Congress' Week

Harry Truman had called the 80th Congress' D.P. Act "a pattern of discrimination and intolerance." The D.P. Commission had declared it "all but unworkable," because it excluded thousands of Jews and Catholics. In nine months of operation, only 34,569 had been admitted out of a two-year quota of 205,000. Last week an Administration bill to admit 339,000 D.P.s in the next two years under more generous provisions reached the floor of the House.

Discrimination and intolerance soon had a spokesman. Bellowed Texas' Ed Gossett: "The bill rewards the least deserving, the least desirable and the most dangerous of all people who would like to come to this country. . . The cream has been skimmed off those camps time & time & time again," until only "the dregs were left."

Furthermore, D.P.s were all foreigners, and most likely spies and saboteurs to boot. "There is no question in the world but what many of those now in the D.P. camps were planted there deliberately to infiltrate this country," Gossett declaimed. "They came here with the connivance and assistance...of the Red governments from whom they have allegedly fled. All of this business about these poor people not being able to go home because they would be liquidated is pure unadulterated bosh."

But many a Congressman had gone to Europe to see the D.P.s for themselves last summer. Member after member, Republican and Democrat alike, rose to dispute Texas Ed. Pennsylvania's James G. Fulton pointed out that the D.P. behavior record was better than that of the U.S. occupation forces. New York's Kenneth B. Keating declared: "They are the most fervid anti-Communists I have ever encountered." To exclude any possible subversives, "there has been set up a truly formidable labyrinth of five screening agencies through which these people must go." Added Kentucky's Frank L. Chelf: "Out of the 200 D.P. camps personally visited...we found only one D.P. in jail...He had slapped his mother-in-law."

The House promptly slapped Ed Gossett and passed the bill with a resounding voice vote. But the bill had a clouded future as it went to the Senate Judiciary Committee. There, by interminable secret hearings, bovine deliberateness, and dogged delay, Nevada's silver-haired Pat McCarran had been earnestly sabotaging any revision in the D.P. restrictions. He had pigeonholed one bill, introduced one of his own which nominally increased the number of admissions but kept all the unworkable restrictions. It was only a one-man show, but so far, it had been enough.

Last week the House also: P: Whooped through a $72-a-month pension for all veterans 65 and over with incomes of less than $1,200 if single, $2,500 if married.

The Senate: P: Received a report from its Foreign Relations Committee unanimously approving the North Atlantic Treaty. The report stipulated (at the insistence of Georgia's Walter George) that the pact give the U.S. President no new powers to send troops into combat without consent of Congress.

P:Heard from Vice President Barkley and Majority Leader Lucas that President Truman was now willing to take the best labor bill he could get. A bipartisan team of pro-labor Senators, consisting of Republicans Wayne Morse and George Aiken, Democrats Paul Douglas and Lister Hill, proposed a substitute for the use of injunctions in national-emergency strikes: in effect, seize the plants instead of the men.

P:Passed legislation to restore home rule to the District of Columbia for the first time in 75 years.

P:Passed and sent to the White House a bill, which the 80th Congress had rejected, authorizing the CCC to provide storage facilities for farm crops--a campaign issue which Truman used with enormous effect in farm areas.

P:Approved a medal honoring men of the Berlin airlift.

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