National Affairs: The Senate

In almost any smoking car, last week, you could have heard more oratory than in that forensic musnud the U. S. Senate, which sat for two short days and then piously adjourned out of respect for all the Congressional dead since June (six Representatives, two Senators). A survey of the Congressional Record for those two days, however, would give an entirely different impression as to the Senate's industry. The clerk's desk was submerged under a steady drizzle of notifications by the states that they had ratified the liquor and child labor amendments. Followed a downpour of reports concerning almost everything from the progress of the Gorgas Memorial Institute of Tropical and Preventive Medicine to the results of a survey of the cotton velvet and velveteen industry. These were succeeded by a torrent of communications from such organizations as the Rotary Club of Indianola, Iowa (for increased monetization of silver and extension of agricultural markets by use of War Debts), the Alaska Native Brotherhood (protesting relief discrimination), the Bakers' Association of Puerto Rico (praying for the non-application of the flour processing tax), the Holy Name Society at Saginaw, Mich, (asking closer supervision of movies). The volume of these communications was prodigious, but not so prodigious as the cloudburst of bills released by the Senators themselves— mostly individual relief and pension measures. The most arresting example of Senatorial bravura occurred not inside but outside the Senate. Louisiana's blatant Long thought he had taken a wide swing to the Left when he introduced a resolution for Senate legislation which would allow no citizen to keep more than $1,000,000 of his income, or to receive bequests totaling more than $5,000,000, or to possess an estate of more than $50,000,000. This proposal sounded almost Capitalistic compared to what young Senator Gerald P. Nye, as bleak a personality as the plains of his North Dakota, told reporters he wanted to do. Far from permitting an individual to receive $1,000,000 in income, he would prohibit any man from accumulating more than $1,000,000 capital. "At the last session," said he, "I proposed a levy of 55% on fortunes of more than $1,000,000. My disposition now is to make the levy practically confiscatory."

As the session entered its second week, the Senate emerged from its legislative doldrums, prepared to tackle the liquor bill just passed by the House.