Monday, Dec. 19, 1932
Race to a Rostrum
(See front cover) Philippine independence. Appropriations. The Glass banking bill. Farm relief. Taxation, if any, from the House. Unemployment relief. Economy. Repeal of the 18th Amendment. Beer. World Court.
That, in that order of priority, was the ambitious legislative program agreed upon by Senate Democrats last week for the short session of Congress. In 70 working days they hoped to do what would keep a regular session humping for six months. As a starter last week the Senate opened leisurely debate on turning the Philippines loose. House Democrats, less visionary than their Senate brethren, formulated no elaborate schedule of legislation. Their primary concern was to pass eleven bulky bills appropriating some four billion dollars on which to run the Government during fiscal 1934. Unless these are all enacted before March 4 a special session of the 73rd Congress is inevitable. Later the House will vote on a beer bill and perhaps knock together a special revenue measure to balance the Budget. If it gets that much done in the next two and one-half months it will pat itself on the back and think it has established a "lame duck" record.
The House Week, Sitting for a total of about 14 hours last week the House:
P: Debated the President's State of the Union message. P: Heard Massachusetts' Treadway and New York's Fish orate on War Debts. P: Listened to Nebraska's Howard read a petition from 250 delegates to the Farmers' National Relief Conference. P: Heard Pennsylvania's Beck deliver a scholarly lecture on methods of amending the Constitution. P: Received from New York's O'Connor an amendment to the 1929 Reapportionment Act requiring all Congressional districts to be "contiguous, compact and of approximately equal population." The absence of such a provision in the present law compelled the Supreme Court last October to sustain gerrymandering in Mississippi's redistricting. P: Heard its first farewell speech from Georgia's "Lame Duck" Lankford. P: Passed District of Columbia bills to close local barber shops one day per week and to allow Capitol attaches Congressional automobile tags. P: Received from the Appropriations Committee the first supply bill--Treasury & Post Office. Its total, $961,416,597, had been cut $32,912,304 under President Hoover's Budget estimate. Into this measure the House sank its teeth, went seriously to work. P: Meanwhile the Ways & Means Committee heard many a witness in favor of a 2.75% beer bill carrying a $5 per bbl. tax. Special Session. President-elect Roosevelt, if he can help it, does not want to begin his term by calling a special session of the new Congress. He would like to have nine months free to get squared away in the White House and his new job. But so large is his "new deal," so insistent is the popular pressure to transform it into legislation, so dawdling is every "lame duck" session and so determined is President Hoover to use his veto on Democratic ideas with which he disagrees that a special session next April is widely viewed as a certainty. 73rd Speakership-- Such a prospect gives added importance to the present House session where already a heated Democratic campaign is in progress for the Speakership of the 73rd Congress. The wise eyes of Washington are fixed less upon the routine legislation of this session than upon the adroit pulling and hauling of candidates for Speaker. The Democrat who casts the longest shadow in the 72nd House is most likely to rule over the 73rd. Candidates-- Exclusive of ambitious upstarts, three eminent Representatives are in the race--Tennessee's Joseph Wellington Byrns, cadaverous chairman of the Appropriations Committee; Alabama's John McDuffie, Democratic "whip" of the House; and Illinois' Henry Thomas Rainey, big (275 lb.), broad, white-maned Majority Leader. Their intraparty contest was the essence of politics and each is a consummate politician. By tradition the leader of a House majority succeeds to the Speakership. That is how John Nance Garner, now Vice President-elect, reached the rostrum and. before him, the late Nicholas Longworth.* This tradition prompted Representative Rainey to declare last month: "I think I'm in line for the Speakership. My chances are excellent." Ingredients-- Aside from House custom the main ingredients of the Rainey candidacy are : 1) a rallying point for Northern Democrats tired of seeing all the party plums go to the South; 2) a liberal outlook to match that of the new President; 3) a rural background; 4) long Congress experience; 5) striking personal appearance. Square-faced, square-shooting Representative McDuffie, a comparative (1919) newcomer to the House, was put forward as the South's candidate. He nominated "Jack" Garner for Vice President at Chicago and is now supposed to be the retiring Speaker's choice as his successor. Though an advocate of real economy, he still is one of the most personally popular members of the House. To compromise the sectional feud between North and South, "Joe" Byrns's candidacy was offered. As Appropriations chairman he had enormous prestige not only among his respectful House colleagues but also with Democratic politicians and office holders all over the U. S. Though Majority Leader Rainey held a slight betting edge last week in this race to the rostrum, the Speakership will not be settled until late this winter when the 313 Democrats of the next Congress caucus in Washington. Then the balance of power will be held by the 129 new members, most of them from the North and West. Seniority Ladder-- There would be no serious question about Representative Rainey's selection had it not been for the Harding landslide in 1920. He entered the House in 1903, was assigned to the Ways & Means Committee, started to climb the ladder of seniority. By 1914 only Alabama's Underwood (tariff-maker) and North Carolina's Kitchin were ahead of him on the Democratic list. A year later Underwood had transferred to the Senate. Just as he was about to step out on top Representative Rainey lost his House seat to a Republican, shattered his seniority record. In 1923 he was returned to the House and again started his climb from the bottom up through the Ways & Means. During his