In Togas Clad

Last week the Senate tried its level best to act like a body of Statesmen. Debate on the Lend-Lease Bill, H.R. 1776, opened on a plane so high that many Senators felt a little difficulty in breathing. Crowded galleries, hoping for an old-fashioned quick-&-dirty scrap, with plenty of rabbit punches and hitting in the clinches, were disappointed. The Senate wrapped the toga of dignity and dullness about its collective paunch, and gamely strove for classic words.

Over the chamber hung an atmosphere of a Great Occasion, an air grave and chilling. Most of the speeches were set pieces, delivered from manuscript. Exchanges were sparse. The Administration's strategy --permitting the opposition orators to wear themselves out, unanswered--worked well. And from the start the isolationists knew the bill would pass without substantial amendment.

Here & there in the long groundswell of words a whitecap showed. On the first day of general debate a Vermont Republican, Warren Robinson Austin of Burlington, left little for his fellow interventionists to say, much for the isolationists to answer.

When Washington's eloquent little Senator Homer Bone asked the question that invariably has cornered interventionists before--what is worse than war? Austin answered: "I say that a world enslaved to Hitler is worse than war, and worse than death. A country whose boys will not go out to fight to save Christianity in the world and to save the principle of freedom from ruthless destruction by a fiend--well, we do not find such boys in America. . . ."

The galleries roared applause. Bone sat down. The debate went on.

Conservative Senator Josiah William Bailey of North Carolina, who has been 99% against the Administration except when campaigning for reelection, now recanted his onetime isolationism, ate his words with such solemn gusto that a hushed, impressed Senate clustered around his desk so as not to miss a syllable.

Isolationist Chief Burton K. Wheeler of Montana harked joyfully back to a Bailey speech of October 10, 1939, when the North Carolinian had said: "We are not going to get into this war. It is a European war. It is not our war. . . . If we were to get into it I should think we were the greatest pack of fools history has ever recorded."

Answered Bailey readily: "I have utterly changed my mind. . . . I was devoted to the Neutrality Act. I know now that I am advocating its repeal. . . . I am now advocating intervention. . . . I am not advocating that we go to war. . . . But do not misunderstand me, I am advocating intervention with all its implications. I am not hedging. All my life I have looked a thing in the face and argued it as it is."

As for Senator Wheeler: "I think a great deal of my friend. He has painted a curious picture of himself here, however. All the events since September, 1939, have not changed his mind. I believe he is the only man in America who has not adjusted himself to the new circumstances that have developed since then."

Next day sleek "Roarin' Bob" Reynolds of North Carolina took the floor, held forth for two and a half hours of teary, sob-voiced argument for isolation. Said Senator Reynolds: Hitler is no more of a menace to the U. S. than Napoleon was in 1808. He insisted that the bill had nothing to do with the defense of the U. S., proposed sarcastically that its title should be changed to: "A Bill for the Defense of the British Empire at the Expense of the Lives of American Men and at the Expense of the American Taxpayer, and for the Preservation of the British Empire Without Any Consideration for the Preservation of the United States."

Green-eyed observers noted that North Carolina is one of the most interventionist States in the U. S.; that Senator Bailey will be campaigning for re-election in 18 months; that Senator Reynolds will not face an election for four years.

The week ended on a gory note struck by marcel-haired Pat McCarran of Nevada, known to the ungrateful press as "Old Bleeding Heart" for his practice of making important speeches as if each were his last on earth. Said McCarran:

". . . My country is about to approach the cross at the end of its rosary. I see on that cross not the old man, not the man who has chin whiskers, with stripes on his trousers. . . . I see through him a young man just pausing on the threshold of his life. I see through him, gibbeted there, a red-blooded youth, the youth of my country, the blood of my nation, the blood of civilization. I look through the old man, Uncle Sam, outstretched upon the gibbet, and I see his son not given an opportunity to be crucified but only given an opportunity to be murdered in mass formation. I see my country going down into a holocaust of hell where others have been bleeding for centuries. . . ."

As the debate dragged on, Majority Leader Alben Barkley of Kentucky calculated that the opposition would scrape barrel-bottom in a few days.

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