Step in the Dark

Impatience with the Senate last week had finally risen to a clamor. Columnists, editorial writers, radiorators volleyed & thundered. The isolationists were cursed with bell, book and candle; Administration leaders were wigged and trimmed for their fumbling delay; cartoonists kept a brush in brine for the isolationist leader, Montana's Burton K. Wheeler.

But while praise for the Senate came mostly in the form of loud damns, the Senate did have a case, and its case was democracy's. To veteran Washington observers, the remarkable thing about the Lend-Lease debate was its consistently high level. The self-restraint of the Senators, with but few exceptions; the steadily maintained effort to keep the argument on a plane of morals, of policy, of what-is-best-for-the-U. S.; the hands-off patience of the President; the lack of political tricks and pressures; the general objectivity of the press--all these seemed to be examples of what campaigners have called the American way of doing things, a slow way, inefficient by totalitarian standards, but in which no individual's rights are lost. Said Scripps-Howard's Columnist Ray Clapper: "Doing it the slower way means that when the Lend-Lease Bill is passed it will stand as the deliberate and considerate action of Congress, taken after full and fair hearing had been given to the opposition. No one can say he was gagged."

By last week each side had exhausted its arguments. The proponents of H.R. 1776, although of every belief in domestic affairs, were nearly unanimous in arguing that the world is small nowadays; that in this small world the best defense of the U. S. is aid-to-Britain; that the best way to aid Britain is to pass this bill, granting the President enormous additional powers. The opponents' arguments ranged extremely; but significantly, no isolationist said the-hell-with-Britain.

Montana's Wheeler and Missouri's Bennett Champ Clark pounded away at their theme: This is a war bill; if this bill is passed, the U. S. will go to war abroad and will suffer dictatorship at home.

The Administration had only one bad moment, at the hands of little, black-eyed jumping-jack Allen J. Ellender of Louisiana, who was a Huey Long adjutant at the time the late Kingfish, looking fondly at his henchmen, said: "I can buy & sell legislators like sacks of potatoes." Last week Senator Ellender stood ready to fight for his amendment, which would merely have added a paragraph to the effect that nothing in the measure gave the President any additional authorization to send an A. E. F. outside the Western Hemisphere, wherever that is. Many a mother-conscious Senator stood ready to vote for this. Constitutionally the President has absolute unchallenged power to send the Army or Navy wherever he pleases. But Administration strategists went to work on Ellender, finally persuaded him to accept an extravagantly meaningless substitute amendment: that nothing in the act should be construed to change existing law about the use of the Army or Navy. Even callous reporters gulped at that one; but without a blush Ellender then voted against his own amendment when it was reintroduced.

With the one possibly dangerous amendment broken, with Barkley at last steeled to hold an early-&-late session, the opposition quickly collapsed. Twenty-one amendments were slapped down; eleven minor modifications were accepted. Only one of these was possibly important: an amendment by Virginia's apple-cheeked, apple-growing Harry Byrd, to require the President to get a specific Congressional authorization before disposing of defense articles produced out of new appropriations. The Senate passed the bill 60-to-31.

That Saturday night, as the nation's juke boxes ground out The Last Time I Saw Paris, as millions of Americans danced, drank, played bridge, collided in automobiles, sloshed through the East's thickest blizzard in six years or gave thanks that California's record rain had stopped; as the millions who have as yet felt no impact of the war prayed or played; as on any other Saturday night, with the children bathed and in bed and the old folks nodding by the radio, the U. S. went about its usual concerns, while the Senate took a great step into the dark.

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