SLOGAN-SICKNESS IN CONGRESS
Lowry, W. McNeil
Slogan-Sickness in Congress By W. McNEIL lowry Washington, D. C. THE MOST distinctive characteristic of the United States Congress in the five years since World War II has been its subservience...
...The proposal, say the Republicans and other Brannan opponents, seeks to regiment American agriculture from planting season to the market time...
...He campaigned against Communism, socialized medicine, and the Brannan Plan...
...The third involves a nationwide system of public health insurance on the first $4600 of everybody's income...
...The first two are aimed at precisely the objectives of the Republican "substitute...
...Before going to Washington he was associate editor of the Dayton (O...
...When the U. S. policy "failed," meaning that millions of dollars worth of supplies and equipment had not kept Chiang in the field against the Communists, the whole question in Congress became identified with the discredited Generalissimo...
...These five subjects, however unrelated they may otherwise seem to be, do have this in common: None has been considered on its own merits by the past two Congresses...
...intervention would have prevented a Communist victory...
...But he made no mention of this vote when on June 28 he charged the President with being slow to use the money appropriated...
...Not many of even the most conscientious Conr gressmen have studied its detailed provisions, and yet the Brannan Plan in 1950 is the key issue in a number of important Congressional races...
...diction to stereotypes is beginning to exercise a profound effect on our whole political life...
...The whole trouble, so the explanation IPM...
...on fair employment practices, lynch* ing, and poll-tax—whether you are for the "Truman civil rights program" or against it...
...He wrapped up all the stereotypes in one campaign, and was victorious in a state which had come to be known as the South's most progressive...
...Frank Graham, was obviously a strong conservative, respectable enough to have been elected president of the American Bar Association...
...It mattered not whether more aid for Chiang short of actual military W. McNEIL LOWRY, The Progressive's Washington correspondent, ranges over a wide field of the top news-producing areas in the nation's capital in his role as chief of the Washington Bureau for the four dailies owned by former Gov...
...When Albert Loveland, a former undersecretary of agriculture, won the Democratic Senatorial nomination in Iowa campaigning on the Brannan Plan, Lucas followed up with a broadcast in Illinois, saying he "had always been against it...
...William Knowland, California, and Rep...
...But just as certainly it is an over-simplification...
...If you were a member of Congress or an official of the State Department, you were labelled white or black, for Chiang or suspect...
...Willis Smith, the successful opponent of Sen...
...on farm legislation, to whether you are for "regimentation" (read "the Brannan Plan") or against it...
...The Administration's Thomas bill, fundamentally reinstating the Wagner Act, came to the floor by the one-vote margin by which the Democrats controlled the committee...
...Much the same kind of controversy has developed around the Administration's health program...
...But the issue was still "repeal Taft-Hartley...
...that President Truman tries to keep Fair Deal issues alive for campaign purposes and the Administration doesn't get down to the business of legislating on a give-and-take basis...
...But the extravagances of the McCarthy attack finally produced it...
...But in this dilemma they are not conspicuously different from most members of Congress...
...But it was the Truman campaign which made "repeal Taft-Hartley" rather than "get a good labor law" the issue...
...In fact, the addiction of the Congressional mind to reducing all issues to the black-or-white level has had as much to do with legislative deadlocks as has the much publicized coalition between Republicans and Southern Democrats...
...Suppose we look at five basic legislative issues that have produced millions of words in the 80th and 81st Congresses—U...
...Beginning his campaign by adopting the slogans of both McCarthy and the States Righters, he ended by attacking Graham's general support of the Truman Administration...
...What was needed was a bill that all but the most intransigent labor leader could accept, and if the President didn't get much of a bill in 1950- (which was plain), he might get it in 1951...
...There had been long and bitter quarreling over China...
...Now the Brannan Plan is no issue in North Carolina, but Smith, consciously or not, was following the instinct which has so sterilized Congressional debate...
...The principal Douglas amendment substituted governmental seizure for the injunction in "national emergency" strikes, called for a 90-day cooling off period, and established a fact-finding board under the Taft-Hartley Act, with power to make recommendations for action...
...Daily News, and served for a while on the faculty of the University of Illinois...
...And it would be hard to describe any real difference in the "regimentation" of the Brannan Plan and the existing farm program...
...The Democratic handle on the cliche was slow in being fashioned...
