Dialog

Scores of tourists, attracted by angry voices, last week scurried into a Senate committee room, where they gaped in pop-eyed wonder. A guide showed them Senator Harry Bartow Hawes, 62-year-old St. Louis lawyer, scion of an old Southern family, who is the chief agitator for freeing the Filipinos. Last summer he traveled to Manila, stirred the islands' little brown men to wild excitement. Standing before him, tall, handsome, was Secretary of War Patrick Jay Hurley, 49--, onetime capitalist of Tulsa and fighting son of a poor immigrant Irishman. To counteract the Hawes agitation President Hoover sent Secretary Hurley to the Philippines last autumn. He left Washington determined that the U. S. should hold on to its Pacific possession. He returned with the same fixed idea. Last week he was summoned to the Capitol to testify on a bill prepared by Senators Hawes & Cutting which would progressively free the Philippines over a five year period. Before the Senate Territories & Insular Affairs Committee the following dialog occurred:

Secretary Hurley: You can't give the Philippine people their independence at 2 o'clock on a specific day. This Hawes-Cutting bill attempts to tear down in five years all the United States has built up in 20. It is a cowardly bill.

Senator Hawes (quietly) : What do you mean by cowardly?

Secretary Hurley: I mean it hasn't one element of courage. It's neither fish nor fowl.

Senator Hawes (angrily) : Do you mean to assert that Senator Cutting and I are cowards?

Secretary Hurley: I'm not making any personal implications. The bill is based on fear.

Senator Hawes (rising) : Then you don't withdraw the word "cowardly"?

Secretary Hurley (shouting): No, I don't-- Senator Hawes (also shouting): You-- you--there's not a line in the bill that justifies that statement!

Secretary Hurley (making fists): I'm making this speech. You wait until I finish. If you must grant independence, be courageous enough to grant it at once and let the revolution that will follow occur under their flag, not ours.

Senator King: I'd be very sorry if you remained as Secretary of War for an indefinite period with the Philippines under you.

Secretary Hurley: I'm the best friend the Philippines have got. . . . Every sentiment in my soul supports the idea that there should be no domination of man over man.

Next day before a House committee studying Philippine independence, Senator Hawes declared Secretary Hurley's proposals smacked of "political immorality." According to the Missouri Senator, Secretary Hurley's advice to restrict Filipino immigration without setting a date for the Islands' freedom was "like hitting a man in the face whose hands are tied behind his back."

The following day Secretary Hurley returned as a witness to the Senate committee where he rowed as follows with Senators King of Utah and Cutting of New Mexico, both ardent advocates of Philippine independence:

Senator Cutting: Wasn't independence a condition of our promise to the Philippines?

Secretary Hurley: Don't create something that will drag down our sovereignty or hurt our prestige. ... I have never repudiated that promise in any way . . . you're weakening the authority of the United States.

Senator Cutting: I asked for an answer and you give me a stump speech.

Secretary Hurley (shouting) : Of course it's a stump speech if I say anything but it would be the height of statesmanship if it were made by a Senator. . . .

Senator King: Now about economics in the Philippines--We're not very stable ourselves in the United States now, economically.

Secretary Hurley: I disagree with these statements about the United States being weak and off color. Let's be Americans once in a while and have faith in our stability.

Senator King: Have you not projected the economic question into this discussion to the subordination of the question of political independence? . . . Now wait a minute! You want to answer before the question is asked. You've based your argument entirely on economics, haven't you?

Secretary Hurley (angrily) : No, that's what you said. I'll tell you what I said.

Senator King: I know what you said.

Secretary Hurley (shouting) : Well, let me tell some one else then, if you know so well. In every question, you've tried to distort what I said.

Senator King (indignantly): I resent that statement as untrue, as some of your other statements have been.

Secretary Hurley (rising in anger and shaking his fists): You can conduct star chamber proceedings and call me a liar but you can't have me remain here. I decline to let you call me a liar.

Senator King: I haven't.

Secretary Hurley (now raging): I've taken just about all I can stand from this committee. You won't permit the truth to be told. You distort everything I say. Now you can go ahead and browbeat your witnesses but you can't call me a liar and expect me to take it.

Thereupon, his fists clenched and his face flushed, Secretary Hurley stalked out of the committee room.

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