National Affairs: Amendment by Rage

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The McFadden speech left the House thunderstruck. The argument that the Moratorium favored international bankers was old and trite but the charge that the President had "sold out" to them was recklessly new and shocking. Red with rage, Democrats as well as Republicans stampeded to the President's defense. One woman member cried "Shame! Shame!'' and almost fainted. Speaker after speaker yelled that the Pennsylvania Congressman had cruelly slandered Mr. Hoover. The word "impeachment" kept bobbing up in the debate.

Congressman McFadden took all this tongue-lashing in poker-faced silence. Senator Reed of Pennsylvania, his lean face twisted into an expression of deep hurt, announced that he had arranged with the Post Office Department to deprive Mr. McFadden of all patronage, to treat him "as if he had died," to secure his defeat for re-election next year. President Hoover pointedly passed over his name in inviting congressional leaders to a White House breakfast, according to his secretariat, "for obvious reasons and by unanimous consent." Refusing to retract his intemperate words, Congressman McFadden boldly asked for a House hearing to offer evidence in proof of his charges.

The House spent eight hours in formal discussion of the Moratorium resolution before putting it to a vote. Galleries were packed and the air tense with nervous excitement but there was little new or startling left to be said by either side. In nobody knows how many different forms the Moratorium's friends repeated that President Hoover had saved the world. Its foes, with no originality, kept insisting that he had done nothing of the sort, that U. S. recovery was not dependent upon European dabbling.

In last June's telegraph & telephone poll President Hoover lined up 276 Congressmen for his Moratorium. But when long after the dinner hour the House voted on the resolution, the President found 317 members on his side. The opposition was composed of 95 Democrats, five Republicans. Thus the Moratorium, amendment and all, was passed over to the Senate.

Outrageous Effrontery. Foreign affairs are not the treat for the Senate that they are for the House. Besides, the international-banker complex is far more acute and articulate in the upper chamber. Thus it was that such a steady, level-headed supporter of President Hoover and Secretary Mellon as Senator Reed broke loose last week in a stinging tirade against those financiers "who have put out so-called private loans to European countries which they would like to see paid by means of cancellation" of public debts. Said he:

"To ask that these private claims should be given priority over intergovernment debts seems to me to be a piece of out-rageous effrontery. . . ."

Sleeves up; Sleeves down. In an effort to link the Moratorium with international finance, Senator Hiram Johnson had induced the Senate to investigate the great bond houses which deal in European securities. Last week the Senate Finance Committee sat down to this inquiry while Senator Johnson rolled up his sleeves for what he confidently expected to be a shocking expose of cancellation agitation. Two of New York's most famed bankers were examined carefully but there were no horrors, no sensations. Senator Johnson rolled his sleeves down in obvious disappointment.