Reprocity Renewed

In 1934, when Cordell Hull first submitted his cherished Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act to the House, it got just two Republican votes. By 1937, when it came up for a three-year renewal, Republican sentiment in its favor had shot up 50%--to a total of three votes. In 1940 there were five. Last week, when the House voted 342-to-65 to extend the Act once again, Republicans cast 145 of the "aye" votes and only 52 of the "nays."

As evidence of a change of heart about Secretary Hull's free-trade doctrines, however, the Republican vote was questionable. In four days of debate, the merits of the Act got scant attention. There was only one real issue, hammered home by speaker after speaker. The eyes of the world, including those of Axis propagandists, were turned to Capitol Hill. Would Congress--or the Republican Party--rock the war boat by a vote for isolationism?

Joe Baldwin, dandiacal Representative from New York, sprang the surprise of the week in the House when he produced a letter he had received last February. In it, none other than Harrison Spangler, the plodding Republican National Chairman, had taken time off from damning the New Deal to aver that "with the situation as it is we should not attempt to disturb (the treaties), at least during the war and some time thereafter." New York's conservative Jimmy Wadsworth put his reason even more plainly when he announced that he was reversing his three-time vote against the trade act "solely for the reason that we are at war."

Only major amendment adopted was one to limit extension of the Act to two years, instead of three, so that the next Congress can have a crack at it. But the amendment permitting Congress to reject any trade pact within 90 days after its making--an amendment which would have made it virtually as difficult to get a trade pact as a formal treaty--was defeated by a 3-to-2 vote.

Had the Act been emasculated, notice would have been served on the world that the U.S. was going back to economic isolation and would offer no help in settling postwar economic problems. With the bill past the House, that danger was apparently over. (The bill was sure to encounter some rough weather in the Senate, but seemed more than likely to pass intact.) Perhaps the door was beginning to open a crack for some U.S. help in setting up a workable postwar economy in which other nations would not again be starved into fascism and aggression.

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