34 in a Lair

Time & again last week Chairman Key Pittman postponed a showdown in his Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the biggest question this Congress has had before it: The Neutrality law, the rules of behavior for the President of the U. S. should war break out abroad. The House had sent up the Bloom bill putting half a halter on the President, obliging him to embargo U. S. "arms & ammunition" (but not other material such as planes, motors, trucks, oil, cotton) to belligerents (TIME, July 10). Reason Senator Pittman delayed seemed to be that he was not at all sure of being able to rid the President of that half-halter. And the reason he was not sure stemmed straight back to the spirit of resurgence in Congress, the determination of many a Senator to show the President that Congress, not he, is boss. Among the older Senators it stemmed back also to the great fight on Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations, the post-War rebirth of Isolation and mandatory neutrality laws.

Old Senator Borah (74 last fortnight) opened the Senate fight to keep Franklin Roosevelt haltered by getting up and reading one of his rare written speeches. Two days before, the President had declared that U. S. policy is not only avoidance of war but prevention of it in all parts of the world. Senator Borah addressed himself to the democracies whom every one now knows Franklin Roosevelt proposes to save if necessary. He flayed Foreign Minister Bonnet of France and the French press for criticizing the House's action in haltering Mr. Roosevelt. He asked what difference there was between Prime Minister Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler, between "democracies" and "dictatorships," when ever since Munich they could all be seen serving their own selfish interests. "It is not surprising," rumbled the idol of Idaho, "that the majority of the House did not make any distinction between dictators and democracies but pursued the old system of considering alone the interests of the people of the United States."

Beneath the Capitol's rotunda is a book-lined lair where, 21 years ago, California's Senator Hiram Warren Johnson, then a vigorous ex-Governor and ex-candidate on the Bull Moose ticket of 1912, put his name up on the door without a by-your-leave to anyone. That has been his office all these years, while other Senators shuttle to & from the palatial marble Senate Office Building. One day last week more than a score of Senators took their way to Senator Johnson's lair to join in drafting a manifesto that constituted the gravest declaration of war yet made on Franklin Roosevelt. They said:

". . . We are against any discretion being lodged in the hands of any Chief Executive to determine an aggressor or aggressors during any war abroad.

"We believe in the real neutrality of our nation in the case of any armed conflict.

"We are determined to maintain our position by every honorable and legitimate means at our command."

Senator Borah, of course, was stanch at Senator Johnson's side. So was North Dakota's Gerald ("Neutrality") Nye. They declared they had a minimum of 34 votes, perhaps as many as 60. Thirty-four Senators exercising "every honorable and legitimate means" at their command could filibuster Neutrality far into August's dog days.

Conducting a one-man lobby against the Roosevelt brand of Neutrality, Herbert Hoover last week, in a speech at Cleveland, idealistically proposed that participants in the next war agree: 1) not to air-bomb civilian populations; 2) not to blockade food; 3) to let neutral umpires watch them fight, render moral verdicts.

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