CONGRESS ON SPOT AS VOTERS AWAIT FAIR DEAL ACTION
Conrad, John
Congress on Spot As Voters Await Fair Deal Action. By JOHN CONRAD WASHINGTON. THE SECOND BE8SION of the 81st Congress^ which was billed through the fall and early winter merely •as a reanact...
...He would be ready to win again in 1950 and 1952 with essentially the same set of issues that won for him in 1943...
...Such a coaliUon would be no more than a formalization of an alliance that already operates in Congress...
...Others, like Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, knew and were trying to lead the Republicans away from their doom...
...Secretary Acheson and Upheld Defense Secretary-Johnson and General Mac Arthur when he declared the U.S...
...THE SECOND BE8SION of the 81st Congress^ which was billed through the fall and early winter merely •as a reanact merit of the first session of the tame Congress, now promises to be something far more exciting...
...would adopt a "positive" policy toward the island bastion...
...While they seemed to have a promising issue in the failure of state department policy in China, just how they meant to exploit it without spending anything on defense measures in Korea and elsewhere, was a mystery...
...They talked about evidences of a Republican resurgence, as they had every election year since Roosevelt first licked them back in 1932...
...On December 21, the birthday itself, for example, the Voice's Russian-language "Calendar" picked the 1947 Foreign Ministers Conference as its most important "historic date" for discussion...
...President Harry S. Truman will press, as he did last year, for the Brannan farm price subsidy plan, for repeal of the Taft-Hartley act, for compulsory health insurance and for more adequate old age and survivors' insurance under an improved Social Security program...
...Yet the Republican leaders—the Martins and the Tafts, who make party policy, and the Guy Gabrielsons, who are the party's fund-raisers—are deliberately lining up against all these appealing causes...
...Senator Taft, unless he is beaten for reelection this year in Ohio, will be the favorite of the Republicans and the Dixicrats for t)..' Presidential nomination...
...But if Truman's economic advisers are right in their confidence that such a depression can be averted by an expanding economy, and a gradually Improving national income within the capitalistic structure, with a system of security superimposed upon it, then such a depression Won't occur in the foreseeable future—certainly not before 1952...
...But a majority hadn't learned and didn't know...
...Publication of the China White Paper and the reappointment of W. Walton Butterworth as head of State's Far Eastern Division this summer added to his bitterness...
...Eventually, it may mean a reorganization of the Republican remnants in amalgamation with the Southern conservatives under some new label less objectionable to the Southerners than the party name that still has odious reconstruction connotations for them...
...Some of them knew it and were telling themselves it would be better to go down fighting than just sitting...
...Eastern Europeans were bombarded by more than a full week of Communist Stalin broadcasts, but a high State Department official is believed to have balked Voice plans to reply in kind...
...It is believed Souers was unwilling to go along with the imminent $2-billion cut in military appropriations...
...They also had an exploitable issue in the Administration's failure to make good any of its civil rights promises but here, again, the willingness, not to say eagerness, of many Republicans to play ball with the Soutlfern Democrats, spiked theii guns...
...The only conspicuous new face will be that of Herbert H. Lehman, who will replace John Foster Dulles as junior Senator from New York...
...But as Republican Congressmen and Senators gathered in Washington for the new session, it became apparent that they were adopting the same line—suicidal as it seemed in terms of practical politics...
...But the policy has not yet been implemented...
...2. The inter-cabinet struggle over Formosa...
...They, too, were discarding the me-tooism which, though it had not won for them, had at least kept them alive and kicking as an* opposition party through the 1948 Presidential election...
...They were determined to cut foreign and defense spending in the face of...
...Labor*, which is cleaning out its Communists and thus ridding itself of a political lodestone, is stronger than ever...
...The resignation of Kennan was perhaps the most dramatic evidence of an intra-departmental rift in State, informed observers believed...
...The Republicans would be fully prepared to go down again on these same issues...
