In Session

If there is one thing particularly enjoyed by Arizona's florid, courtly Henry Fountain Ashurst, it is disseminating bits of the complex philosophy he has acquired in his 25 years in the U. S. Senate. Last week Senator Ashurst had a characteristically involved witticism to deliver. Said he: "In times of classical antiquity there were two things unpredictable: the way of a man with a maid, and the way of an eagle on a rock (which way it will fly)." The last decade, according to Senator Ashurst, has added another equally profound human uncertainty: "What will Congress do?"

In Washington this week, the 24th Special Session of Congress in U. S. history convened under circumstances to which Senator Ashurst's remark was peculiarly pertinent. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt last month called the Session to deal with a five-point legislative program, the U. S. was, relatively speaking, economically content. The five weeks since have been just long enough to include the first serious decline in U. S. business since 1933. To the notable opportunities for controversy already foreseen for the special session, the slump added another. This week, when Vice President Garner in the Senate and Speaker William Bankhead in the House thumped their gavels for the first time since last August 21, they were as uncertain as the rest of the U. S. what the session would bring forth. First thing it brought forth was a message from the President.

Read to both Houses by their clerks, the message started with a discussion of the business recession and legislative means toward ending it. Said the President: "The fundamental situation is not to be compared with the far different conditions of 1929. . . . Obviously an immediate task is to try to increase the use of private capital to increase employment. . . . Private enterprise, with co-operation on the part of Government, can advance to higher levels of industrial activity than those reached earlier this year. . . . Such advance will assure balanced budgets. . . . If private enterprise does not respond, Government must take up the slack. ..." On the subject of taxes, the President in effect reiterated what his Secretary of the Treasury had said a few days earlier (see p. 16), in proposing to remove "unjust provisions." He also warned that "modifications adequate to encourage productive enterprises, especially for the smaller businesses, must not extend to the point of using the corporate form for the purpose of hiding behind it." Almost simultaneously with the reading of the President's message, the House Ways and Means Sub-Committee on taxation agreed to exempt corporations with net incomes of $5,000 or less from the undistributed profits tax.

In his fireside chat last month, the President called for the "early enactment" of laws to 1) control crop surpluses, 2) regulate wages and hours in industry, 3) reorganize the executive branch of the Government, 4) permit regional planning for better use of national resources, 5) modernize anti-trust legislation. In his message this week, he again enumerated the first four, omitted the last.

Question of what Congress will make of this formidable program in the next six weeks, and of whether it will do anything much besides laying the groundwork for the regular session, was this week almost as mysterious as Senator Ashurst made it sound. The Wages & Hours Bill was last week exactly where it was last summer--tied up by an unfavorable House Rules Committee. Neither the farm bill nor the bill to create seven regional TVAs was clearly formulated. Executive reorganization looked like the first item on the calendar but on it also was something definitely not included on the President's list. This was the Wagner-Van Nuys Anti-Lynching Bill which Senate Democratic Leader Alben Barkley had agreed to consider early in the current session to avoid a possible filibuster in the closing days of the last one. With antilynching, and the possibility of a major Congressional uproar on the subject of taxation added to the President's highly controversial program, the only thing the special session seemed completely sure of was its full share of fireworks.

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