two-year absence "Jack" Garner, who entered the House with him in 1903, jumped ahead. Well may Representative Rainey wonder what his political destiny might have been, had he not lost one term out of 16. Even today only one "lame duck" (Mississippi's Collier) precedes him on the Committee over which he helped to> preside at last week's beer hearings. In all the 73rd Congress only one member of either House or Senate--North Carolina's tall, sallow-faced Pou. chairman of the Rules Committee--will have seen longer Capitol service than he. Farmer Rainey-- Henry Thomas Rainey, inside the Capitol and out, remains "just an ordinary Congressman.'' His grandfather came out of Kentucky into Illinois in 1814, settled on the fat, flat farmlands of what is now Greene County, 70 mi. north of St. Louis. There one blistering August day 72 years ago the future Majority Leader of the House was born. A great hulking farmer's son, he went to Amherst, dashed 100 yd. in 10.2 sec., won the heavyweight boxing championship of the college, got his A.B. in 1883. After a law course in Chicago young Rainey began to practice at Carrollton, the town in which his mother's father was the first settler. He married a Nebraska girl named Ella McBride, got himself elected to Congress from Abraham Lincoln's old district.
But farming rather than law ran in the Rainey blood. Today the Majority Leader lives in a rambling frame house on a -acre farm near Carrollton. He has pure-bred Holstein-Friesians and fine Hampshire hogs. Over his place roams a herd of sacred Japanese deer, bred from a buck and two does originally obtained from the Washington zoo in exchange for one porcupine. Childless, he has built a wading pool for neighborhood children, gives them the run of his grounds for picnics and play. His milk and corn are trucked to St. Louis. He says: "I think I have one of the best farms in Illinois but I'm having difficulty making enough money out of it to pay taxes." It was as an Illinois rustic rather than as a smart financial mind of Washington that he was swindled out of $7,500 on worthless stock by two New York slickers (TIME, Dec. 5)* In Washington the Raineys live in a small apartment on 16th Street. She works around his Capitol office, reads the Congressional Record for him, has been on the House payroll for $208.33 per month as his secretary. On Saturdays they answer the accumulated mail of the week, go calling on Sundays. Politician Rainey-- With his shock of white hair, his fine head, his ruddy complexion, his Windsor tie, his heavy crooked pipe Representative Rainey might well be taken for a great British statesman. Yet in political mind and manner he is bound firmly to the U. S. soil. In the House he first (1903) attracted attention by a virulent attack on the late Dr. Harvey Wiley, pure food man who had criticized as "poisonous" a certain corn flour produced in his Illinois district. He worked hard getting his constituents bigger & better pensions, dipped into the pork barrel for public buildings, joined log-rolling expeditions for local waterway developments. He denounced Theodore Roosevelt for the Panama "grab," flayed him as a "mob leader." Loud and tactless, he was set down and snubbed as a radical ranter by conservative Republicans and Democrats alike. Tariff Fire-- In 1908 Representative Rainey struck fire from the Republican tariff. A traditional low-tariff Democrat, he charged that U. S. manufacturers, protected by the tariff, were selling watches cheaper abroad than in the U. S. To prove his point he produced from his large person, like a magician, 40 U. S.-made watches which he said he had bought in Europe for less than U. S. jobbers would sell him the same article here. This speech made a sensation. Eleven million reprints of it were circulated. A tariff revolt was started by the gentleman from Illinois which cost the Republicans the House in 1910, the Presidency in 1912. Tariffs are still Representative Rainey's special legislative study. He works on them the way other men work on their golf stroke. When President Hoover raised the tariff as the last desperate campaign issue, it was Representative Rainey whose retorts were most authoritative and deadly. Long a believer in tariff reciprocity, he got that feature into the Democratic platform, made it part of Nominee Roosevelt's New Deal. If he is elected Speaker and the new Congress orders a tariff revision, his ideas will dominate the proceedings. His ideas: "We are in a tariff trap. . . . What we need now is a broad, comprehensive plan to save our foreign trade from complete disaster. . . . Our tariff policy will be only part of that plan. . . . We must have a President in sympathy with lowering the tariff [because] in the future our tariffs must be lowered and regulated as a result of international agreement. . . . We are practically stopped from negotiating any reciprocity treaties because we are bound, hand & foot, by the so-called 'most favored nation' treaties. France makes fine gloves. We need them. She needs our wheat. We could make a reciprocity treaty with France admitting her gloves free or at a low tariff in return for free admission for wheat. But we have an unconditional 'most favored nation' treaty with Czechoslovakia which also makes gloves and which would thus be able to claim the same preferential rate. In whatever direction we turn we meet this obstacle. . . . For this we can thank the State Department. . . . "Hopeless as it may seem there is a way out. First, no more tariff boosting. Next, we must put an end to the making of 'most favored nation' treaties. Finally, we have got to sit down at the council table with the rest of the world and talk the whole troublesome problem over. . . . If armaments and tariff walls can be brought down together, the foreign governments which owe us money will be able to pay us. ... The tariff problem, the debts problem, the reparations problem, the international finance problem, the foreign exchange problem, the armaments problem, the peace problem are all one problem. They cannot be solved separately. They have to be solved together through abandoning isolation and adopting reciprocal services and reciprocal benefits as the rule of our international life."