...One of the Senate's leading and most influential non-interventionists, Republican Sen...
...Congress, of course, did not invent the slogans on the Taft-Hartley measure, which the CIO was calling a "slave labor act" before President Truman began promising its repeal in the 1948 campaign...
...After McCarthy you were either for Chiang Kai-shek or for Communism in Asia, and that went for Gen...
...It mattered not whether the Chinese people would fight for Chiang...
...Robert A. Taft of Ohio, got in under the wire of the "for Chiang Kai-shek" cliche very late indeed, after Chiang himself had fled to Formosa...
...It is hard to define what has produced this polarization of phrases and ideas...
...It is doubtful that the citizens of North Carolina know any more about the Brannan Plan or the Administration's health proposal than they knew before...
...The result was adoption of the Taft substitute and a stalemate on all labor legislation for the 81st Congress...
...III The Brannan farm bill is another piece of major legislation which has never been considered on its merits, or lack of them...
...James E. Murray of Montana, Claude Pepper of Florida, and Elbert Thomas of Utah...
...But the extension of support in every case demands a 60% majority vote from the farmers growing the particular crop...
...Joseph McCarthy, Wisconsin Republican, carried the stereotype to its inevitable extreme...
...Nothing mattered but whether you were for or against Chiang Kai-shek...
...The "Ewing Plan," say its opponents, is "socialized medicine...
...Veteran officials of the Department of Agriculture who themselves oppose the Brannan Plan for one specific reason or another say that it would involve regimentation of the farmer...
...The Republicans, led by Sen...
...The absurdities to which the addiction to stereotypes carried members of Congress on the Far Eastern question continued even past the Korean crisis...
...Senate Majority Leader Scott W. Lucas of Illinois, representing a state dominated by the American Farm Bureau, feels he must speak out against the plan every time Brannan speaks for it...
...When the vote came, the Douglas amendments were opposed not only by a majority of Republicans and Southern Democrats but by the "repeal Taft-Hartley" bloc led by Fair Deal Sens...
...Thus both Taft and the CIO-PAC were kept happy, but the admitted shortcomings of the Taft-Hartley Act were left to plague both labor and management, and the sizeable group of Congressmen actually seeking to legislate on the facts of labor-management relations was sterilized by the all-or-nothing attitude in the White House...
...The actual provisions of the Plan require no new authority from Congress and only the extension of an existing authority—marketing quotas—to additional crops, potatoes, for example...
...The black-and-white attitude toward Communism growing out of Russia's threatening power in the postwar era has revived and stimulated an older tendency on the part of many Americans to lump what they do not like with "Communism...
...That was in January...
...He denounced the President for being so slow to use in Korea money voted for arms aid in 1949...
...He decided it was not enough to attack Graham as a "Red" and a "nigger lover...
...On the other handle of the cliche, the proponents of the plan, like the proponents of the Brannan farm proposal, have discussed it in the terms of a panacea—an effective weapon against the "interests," and the end of just about all medical problems for all Americans...
...The stereotypes on the Brannan Plan jumble party lines even more than those on labor legislation, for it has split the Northern Democrats themselves...
...As a "substitute," Republican leaders like Sen...
...II The same addiction to cliches has sterilized the 81st Congress' action on labor legislation...
...Weren't there votes in the Senate to pass a labor bill roughly like the Douglas proposal, which had—in private— an okay frim Philip Murray and William Green...
...These proposals, they say, would leave "free enterprise" among the nation's doctors...
...The "Fair Deal" is but one of the slogans (or epithets, if the President's .opponents are involved), and it is not the father of all the rest...
...Prior to the convening of the second session, this reporter had an opportunity to discuss Administration legislative prospects with one of the chief Truman advisers...
...But in the Senate Labor Committee the whole question of new legislation was being decided on a strictly party-line vote...
...It mattered not that U. S. aid to Chiang had fallen into Communist hands...
...in other words, Government control of the nation's doctors...
...The Administration's health bill actually consists of three titles, or major legislative groupings...
...One feature was the elimination of the independent powers of the NLRB general counsel and the transfer of his administrative functions to the board itself...
...Perhaps never in the history of American statecraft since the invention of the underseas cable has a major question of foreign policy been debated with so little consider^ ation of its merits as was the subject of U. S. policy in the Far East in the period 1945-50...
