Truman v. Congress

At Harry Truman's public declaration of war last week, the Congress scarcely batted an eye. Senators and Representatives, home for the holidays, listened to their radios without visible fear or anger, felt little impulse either to rush into battle or go hide in the hills.

Their first reaction was confidence that the President's attack had hardly hurt them a bit. Events seemed to bear them out.

Day after the speech, Presidential Press Secretary Charles Ross told newsmen that the President had received 100 telegrams, mostly favorable. (Franklin Roosevelt used to get 1,000 after every fireside chat.) Congressional mail showed no evidence of public outrage; nobody came banging at doors or shouting over the telephone.

The Hooper count on the President's plea for a Congressional hotfoot was 37,500,000 listeners. But a survey by TIME correspondents in 40 cities and towns showed that a surprising proportion had not listened to the end, that few had any intention of writing to their Congressman.

All or Nothing. Harry Truman, no political tyro, had apparently made a grievous political blunder. He had asked for the same kind of war which Franklin Roosevelt had fought with Congress ever since the great Court-packing skirmish of 1937. In such a war, a President who stakes everything on public support and fails to win it--in unmistakable terms--runs the risk of increasingly humiliating retreats.

Unless his speech had a delayed-action detonator, Harry Truman might soon have to decide where and how far to make his first backward step.

He was at a disadvantage in fighting Congress anyway. The enemy knew him well. He had been one of them, and they treated him like an old comrade who should know better but didn't. They were quite prepared to ignore his threats, and it is always harder to battle a patronizing opponent than an angry one.

There was another difference. F.D.R., a great political tactician, had the knack of making his speeches stick to a single issue, as sharp as a bayonet. He deployed his strength so that he could usually choose his own enemies. Usually they turned-up in the guise of black reactionaries or members of the lunatic fringe, whom he could belabor with abandon.

Harry Truman, asking for fact-finding, full employment, 65-c- minimum wages and a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee in the same scattered charge, had fired without aiming. At least part of his opposition, it turned out, was composed of men with fair and open minds, or at least men whose motives could not be questioned. Some of the committees which had blocked parts of his program had passed others without a quibble. The villains were not obvious villains.

Nothing at All. Of the three Senate committeemen who blocked the President's proposal for fact-finding and cooling-off periods in labor disputes, none could be called a reactionary. Montana's James E. Murray opposed it because his view coincides with the C.I.O.'s, whose leaders are solidly against the measure. Utah's scholarly Elbert D. Thomas, a painstaking legislator, likes to think twice before he makes a law. Arkansas' J. William Fulbright, one of the heroes of the old anti-isolationist debates, thought "fact-finding" did not go far enough, that unions must be made more responsible.

The President's other bills had often been thwarted in paradoxical ways. One of the Senators holding up the 65-c- minimum is Louisiana's Allen J. Ellender, who fought hard for fact-finding. The House committee bottling up the full employment bill worked hard for Harry Truman on Government reorganization. The decisive vote to kill FEPC was cast by Mr. Truman's own Congressman, Roger C. Slaughter of Kansas City.

There was little prospect, as the echoes of Harry Truman's widely heralded "fighting speech" died down, that Congress would raise minimum wages to 65-c-, that it would give him the full-employment bill he wants, or that it would pass fact-finding legislation unless the strike situation became intolerable.

About all the President seemed likely to get was an extension of price control. For the rest, he would have to revise his program or find better tactics.

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