Taxes. When times were good and the rich were rich, Representative Rainey, like many another, believed that they should shoulder most of the cost of government. None fought more doggedly than he each successive cut in the surtax rates during the 1920's. To him, every attack on the estate tax was sponsored by a millionaire's lobby and Andrew William Mellon personified all the evils of wealth. But Depression has changed many of Henry Rainey's tax theories. He realizes that the income tax is not a perpetual geyser of revenue, that the well-to-do, if pressed too hard, will take refuge in tax-exempt securities, to the detriment of general business. For years he stoutly opposed a sales tax, yet last session was converted to that form of levy as a desperate emergency measure. When it was defeated in the House, he blamed the result on President Hoover. He is still for the sales tax, as recommended fortnight ago by the President but realizes that it cannot muster a House majority. A convert himself, he declines to be a militant missionary for such a levy but believes it will inevitably come. Among Representative Rainey's views which fill many a conservative with alarm are: 1) the U. S. should recognize Soviet Russia as "the greatest market in the world"; 2) the U. S. should go into the power business at Muscle Shoals; 3) the R. F. C. must (as it now does) publish a list of its borrowers monthly; 4) the late Chief Justice Taft should not have accepted a $10,000 annuity under the will of Andrew Carnegie; 5) Eugene Meyer, now Governor of the Federal Reserve Board, "wrecked" the Federal Land Bank system in the interest of Wall Street; 6) Mr. Mellon ran the Treasury in the interest of Big Business: 7) Federal jobless relief to the States should be greatly expanded; 8) farmers should be "relieved" by the domestic allotment plan of excise taxes on processers. One gleam of conservative hope: Majority Leader Rainey is not a rabid currency inflationist. Mellowed-- Time has softened this loud, lumbering House veteran. His blue eyes are as penetrating as ever but no longer do they see "sinister influences" on all sides. His tongue is as sharp as ever but n&w Mr. Mellon is just a "genial old gentleman, intellectually honest but a prey to millionaires who fawn upon him and flatter him." Once he was one of the House's most uncompromising Drys but fortnight ago he offered the Repeal resolution which the House rejected by six votes. Twenty-eight years in the House have mellowed him. He still has his bursts of crusading fervor but he has discovered that the world will not go to pot if he loses his point. Born & bred in political opposition, he has been subdued by the leadership of a majority. His personal convictions are at a discount, his party's principles at a premium. Success has sobered and steadied him--and robbed the House of a picturesquely independent fire-eater. In the Speaker's chair he would become almost benign. Republicans-- The 117 Republicans in the next House will be mostly stale old political blood--heavy-footed veterans incapable of seriously damaging the Democratic majority. Undoubtedly this minority will again be led by stocky, heavy-jowled Representative Snell of Potsdam, N. Y. Leader Snell, a gruff, hard-boiled tartar at heart, is not at his best in opposition. Of the 27 Republican newcomers in the next House the white hope is slim, bald Representative-elect James Walcott Wadsworth Jr. of New York.* Twelve years (1915-27) in the Senate, his seat in which he lost because he would not weasel on Prohibition, proved his worth as a statesman. "I'm not out of politics by a long sight," declared Mr. Wadsworth when he quit the Senate. Tried & true blood rather than young new blood (he is 55), Mr. Wadsworth is counted upon by G. O. Partisans not only to make a conspicuous House record for himself, despite the hobbling effects of seniority rules, but also to lead the rehabilitation of their party for 1934.
* One Republican majority leader who would not have succeeded to the Speakership even under favorable circumstances was Connecticut's gangling Tilson. When his party went into the minority, he was displaced by New York's Snell as leader. * Convicted of using the mails to defraud, the slickers were sentenced last week to seven and five years in Atlanta Penitentiary. * Last week "Hampton," the 100-year-old Wadsworth home at Geneseo, burned to the ground in its owner's absence. Loss: $50,000.
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