"We Who Serve"

"I almost express a prayer about it," said Majority Leader Scott Lucas, ". . . that somehow we who serve here in the Senate . . . will harmonize and unite." He was talking about foreign policy, making his plea at the end of a day of bitter debate, of argument over who was responsible for the China fiasco and continuing Republican charges that the State Department was to blame. Those charges were "a base slander," Texas' white-maned old Tom Connally had shouted. "Where, at the appropriate time, were the voices that now proclaim their virtues and their schemes?" The voices were there, the Republicans shouted back, but the State Department would not listen to them.

There would be neither harmonizing nor uniting for a long time to come. Scott Lucas' plea was made in the teeth of a gathering hurricane. It was the beginning of the biennial Big Blow.

The 81st Congress, at the midpoint of its legislative session, was already in the middle of the off-year election campaign--an election which, both sides indicated (as always), would be as crucial as any in U.S. history. Politics came first. The primary consideration was not so much passing bills as creating issues which could be presented persuasively to the folks back home. The strategy of the Republicans was to blame and reproach. The strategy of Democrats was to explain, defend and duck--or to demand laws they couldn't get and blame the Republicans for not getting them.

"Is This a Cover-up?" The Big Blow, whistling around foreign policy, also whistled around domestic issues. Senators argued over a resolution proposed by Tennessee's Estes Kefauver that the Senate Judiciary Committee investigate syndicated crime in the U.S. Republicans approved it. They looked forward to the participation of Michigan's Homer Ferguson and Missouri's Forrest Donnell, both members of Judiciary and both tenacious Republican investigators, knowing that they would get their teeth into crime and Democratic politics in Kansas City, and into the past affairs, for instance, of the late Charlie Binaggio.

Administration leaders did a quick retake. They rejuggled Kefauver's proposal so that Vice President Barkley would do the picking. No one thought that Barkley would choose Donnell or Homer Ferguson. Said Ferguson indignantly: "I've been euchred out." Minority Leader Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska demanded: "Why are they doing this? Is this an investigation or a cover-up?"--and thought he knew the answers.

"The Power & Influence." The Big Blow moaned around Harry Truman's platform. No plank in it had been more loudly and insistently proclaimed than his plank on civil rights. An FEPC bill had been on the Senate calendar since October 1949. Scott Lucas had scheduled FEPC second on the legislative program this year (first: repeal of the oleo tax). Instead, Harry Truman and his Senate leader had let one bill after another run ahead of it.

Last week Lucas announced that civil rights would be postponed once again with the President's approval until such bills as ECA, a $1.75 billion rivers and harbors bill, and a bill to increase CCC's surplus crop-buying power by $2 billion were disposed of. Majority Leader Lucas explained that the Administration did not want those measures jammed up behind the filibuster which FEPC was certain to provoke.

But there were other reasons. To force a showdown on FEPC now would only embarrass the faithful on their home grounds; several Southern Senators loyal to the Administration were facing opposition from Dixiecrats at the primary elections. Devoted Lister Hill of Alabama was not only trying to get re-elected but was also trying to lead his state back into the regular Democratic Party from which Alabama broke in 1948.

A speech which Lister Hill had made over an Alabama network was pounced upon by New Jersey's Republican Robert Hendrickson. Hill had told his Southern constituents: "It is the power and influence of your Congressmen that has made possible defeat of FEPC and other so-called civil-rights bills." His Democratic colleagues, Mississippi Senators Eastland and Stennis, he said approvingly, "had bottled up" various civil-rights bills in subcommittees of which they were chairmen. "I led the fight in committee against the FEPC bill," Hill boasted. ". . . If our group of Southern Senators is to continue to defeat these civil-rights bills, we must keep the power and influence we hold as members of the Democratic Party. I also warn that the Republicans are committed to civil rights."

Hendrickson chided: "Nonetheless, the Democratic Party has the audacity to claim that it is the party of tolerance, the party which abhors racial and religious prejudice."

To this Lister Hill replied as if explaining everything in the year of the Big Blow. "I was talking to the people of Alabama."

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