WASHINGTON CALLING
Washinton Calling... „ Washington, D. C. WHEN Congress recessed for the Holidays this week, it wound up one of the most abortive and unproductive periods in recent legislative history. Wartime...
...For five months Ickes has stalled on the issue of a Columbia Valley Authority...
...Now he has come into the open and is blocking a message from the White House endorsing such a proposal...
...Truman had to mail him his airplane ticket to get him to leave Spokane to discuss the Labor Department appointment...
...Mr...
...Ickes In The Open Watch for a showdown soon between Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and the progressive Senators and Representatives from the Far West...
...Wayne Morse, Oregon Republican, jumped all over his GOP colleagues for drafting a weak and watery statement of princtples...
...Hugh Mitchell, Washington Democrat, may blast Ickes publicly...
...Truman's favor...
...Department Of This & That Although the fact that we had cracked the Japanese code was kept from American commanders in the field in 1941, it was freely discussed in Washington cocktail bars at the time...
...You Republicans could certainly accuse the majority of incapability in carrying out the Administration's program because in reality we have two parties on this side...
...If free men here in America should fail, where can free men anywhere succeed...
...OPA sleuths looked into this complaint, found that the lawn-mower manufacturer owned the castings factory—and was charging himself 100 per cent more for his own castings...
...The hopes of the world rest on us to provide leadership in the present crisis...
...Snyder, a conservative, is rated as a high-type man...
...Rising in the House one day last week, Rep...
...Pointing out that the Republicans have adopted noble-sounding pledges on a variety of issues, La Follette wondered out loud why so many of his party vote and act in almost direct opposition to the principles they write into their various declarations for public consumption...
...The other day, for instance, Sen...
...Allen, however, is regarded as a glad-handing weakling who is said to boast that he is the "Harry Hopkins of the Truman Administration...
...Ickes' reputation as a progressive has suffered greatly in recent months...
...Ickes opposes regional river developments because he wants all such projects—including the enormously successful TVA—under his jurisdiction...
...The lawn-mower makers dropped around at OPA the other day for a price increase...
...Organized labor's growing hostility toward the Truman Administration and the Democratic Party imperils their largest single source of support outside the Solid South...
...One manufacturer complained that his castings were costing 100 per cent more and he should get a juicy increase on mowers...
...Army officers spoke carelessly of the "secret" and one officer employed as a code-cracker actually tried to sell it...
...We cannot," he said, "have security, freedom, opportunity, and abundance abroad while we have insecurity, fear, and economic disorder at home...
...In terms that were even harsher than Sen...
...Now the Secretary often cools his heels while his chief decides basic labor policy with others...
...Although Congressional Democrats have been trying to pocket the credit for pushing UNRRA appropriations for the world's destitute, the fact is that Administration leaders in the Senate blocked passage of the urgently needed appropriation until they blackjacked the Senate into approving enforcement machinery for the United Nations Organization...
...Schwellenbaeh is not too happy about this...
...The Democrats are split squarely down the middle between liberal and conservative factions, with the latter very much in the saddle...
...Strife Among The Democrats All is also far from calm in the camp of the party in power...
...The fearful fact of the atomic bomb has brought on alternating fits of apathy and hysteria, neither very conducive to hard work and sound planning...
...Even Bob Hannegan, Postmaster-General and party boss, complains that the President doesn't always accept his counsel—a fact which may well be in Mr...
...The Republican Party, he asserted, can win votes only if it offers a program of specific legislation "rather than a program of blind reaction and evasive double-talk...
...The two men the President sees last before an important decision is announced are said to be John Snyder and George Allen...
...The period now ending has been marked, too, by some serious soul-searching among thoughtful members of Congress who are dismayed by the lack of program, action, and leadership...
...Ours are unparalleled resources and productive power...
...Walker K. Granger, Utah Democrat, lashed out against the majority of his own party...
...Across the Capitol, in the House, Rep...
...Certain members are like a millstone around the neck of those of us who favor progressive action...
...They fear he is getting bad advice and listening to the wrong people...
...Bowles, who has come to symbolize leadership of the drive against unbridled profiteering and runaway prices, has done a magnificent job with a faulty law and weak administrative staff in the field...
...Although the UNRRA funds were needed immediately and the UNO machinery won't begin to function for a while, Democratic leaders refused to let the Senate vote on the relief fund until it had debated and disposed of the other legislation...
...President Truman's strength in Congress is ebbing fast...
...It required heavy pressure from the President to get him to resign a lifetime post on the Federal bench...
...Wartime jitters have been replaced by an atomic jag among lawmakers, policymakers, and administrators, with the result that nothing much has been accomplished...
...Morse and Rep...
...Ours is the tradition of freedom—freedom not for the few but for all...
...Truman's Advisers The President's followers are worried...
...In a fine speech before the New Council for American Business in New York recently, Bowles struck a statesmanlike note when he warned that the quest for security and abundance abroad will fail "unless we have these things at home...
...Charles La Follette, Indiana Republican, took up the battle for a more honest and progressive GOP...
...The National Farmers' Union last week accused Ickes of being a dog-in-the-manger, of not wanting the Bonneville and Grand Coulee projects removed from his jurisdiction...
...Bowles Refuses To Budge Chester Bowles, hard-driving chief of the Office of Price Administration, has no intention of responding to recurring invitations from his enemies that he resign...
...Secretary of Labor Lewis Schwellenbaeh is one of the Cabinet members who has been by-passed in favor of the free-lance advisers around the White House...
...In fact, Mr...
...Granger told his colleagues: "My party has never sunk so low in all its history...
...La Follette used against their own party, Rep...
...Turning his heavy guns on the Democrats as well— he called them "a party torn asunder by machine politics and using a strategy of playing both ends against the middle"—Morse said the GOP would muff its great opportunity if it didn't stop ducking issues...
Vol. 9 • December 1945 • No. 51
