The 73rd Congress: FIRST REGULAR SESSION

RIGHT

One of the few great U. S. statesmen who does not feel his position altered by the shift in his country's political balance is Idaho's Senator Borah, the straddler magnificent. Always he has been just Republican enough to bear the name but always he has been poised on the crux of great issues, waiting until lesser men have spent their arguments, to impart his Olympian conclusions. His last great cry was for an Honest Dollar. Now that the dollar has moved Leftward to 60¢, his cry is for collecting the War debts, a notion that Calvin Coolidge used to play with.

Money having become the paramount issue, it must be startling to sound-money Democrats like Senators James Hamilton Lewis of Illinois and Carter Glass of Virginia to find themselves in the Right-wing bed with an old Republican fogey like Ohio's Fess, the prophet of Harding and Hoover, and Pennsylvania's Reed, the voice of Andrew Mellon. To Senator Lewis, Democratic whip, it must seem most peculiar because it was his unexpected election in 1930 which signaled the return of the Democracy to power, the beginning of a Left shift which was to pass even him. Senator Glass's banking bill of last summer seemed radical indeed at the time, but subsequent events were even more radical. When the body of Democratic conservatives lockstepped to the Left behind the President, Senator Glass stood still in bitter silence.