Unmanaged & Unmanageable

With many an oratorical sigh, Congress took a parting look at the historic chambers it had occupied for nearly one hundred years. From both sides of the aisle came a flurry of windy evocations of the past. Then workmen moved in under the unsightly steel girders which had been supporting the sagging House and Senate roofs since 1940. While a complete $5,000,000 refurbishing went on--from new steel & concrete roofs to television and radio outlets--the House took up a temporary stand across the street in the new House Office Building. The Senate moved back to the old Supreme Court chamber which a 70-member Senate outgrew in 1859. (Both quarters are so cramped that the public will be excluded.)

Caught up in a sense of the occasion and the historic background of the Senate's temporary quarters, Majority Leader Scott Lucas reminded his colleagues: "Clay, Calhoun, Webster and Hayne in those days decided some very important issues ... I would not be surprised if history repeated itself." Just what this fine-sounding remark really meant was hard to say. Perhaps Lucas was only trying to suggest that since there were important issues still to be decided, Congressmen might possibly rise to the stature of Clay, Calhoun, Webster & Co. in meeting them. If that is what he meant, his optimism was understandably guarded.

The 81st Congress was six months old. No one had yet put his brand marks on it, though several had tried. In the first glow of the session it was hopefully hailed as a Fair Deal Congress, but that was obviously a misnomer. Then when Republicans and Southern Democrats ganged up to kill Harry Truman's civil rights program, an angry C.I.O. official said that Congress was run by the "Dixiegop." That was also too pat. It hardly fitted last week's news, in which the Fair Deal won a big victory in one house and lost in the other, both by narrow margins (see below).

The fact was that, except for foreign policy, the 81st Congress was proving to be one of the most unmanaged & unmanageable Congesses in recent times. No one man, no one group ran the show--neither the Fair Dealers, the Southern diehards, Taft's moderate Republicans, nor Kenneth Wherry's Midwestern tories, nor any permanent coalition of them.

The 81st in action looked like a chart of atoms at work; particles were constantly breaking off from one nucleus to join another. Judging by the first six months, the 81st was proving footloose and independent-minded. The independence made it irritatingly slow at times; it also made for the kind of middle-of-the-road Congress which would never fully satisfy the Truman Fair Dealers, or satisfy the conservatives either, but would nevertheless leave behind it some solid achievements.

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