Yank or Commissar

Stacks of mail were coming to Congressmen, demanding that something be done about rising prices. Like a scared herd, they reacted first in chaos and confusion (TIME, Aug. 14); then almost by stampede, as Administration leaders cracked the whip over them. The House, which had ineffectually tried the week before to ad-lib some sort of law, let Chairman Brent Spence's Banking & Currency Committee write a bill behind committee doors. It passed the House by a lopsided, anticlimactic vote of 383 to 12.*

The House bill gave the President almost all he wanted--power to requisition goods and facilities, assign priorities, control credits, make loans up to $2 billion for production of war materials--and some things he did not particularly want --stand-by power to establish at his discretion wage and price ceilings, order rationing. The bill would also penalize hoarders with a maximum $10,000 fine and a year in jail.

No Particular Strain. The Senate, always sadder & wiser than the House, continued to debate. Still the most voluble and stubborn opponent of granting such executive powers was Ohio's Robert Taft, who talked as if all the mobilization now going on was meant only to lick North Korea, instead of preparing for something worse. "I do not intend to say that the Korean war is not a real war," he argued. "But from an economic standpoint, it is not any particular strain on the economy."

The imposition of full economic control would require possibly half a million civilian officials, the policing of nearly 1 billion transactions a day, said Taft. The bill, which Bernard Baruch had argued was the minimum necessary, would, according to Taft, give Harry Truman "arbitrary dictatorial power" to regiment the economy; Congress should have its hand on the lever of every war manufacturing program.

Neither Time nor Competence. At this point, many of his own Republican colleagues parted from Taft. New York's unfrightened Irving Ives pointed out that the Maybank bill (similar to the bill the House passed) contains safeguards against threats of dictatorship, that "Congress has neither the time nor the special competence necessary to administer economic controls," and that Taft's kind of congressional supervision might paralyze the country's whole effort in a crisis.

Said Ives: "I doubt that it is necessary to convince the American people that they are now beset by a very grave crisis, in which our future freedom and freedom everywhere is at stake . . . There can be no question of choice between acceptance of limited governmental regulation and control--on a temporary basis--by honest-to-goodness Americans, and the possible alternative of permanent and absolute control administered by a Soviet Commissar."

The House cited 56 persons for contempt of Congress. All of them had refused to answer questions put to them by the Un-American Activities Committee in the past year. Thirty-nine were Hawaiians who defied questions asked by committeemen during an on-the-scene investigation of Communism in the territory; four were scientists who worked on atomic bomb projects; the others were various Reds and officials of the Red-run United Electrical Workers Union, including Julius Emspak and James Matles. Conviction may bring $1,000 fine, a year in jail.

*Those who held out: Allen, Jenison, Simpson (Ill.); Crawford, Hoffman (Mich.); Gwinn (N.Y.); Nicholson (Mass.); Rich (Pa.); Sanborn (Idaho); Werdel, Phillips (Calif.)--all of whom would qualify as diehard Republicans; and Communist-Liner Marcantonio (N.Y.).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.