...On the floor, the Republicans met "repeal Taft-Hartley" with "keep the Taft bill...
...The cloakroom eminence of multimillionaire Alfred Kohlberg, who made his fortune in China, was discovered, and thereafter if you were for Chiang Kai-shek you were part of the Kohlberg China Lobby and hence suspect, too...
...The first session of the 81st Congress was no sooner under way in 1949 when it became apparent to any non-partisan observer that the Truman Administration could get a labor law that would make important changes in the Taft-Hartley Act and meet criticisms which even Sen...
...Debate on our Far Eastern policy has been reduced to black-or-white consideration of whether you are for Chiang Kai-shek or against him...
...The mushrooming of the advertiser's technique in all areas of American life is no doubt a considerable factor...
...George C. Marshall as well as for Owen Lattimore...
...on health matters, whether you are for "socialized medicine" or against it...
...The Marshall-Acheson foreign policy in the Far East, for example, was in the ordinary sense unpolitical, and it remained so—despite the pressure of the China lobby in Congress—until it became perfectly clear that Chiang Kai-shek would lose control of the Chinese mainland...
...Sen...
...Government support of farm prices, income, or purchasing power, they say, is bound to involve regimentation...
...Under the Plan, local groups would decide whether their doctors should be paid by flat monthly payments or by fixed fees, as now...
...But whatever its source, the ad...
...S. foreign policy in the Far East, farm legislation, health legislation, labor legislation, and proposals for extending the civil rights of minorities...
...Taft himself, in 1949, voted against the arms aid bill...
...In the health insurance title of the Ewing Bill there may be features which under a strict definition of the term could be called "socialized medicine...
...Taft privately accepted...
...The epithet "regimentation" has been substituted for the detailed and involved provisions of the Brannan Plan...
...Paul Douglas, Illinois Dem^ ocrat, offered five amendments to the Administration's repealer bill, which would have been accepted if the President had given the word...
...Slogan-Sickness in Congress By W. McNEIL lowry Washington, D. C. THE MOST distinctive characteristic of the United States Congress in the five years since World War II has been its subservience to the slogan and the epithet...
...lames Cox in Ohio, Georgia, and Florida...
...Brannan does seek to support more farm products than those covered in the present Ander-son-Gore Bill...
...This is especially true of Republicans, whose conclusion is given strong plausibility by the conduct of the Administration's Congressional leadership...
...And every doctor would have a chance to elect whether to come into the plan or stay out...
...When Congressmen discuss their own predicament, they tend to reach for an over-simplification by way of explanation...
...Yes, there were...
...the current Congressional disease is both more serious and more complex...
...Taft have proposed Federal aid to medical education and internship and an expanded hospital program...
...To make the process click, Lattimore had first to be elevated to the position he had never occupied, that of "chief architect of our Eastern policy...
...on labor legislation, in terms of "repealing Taft-Hartley" or keeping it...
...The senior Senator from Ohio had prepared an amendment in the nature of a substitute which was specifically designed to harvest Southern Democratic votes...
...IV This addiction to slogans—the Far Eastern, labor, farm, and health issues are only a few illustrations of a widespread and deep-running disease—has contributed far more significantly to the deadlock in Congress than the absence of a working legislative majority for President Truman...
...Certainly there is more than a little accuracy in this diagnosis...
...But the opponents of the plan have not applied a strict definition, and they have substituted the back-of-the-hand to "socialized medicine" for any serious, thoughtful debate on the detailed provisions of the Administration program...
...The North Carolina Democratic primary afforded an excellent and chilling example...
...After long opposition to American interventionist moves, the senior Senator from Ohio allowed himself one little spot of interventionism— Formosa...
...Walter Judd, Minnesota, reduced the entire question of Far Eastern policy into the stereotype of "support" for Chiang Kai-shek...
...The precise nature of this advanced Congressional disease is best examined through concrete illustrations...
...But the Anderson-Gore Bill, they add, involves regimentation also, as djd the Hope-Aiken measure, and the Agricultural Act of 1948...
...Thereafter, when President Truman's order went out on June 27 for the use of American forces in Korea, Taft took the floor to complain that U. S. troops should never have been withdrawn from southern Korea in the first place...
Vol. 14 • August 1950 • No. 8
