"A Pretty Picture"

For long months, Nevada's crusty old Pat McCarran had" fought off the day with secret hearings, long junkets, parliamentary delays and diversionary bellowings. But one day last week he was close to a reckoning: only three hours remained before the long-delayed vote on a new Displaced Persons bill.

Then a very unsenatorial thing happened: the Senate chamber was still, and no one got up to speak. At his front-row desk, McCarran stared stonily at Vice President Alben Barkley in the chair. McCarran's strategy was to allow his opponents to use up all their allotted time, leaving him the last, unanswerable word. The leader of his opponents, West Virginia's chunky, Fair Dealing Harley Kilgore, as stubbornly clung to his allowance of 39 minutes to be used after McCarran. Barkley asked if McCarran wanted to use or to yield any of his time. No, said McCarran, and sat down again.

Another Senator suggested work on another bill; Kilgore objected. "The Senate of the United States should not be placed in this position," cried Arizona's Ernest McFarland. Snapped New Mexico's Dennis Chavez: "A pretty picture is being painted before the country." Finally, outwaited, McCarran heaved himself up, announced that he would spend ten minutes of his remaining 86.

The Amending Game. There are two to five million people illegally in the U.S. right now, he cried. D.P.s would add to unemployment, take housing away from veterans, jeopardize the economy (actually, veteran and labor organizations were behind the bill). Besides, said McCarran, there would be only 11,000 "real" displaced persons left by June; the rest were "criminals, the diseased and those who cannot possibly take care of themselves."

The determined bipartisan majority listened but was not impressed. When voting began, it doggedly beat down one McCarran proposal after another: by prearrangement, a Democrat would answer one amendment, a Republican the next. McCarran tried to cut the total number of admissible D.P.s, to swamp the D.P. quotas by making eligible 8,000,000 Germans expelled from Iron Curtain countries, to keep discriminatory requirements against Jews and Catholics, to ban all D.P. admissions when there are more than 4,000,000 U.S. unemployed or more than 2,000,000 families living doubled up.

When the final vote came, the weary Senate had been in session for close to 13 hours, had heard some 130 amendments offered. There had been 20 roll calls, an alltime record for a single day. Just before midnight, the Senate rejected the last McCarran proposal, adopted the Kilgore substitute bill by a vote of 49 to 25, then passed it 58 to 15.

The Wandering Homeless. The new bill, similar to one adopted by the House last year, would extend the D.P. program until mid-1951. It would admit 359,000 (instead of 320.000 in McCarran's bill) of the world's homeless. It made eligible 5,000 Italians dislodged from the Trieste area taken over by Yugoslavia, 18,000 members of General Anders' Polish army now in Britain, 10,000 Greeks made homeless by civil war, and some 4,000 White Russians who fled from Communist-held Shanghai to the Philippines. Provision was made to admit 54,744 Germans expelled after the war by neighboring nations.

The eligible cutoff date to qualify as a D.P. was advanced from Dec. 22, 1945 to Jan. 1, 1949, thus giving a chance to refugees from postwar pogroms and Communist persecutions, and the requirements that 40% of all admissions be Baits and 30% be farmers were struck off. Despite Pat McCarran, the U.S. at last was about to do a little more for the world's helpless, as both parties' platforms had long pledged themselves to do.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.