of California and Vice-President Garner—the leaders of the Hearst wing of Western Progressivism—will be weakened by the widening breach between the Administration and the Hearst organization. Dave Reed of Pennsylvania is the only conservative leader available in the Senate and, as the representative of corporate wealth rather than political ideas, he will be handicapped by bis inability to speak the new language of popular political activity. His former allies—Smoot of Utah, Moses of New Hampshire, and Watson of Indiana—are gone and there is no new material available for determined and intelligent resistance to the uprising against economic privilege and the demand for economic liberty. Robinson of Indiana, Schall of Minnesota, and Hatfield of West Virginia, who have been touching off firecrackers under the NRA, are mere trial balloonists—political parachute-jumpers.

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So far has the party of Herbert Hoover disintegrated that, even if the whim of the American electorate should return power to the Republicans, they could function only as a new party with new policies and new leadership. Eight years will not be too long a time for the policies to be developed and the leadership trained.

The Democratic Senators—with the exception of inflationists like Thomas of Oklahoma, toreadors like Huey Long, and the hill-billy wing of Southern Democracy—are going along with Roosevelt. He is meeting them on patronage matters and although they are more than doubtful as to the wisdom of his policies fpage Carter Glass) the tradition of party regidarity is very strong among them. Moreover, Southern Democrats are in control of a bare half of the available committee chairmanships, and committee assignments have been equitably distributed so there is no interior Senate conflict pending. Furthermore, of the "key committees" — Appropriations, Commerce, Finance, Foreign Relations, Manufactures, and Rules—Southern men are in control of only three.

PITCHED BATTLE.—The picture for January, 1934, is, therefore, refreshingly simple. The Seventy-Third Congress in its Special Session served as a rubberstamp, a vermiform appendix, a chorus of political yes-men for the virile policies of the New Deal. Now. having received an earful from its varied constituencies, the Seventy-Third Congress will come prancing back to town, prepared to tell Roosevelt that the American people want none of the NRA and that the farmer wants inflation. Under Hoover, the Administration would have awaited this onslaught with queasy apprehension, prepared to die with its back to the wall for the literal application of past policies.

The Roosevelt Administration will make no such mistake. It will beat the opposition to the draw. It will launch before the country a series of more radical and controversial policies than it has ever before contemplated: policies designed to divorce wealth from power and to put the public authority in control of the industrial and the credit systems of the country, in the interest of the mass of people. The radical discontent with NRA and AAA, upon which the conservatives are relying to support their policy of industrial and financial concentration in private control, will break ranks. Those who have been cursing Roosevelt most bitterly—the Milo Renos, the George Christians, and the other leaders of the erstwhile "lunatic fringe"— will line up behind the Administration to the triumphant battle-cry of "Who's loony now?"

In short, the social revolution which began in November, 1932, will enter upon its second and really radical phase, under the impulsion of human misery and popular unrest. What was to have been a sliam battle between Conservatives and Radicals for the destruction of the Administration's inconvenient policies will be changed, by the Administration, into a finish fight between the "People" and the "Moneychangers." If you want to know who the real leaders of this battle are going to be, you will be wise not to consult the Congressional Directory for 1934 too slavishly. You will find the answer in Who's Who in America—for 19-44.