Three New Chairmen for the House

BANKING AND CURRENCY

"I'm the Kraut with clout," joked Henry Schoellkopf Reuss last week after House Democrats voted him chairman of the Banking and Currency Committee. For 20 years as Representative from his Milwaukee district, Reuss had suffered Congress's archaic seniority system, waiting impatiently in the wings for his turn.

An intense, scholarly man, Reuss has had a longtime interest in the abstrusities of fiscal and monetary policy, a passion shared by his wife Margaret, an economics professor. Reuss describes himself as Lincolnian in economics. "The Government should do for people that, and only that, which they can't do for themselves, like standing up to conglomerates and multinationals, and other examples of giantism," he said. "I believe in low interest rates, fair prices and jobs for all. If that be Populism, I'm a Populist."

His program for jobs would call for expanded manpower training and a sizable increase in public-service employment. He would make better use of existing manpower resources by creating regional labor exchanges with computerized job data banks. He thinks that monetary policy must protect interest-sensitive parts of the economy from the harmful effects of tight money. To that end, he thinks that the Federal Reserve must be able to direct more credit toward small businesses and low-and moderate-income housing. To do this, he would encourage banks to make high-priority loans in return for the right to hold lower reserves.

Some Government agencies, he argues, give perverse incentives to export scarce goods like wheat and cotton, and to export credit, which allows rich countries to buy U.S. goods at less than market prices. Last year Reuss suggested the creation of a congressional price-supply ombudsman to act as watchdog over rising prices. Finally, he would finance a tax reduction for low-to middle-income Americans by, among other things, closing loopholes such as untaxed capital gains at death, hobby-farm deductions, and tax-exempt interest on bonds.

Reuss (the name rhymes with Joyce) was born 62 years ago into a Milwaukee banking family headed by his grandfather, a German immigrant. He studied at Cornell University, graduated from Harvard Law School in 1936, and won the Bronze Star in World War II for action in the crossing of the Rhine. Back home, he ran unsuccessfully for mayor, helped organize an anti-Joseph McCarthy drive called Operation Truth, and was defeated in a campaign for the Senate in 1952. But two years later, Reuss stumped Wisconsin's fifth district, making speeches in his fluent German, and was elected to his first term in Congress. His seat has never been in danger since.

It was Reuss who urged the U.S. to break the relationship between the dollar and gold that helped set the stage for devaluation of the dollar in 1971. He also proposed legislation in 1970 that gave the President standby authority to impose wage and price controls. Reuss is a convinced environmentalist. Four years ago, he seized on an 1899 act that prohibited the dumping of wastes into interstate waterways and put it to use in the antipollution movement.

His response to Watergate was original, if ignored: Reuss urged his colleagues to pass a constitutional amendment to recall the President when a three-fifths majority of each house of Congress issued a vote of no confidence.

ARMED SERVICES

No one expects Charles Melvin Price to make waves as chairman of the Armed Services Committee. He is a party stalwart, almost unknown outside the House, the defense world and his downstate Illinois district. Notably, he lacks the arrogance of his predecessor, F. Edward Hebert, and any instinct for newspaper headlines.

Although Price feels the need to hold down defense spending and agrees that the military has not always been candid with his committee, he is not likely to go after its budget with a meat cleaver. His statements on cost cutting are always carefully modulated by assertions on behalf of national security. In his only notable break with the military in a 30-year career, he opposed the bombing of Cambodia after the signing of the Viet Nam truce agreement.

Price has served on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy since it was founded after World War II, and has been chairman of the House Committee on Standards and Official Conduct, normally a quiescent body that confines itself to "advising" members of Congress on ethical infractions.

A quiet, grandfatherly man who is married and has one son, Price is popular and trusted within the House. For 16 terms his constituents from the grimy industrial towns around East St. Louis have elected him to Congress, recently with margins in excess of 2 to 1. Now 70, Price worked as a reporter for several Illinois and Missouri newspapers before his election in 1944.

AGRICULTURE

Thomas Stephen Foley's succession to the chair of the Agriculture Committee represented a particular forking in the pathway of his career. As a protege of Senator Henry Jackson, and a popular Washington Congressman, he might have been tempted to run for the Senate if Jackson resigned his seat to campaign for the presidency. Not now: the revolution in the House against the seniority system has handed him, at age 45, an opportunity to block proposed rises in the cost of food stamps and to urge increased production of milk and cotton while keeping a floor under farm prices.

Foley opposed his predecessor, Bob Poage, over a 1970 farm bill rule denying food stamps to families if any member over 18 refused work. "I don't want to feed bums," he argued, "but neither do I think we should visit the sins of the parents upon the children."

Born in Spokane, Foley received his law degree from the University of Washington in 1957 and taught law briefly at Gonzaga University. Before running for Congress himself in 1964, he worked on the staff of "Scoop" Jackson's Senate Interior Committee. Although he backed military-spending projects like the ABM, Foley was chairman of the liberal Democratic Study Group. Unlike the bellow-voiced, unpopular Poage, Foley is quiet, almost diffident; he has a preference for Mozart and Bach.

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