The Bitter End

Representative Beverly M. Vincent of Brownsville, Ky. had a trying week. First short, grey, steely-eyed Congressman Vincent was besieged in his office by a harpy-like group of women who said they were from Kentucky (the Congressman thought they were really from Cincinnati) and grew so bitter in their denunciation of conscription that he had to throw them out. Then, with the rest of the House, Representative Vincent had to sit through an equally violent denunciation of conscription by small, red-faced Martin L. Sweeney of Ohio. A Coughlinite and Irish patrioteer, Martin Sweeney declaimed that conscription was a scheme to deliver the U. S. to the British devils. When Representative Sweeney finally ran out of gas, he sat down next to Representative Vincent. It was too much.

"I'd rather you would sit somewhere else," quietly said Beverly Vincent. When Sweeney bristled, Vincent added: "You are a traitor." Words passed. Vincent called Sweeney a ... .. . ..... . Sweeney swung at him.

Taking careful aim and with obvious satisfaction, Beverly Vincent planted a good hard right, smack! It staggered, and silenced, Martin Sweeney. Though Congressmen not infrequently threaten one another and have been known to throw bound copies of the Record* when vexed, ancient Doorkeeper Joseph Sinnot said it was the best blow he had heard in his 50 years in the House.

The House also had a trying week, but had nobody to take it out on. All it had to do was to vote for conscription in an election year, and though conscription was supposedly favored by a great majority of the U. S. electorate, incumbent politicians fear one angry voter more deeply than they are reassured by five satisfied ones.

That conscription is the kind of issue that makes angry voters the House was dismally reminded by the death watch of twelve veiled mothers, and packed anti-conscription galleries, both of which previously visited the Senate.

When the medicine was mixed by the Military Affairs Committee, it had some sugar coating. The committee extended the age limits for liability to military service, 21-to-31 in the Senate bill, to 21-to-45. Result: to get 800,000 men in the next year, the Army would have to call only one registrant out of 23. But the floor managers could see this was not enough. The Senate had seized at a straw --the Overton-Russell amendment giving the President a club over recalcitrant defense industries--which would permit Senators to argue on the stump that they were drafting wealth as well as men. The House wanted a straw of its own.

The Straw was an amendment offered by New York's big-boned Harvard Republican isolationist from Franklin Roosevelt's neighborhood, Hamilton Fish. Representative Fish, taking his cue from a proposal which the Senate had rejected by a narrow 43-to-41, proposed to defer calling up of men for 60 days after the passage of the bill, to see whether the necessary number of men could be raised by voluntary recruiting. Practical effect of this device, since the Army expected to need six weeks to get its registration machinery in order, anyway, would be to delay the draft by about two weeks. The House saw its straw, and clutched.

In vain foes of the amendment argued that it would open the House to the charge of playing politics with defense, that no one would be drafted until after Election Day anyway. When Georgia's Edward Eugene ("Goober'') Cox exclaimed of the amendment: "To accept it would convince the people of this country that the membership of this House is only an aggregation of self-serving politicians," its fate in a House of 435 politicians was sealed. The amendment was adopted 185-to-155. More notable to many a Representative was the sight of Republican National Chairman Joe Martin--not the only Republican more isolationist than his Presidential candidate--striding up to the teller to vote for the amendment beside his bearded fellow Bay Stater, Isolationist George Holden Tinkham.

But Joe Martin did not, as a few anti-conscriptionists at first dared hope, vote against the bill. If he did not line up his colleagues to vote for it, he at least backed up Wendell Willkie by voting for it along with 211 Democrats, 51 Republicans.

Against it on the final roll call were 33 Democrats, 112 Republicans.

Conference this week will iron out two major differences between the House and Senate bills: the 60-day volunteering period and the House's higher age limit.

Likeliest deal shaping up was that Administration leaders would kill the waiting period in return for giving the House 1) its age limit, or 2) its version of industrial conscription instead of the Overton-Russell amendment (leasing instead of condemnation).

But regardless of differences and qualifications, one great question had been settled: for the first time in history the U. S. was going to force its citizens to learn the art of self-defense in peacetime.

-- From which the House voted to expunge the Sweeney-Vincent colloquy.

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