Potomac Summer

...Good as this is, we think it would have been better if he had said mushrooms...

...Here then is a bill which experts have estimated will cost the consumers of this country something like $500,000,000, and yet which pleases few except sundry New Englanders who are not boot and shoe men, some of the franker cronies of Mr...

...As it is, "we are in the session for all summer, if not all year...

...Fess, "I have seen the danger to the country of the special session...

...What was the danger...

...Of course it is too late to expect escape from the heat of a Washington summer, although timely enough to hope that in those temperatures the "danger to the country" will melt away...

...Senator Fess's letter throws light on other things than his chief interest in debentures, or lack of debentures...

...We find nothing in the bill regarding carrots...

...Grundy, and the cattle and lumber interests of the West...

...But there will be many upward revisions of schedules, and if these are only distributed with some sense of geography, perhaps the disturbing conditions which Senator Fess complains of will disappear, and Congress will again be brought under the proper thumbs...

...The duty on these delicacies, grown extensively in several counties of Pennsylvania, has been boosted 33 percent...

...True, Mr...

...It helps to explain the otherwise puzzling question of why, in a session called primarily to further the interests of agriculture, and particularly the agriculture of the Middle-West, there should be introduced a tariff bill which makes such skimpy concessions to the farmers that, at the time of writing, leaders of no less than nine mid-western states are speaking of revolt as if they mean it...

...And smooth sailing for good Congressmen who could still stand unchallenged on a platform of giving the farmer the sort of relief he wants...

...62 THE COMMONWEAL May 22, 1929 POTOMAC SUMMER THE lament of Senator Fess over the Senate majority for the debenture plan in the Farm Relief bill is in many respects a very frank admission of motives and aims...

...Grundy got his schedules for textiles, cement, plate glass, sheet glass, cast iron pipes, bricks, et cetera, but not for pig iron...

...No sessions, no debates...

...Apropos of which Senator Reed made a memorable remark...

...There will be little blue-penciling, although we do hope for the elimination of Section 402, which denies the right of an importer to appeal to the customs courts from the judgment of an appraiser on a given rate...

...Grundy of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers' Association, who Representative Garner insists is the real author of the bill, makes the declaration (defensive certainly) that Pennsylvania was not well treated...

...No debates, no hard feelings...

...The pig iron producer," said he, "is as much entitled to a decent living as the man who raises carrots...

...It was not Senator Borah's economic judgment which he ventured to attack, but his political discretion, and the political discretion of Senators Nye, Brookhart and others who urged the special session upon the President, and then voted for a measure which the President did not like...

...In his letter "to a Toledo constituent" it was not the ill merits of the debenture which concerned him, but the threat of political catastrophe...

...The answer was a proposal increasing the rates, in some instances, from 15 to 133 percent...

...Apparently that trouble might arise upon which the Democrats could capitalize in the next congressional bye-elections...

...On the other hand, certain eastern industries are offered such fat percentages that one asks whether even the avowed friends of the administration are with it in all matters...

...Limited revision" was President Hoover's request...

...Consequently various Senators are sharpening their pencils, but the first guess is correct as to the direction their rewriting will take...

...From the beginning," wrote Mr...