A Senate Journal 1943-1945, page 4
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.