...President Truman Anally over-ruled State...
...4. The amasing failure of the Voice of America's Iron Curtain broadcasts to comment on Stalin's 70th birthday...
...Again the Republican opposition will be led in the House by Minority Leader Joe Martin and in the Senate by Minority Leader Kenneth Wherry and Robert A. Taft of Ohio...
...When the fund raisers got together in Chicago late last year and announced an end of me-tooism, it was generally supposed that they were addressing themselves to the moneybags out of consideration for the party's embarassed financial condition, not-to the voters...
...Informed observers pointed principally to four events as signs that a softening of the American line might be forthcoming: 1. The resignation of George Kennan as State Department counselor...
...For all tbis surface sameness, it will become obvious within the first month of the new session that something new and vital has been added to the Congressional show...
...The plain fact is that the immediate future of the Republican Party, in its present form or reorganized and renamed, seems hopeless...
...THE REPUBLICANS MEANWHILE seemed to be falling in with Truman's plans for their undoing...
...He would propose popular measures and they woula oppose them...
...Report State Department Considers Adoption of New Appeasement Policy By WILLIAM CALDWELL INDICATIONS that the State Department was contemplating a slowdown in the cold war and a possible new policy of appeasement blew fast and furious in Washington thig -week as Congress convened...
...3. The resignation of Sidney Souers as executive secretary of the National Security Council...
...It is entirely possible, as things are developing, that the Republican Party will smash itself beyond repair by next fall, when its Congressmen and Senators again come face to face with their constituents in a national election...
...True, the actors and the stage business will be about what they were last time...
...IP ALL THIS HAPPENS, the Republicans and their Southern friends, in process of reorientation, will have practically no chance of electing a President in 1952, barring a depression of 1029 proportions...
...Demand for the measures lumped under the loose headings "security and welfare" is growing rather than diminishing...
...Although few could And any formal explanation of the Voice of America's silence, it is believed that George Malenkov's article in Pravda a few days before Stalin's birthday, which pleaded for peaceful co-existence of "capitalism" and "socialism," had convinced high officials that fruitful peace overtures to Moscow would be possible in the near future...
...For a time, it will mean an end of formidable opposition to the socalled welfare state principles espoused 'by Truman and his dominant Democratic Party...
...If he is beaten, as now seems possible but still not probable, or, even if he isn't, the reorganized conservative party may turn to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who is personally more appealing and who, in his recent Texas speeches, seems to have taken up a position as far to the right as Taft's...
...The Republicans and their Southern Democratic allies will have enough strength to beat back most of these measures—probably all of them except betterment of old age benefits...
...Kennan had been bitter, according to these observers, over the Department's unwillingness to extend its firm anti-Communist European policy to Asia...
...Moreover, the Administration was planning to push a Fair Employment Practices Commission bill at the outset of the session and invite a Southern filibuster to dramatize its political independence of the Dixicrats...
...Russia's enormous military expenditures and the announcement that Russia had achieved atomic fission...
...Kennan's 1947 articles, analyzing Soviet conduct, were in large measure responsible for the "get-tough" program adopted by the Administration...
...The Brannan plan, even though it is now running into opposition from the old-line farm organizations, promises to bridge a historic chasm between urban consumers and agricultural producers...
...If this happens, a new political alignment will become necessary in this country and the close of the half century will mark the end of a political era, for better or for worse...
...Moreover, they proposed to blockade to the best of their ability any progress in the* direction of social welfare and security —except, possibly, in government old age pensions, which their business friends thought preferable to industrial security contracts won by organized labor on an industry-by-industry basis...
...Moscow's step-up of her "peace offenaiydi" and the Congressional desire to cut the budget were believed the main factors motivating the change in policy...
...The last session was only a rehearsal for this one...
...and walked toward the precipice blindfolded with confident— and silly—smiles on their rather pleasant faces...
Vol. 33 • January 1950 • No. 1
