Congress Vexed

In the cloakrooms of Congress the cigar smoke last week was slightly tinged with sulfur. Congressmen, nerve-frayed and work-weary, were hopping mad at the press for "pouring it on," for attacking good and bad members indiscriminately, the fatheads with the intelligent, the timeservers with the conscientious.

Some Congressmen spoke darkly of hauling up some offending editors and columnists before Congressional committees, of ramming through libel laws to shake the press's teeth, of getting radio time to take their case to the people. Isolationists, whose pre-Pearl Harbor record has frequently been thrown back at them, cried for an investigation of an alleged "smear" gang said to be behind it all.

99% Tripe? Congress was not only pained but vexed, feeling that the press had gone so far that the prestige of the legislative branch might be permanently impaired. First had come blasts over pensions, soon followed by attacks on Congressional statesmanship, interlarded with denunciations of relatives on payrolls.

Congressional choler rose high over X cards especially, because Congressmen believed that the press had sicked the public on them, had failed to expose the number of Washington bureaucrats with X cards.

The heat that finally sent Congressmen's rage sky-high was Columnist Raymond Clapper's remark: "People don't give a damn what the average Senator or Congressman says. The reason they don't care is that they know what you hear in Congress is 99% tripe, ignorance and demagoguery and not to be relied on." Protector of The Press. One of the abler men in Congress last week poured out the typical feelings of the better type of Congressmen: "You just can't haul off and indict Congress in general. You say this Congress is an all-time low. Well, I can cite you as good men in this Congress as you could find in any Congress in history.

"This publicity was all started by a minority, but the newspapers and magazines are putting the whole Congress in the category of the minority. You can't make Ham Fishes out of everybody in Congress. It's true before the war there was a hell of a lot of politics and backbiting, but don't forget this--the President got every bill and every damned dime that he asked for, and it always took a majority of Congress to give it to him.

"You take that damned column of Clapper's. What does he expect Congress to do--go out and run the war? And if we start that, what will happen? Why, the newspapers will be the first ones to jump on us and say that we are bitching up the war effort, that we are mixing in stuff that we have no business to, that we ought to shut up and let the Army and Navy run the war.

"Who has been any more zealous protecting the press than Congress? If you didn't have Congress standing between the newspapers and the bureaucrats, bringing out information, making investigations, and protecting newspaper rights to free speech, how long would it be before they'd be printing only what some Government agency told them to print, and nothing more? We know that the newspapers are vital. But so is Congress." Congress, seated on the spot that bankers, brokers, businessmen have occupied intermittently since 1932, found--as they had found--that a uniformly bad press gave it a feeling of discomfort and persecution.

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