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In Washington, which was warm but not yet sizzling, some congressional tempers sizzled last week like pork fat dropped in a skillet.

In a hearing room of the Capitol, Tennessee's ancient and irascible Senator Kenneth McKellar faced ECA Administrator Paul Hoffman, who had been reported by the morning papers as saying he would resign if the Senate cut any more of the $3.5 billion which the House had allotted ECA for 1950. Said McKellar, chairman of the Appropriations Committee: "Other than giving away other people's money, I wonder what you are doing in Europe ... I think it would be the best thing for the people of the U.S. and Europe if you did resign . . . Why you sent a lobbyist to my hotel this morning and he tried to lobby me. He said you offered him a job in Korea."

Hoffman, controlling his temper, replied, "That is an absolute falsehood." He did not know the man "from Adam's off ox ... I did not offer him any job."

"You are the first man ever to cast a reflection on me," said Senator McKellar heatedly.

The Big Issue. Across the Hill, in a Senate committee room, Mississippi's rabble-rousing Senator James O. Eastland faced C. B. Baldwin, secretary of Henry Wallace's Progressive Party. "Beanie" Baldwin was there to protest an anti-Communist bill. Baldwin, who off the stand said he was no Communist, refused on the stand to answer whether he was one or not. Angry at Eastland's insistence, Baldwin shouted: "You've been fighting against Negro rights ever since you became a Senator."

The Mississippi drawl of Senator Eastland spread through the committee room. Said Eastland to Baldwin, using no initials: "You goddam son of a bitch."

On the Senate floor tempers were better restrained, although the big issue last week was one to strike fire and doubtless would before the argument was over. The Senate had squared off for the showdown debate on repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act.

"The Fist of His Power." What little chance the Administration had of putting over its bill (reenactment of the Wagner Act with a little stiffening) was knocked galley west when John L. Lewis called his coal strike (see below). Propositions for labor bills were sticking out of virtually every other Senator's pocket. But there was not enough support for any one proposition to put it over.

In this climate, the debate got under way. Ohio's Taft spoke from one end of the line: "There may of course be a mandate on the President to request the repeal (of the Taft-Hartley Act), but ... certainly the people did not elect a Congress in any way pledged to [its] repeal."

From the other end of the line spoke Florida's Claude Pepper. In Taft's mellow old age, he predicted, Taft would remember with more pleasure his support of federal housing, education, medical aid, "than he will recall his Herculean success in putting the retarding fist of his power in the face of the multitudes struggling up the ladder of life to enjoy a few of the satisfactions to which the fortunate were born."

Minnesota's freshman New Dealer Hubert Humphrey read a speech 105 pages long. Senators from the industrial East, Senators from the conservative South, were waiting to be heard. It would be a long hot summer in Washington.

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