It Wrings Our Hearts, But

Eight weeks after President Truman's request that 2,000,000 long tons of surplus U.S. grains be sent to India's relief, Congress still hemmed, hawed and stalled. Georgia's Dixiecrat Gene ("Goober") Cox and Ohio's Republican Clarence Brown sat on the bill in the House Rules Committee.

While Congress stood still, India's onrushing famine did not. Grain reserves dwindled, and worried officials got set for a repetition of the great Bengal famine of 1943, when so many people starved to death that no one ever properly estimated their numbers--from 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 people. Red China offered to help, though so far it had delivered only promises. Red China would score a propaganda victory if it delivered grain when the U.S. would not.

The pettifogging legalisms of the congressional holdbacks could be most clearly seen in a statement issued by the Republican minority on the House Foreign Affairs Committee: "The plight of hundreds of millions of ill-fed and starving people throughout the world wrings our hearts. We believe that charity is the 'greatest thing in the world' but ... we do not believe that the Congress has the right, under our Constitution, to be charitable with money taken from the taxpayers without their consent."

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