Fire v. Fire

When Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg began baying on the trail of recipients of big AAA benefit payments. Secretary of Agriculture Wallace tossed out a few dry bones of figures-without-names which by no means satisfied the hunger of the Michigan GOPossibility (TIME, April 20). Last week the Senate's Democratic majority decided that it was the better part of politics to let Senator Vandenberg have his resolution directing the Department of Agriculture to furnish names of all those who had received AAA payments of $10,000 or more per year.

First, however, Kentucky's Barkley and Texas' Connally prepared to fight fire with fire by tacking on amendments directing the Tariff Commission to supply names of big industrial corporations which had benefited by the tariff, with estimates of the amounts which that form of Government subsidy had put into their pockets. Also, Democrats pounced on Republican Vandenberg's Presidential aspirations, denounced the political motive of his inquiry.

"I doubt," replied the Michigan Senator quietly, "if any of us can search our hearts this year and find political considerations excluded."

Dark Horse on Dog Food

Lester Jesse ('"Dick") Dickinson, 62, is a big, friendly, white-thatched Iowa lawyer who went to the House in 1919, became leader of that body's first, historic Farm Bloc. In 1931 Representative Dickinson moved up to the Senate, where he distinguished himself by coming out early & often against the New Deal. A loud, earnest orator who keynoted at the 1932 Republican national convention, the Senator from Iowa demands "sane, honest industrial and agricultural programs" and a return "to the ideas of our New England forefathers." Senator Dickinson does not drink, smoke, take part in sports or society.

Outside the farm problem, he has few interests except the Republican Party and his own ancestry, which he traces back through 300 years of pioneer U. S. farmers. So regular a Republican is the Iowa Senator that, whereas most agricultural leaders blame much of the farmer's woe on tariff walls, he declares himself "just like William McKinley" on that issue.

Popular with his rural constituents until he began maligning AAA, Senator Dickinson faces a hard fight for re-election this year. But that prospect has lately been assuaged by the buzzing in his large, well-shaped head of some such exciting thought as the following: "If Warren Harding could get the Republican Presidential nomination in 1920, why can't I get it in 1936?" Like Harding, "Dick" Dickinson, with his big frame, Roman features and shock of silver-white hair, makes a handsome, impressive figure. Like Harding, he would personify a return to normalcy after a hectic Democratic regime. For Dark Horse Dickinson, oldtime Harding supporters have been quietly conducting the same kind of preconvention campaign that Harry Daugherty put on for his Dark Horse in 1920--unobtrusively making friends, taking care not to offend leading candidates, building up a man on whom irreconcilably opposed factions could unite after a convention deadlock.

In the Senate one day last week, Iowa's Dickinson rose to deliver one of his usual harangues against the New Deal. It was lunchtime and, as he rambled on, Senators kept drifting out until only a half-dozen, including Idaho's Borah, Michigan's Vandenberg and Arkansas' Robinson, were at their desks. Absentees who felt sure they knew exactly what the GOPartisan would say were wrong this time, because Senator Dickinson had a new idea. Clutching a manuscript that had been prepared for him at Republican headquarters, the lowan cried: "As the logical, the inevitable consequence of [AAA's] deliberate and wicked waste, for the first time we have Americans living on food unfit for even dogs to eat. I mean that statement literally--food unfit for even dogs to eat. . . .

"Now, the interesting thing about the dog-food business is its present unprecedented prosperity. Its production has increased by leaps and bounds for no apparent reason. There has been neither a sudden rise in the birth rate in dogdom nor changes in dog appetites. The Depression provides no explanation; on the contrary, dog owners were much more apt in hard times to feed table scraps than to purchase specially prepared foods. An investigation . . . leads to one indisputable conclusion. The increase in dog-food consumption can be accounted for because it was, and is today, being used for human beings." Senator Dickinson declared that canned dog food was made of carrion or stockyard "tankage," that only 15 of the 200 U. S. dog-food manufacturers were inspected by the Department of Agriculture.

"Gentlemen of the New Deal." perorated the Iowa Senator to Senators Borah, Vandenberg and Robinson, "while you are indulging your dream of Utopia, please, out of the billions of our money you are so recklessly spending, spare us the paltry few pennies needed to enforce the pure-food laws so we may know that third-class food is clean food." South Carolina's James F. Byrnes, who is Franklin Roosevelt's closest friend in the Senate, rose with a news release which had been handed out before Iowa's Dickinson spoke. Solemnly the sharp-witted little Irishman explained that it had been sent out by the Republican National Committee, with instructions for release after the Senator from Iowa had spoken.

"This," cried Senator Byrnes, "is what the country will read tomorrow: Washington,--In a sensational address before the Senate--[loud Senate laughter]--United States Senator L. J. Dickinson of Iowa today laid bare a condition under which poor people throughout the United States had been forced to eat diseased and contaminated food which the speaker described as literally unfit for even dogs to eat.'" While his colleagues chuckled, Senator Byrnes read on from the dispatch, which told how Senator Dickinson had brought cans of dog food to the Senate floor.

Cried the flustered lowan, who had done nothing of the sort: "I have the dog food.

It is in my office." "But the newspapers will publish that he did exhibit them on the floor," insisted Senator Byrnes, continuing with the Republican release: "Sarcastically--I can hear him now--Sarcastically Dickinson referred to the Roosevelt cure of slaughtering food animals, restricting the growing of grain. Then he said: 'Every gangster, every counterfeiter, every dope peddler now incarcerated in a Federal penitentiary not only lives better'--The writer of the Republican National Committee put these words in--he said with studied deliberation. . . ." Blushing to the roots of his white hair, Senator Dickinson made for the door.

"The real issue at this time," declared the Senator from South Carolina, "is not canned food. It is canned speeches."

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