THE CONGRESS: No Log-Roll

What Virginia's handsome Representative Clifton Woodrum called "the best job Congress has done this session" was performed last week in the House more through anger than kindness. All set for execution was a log-rolling act wherein the proponents of $150,000,000 more for WPA would vote $250,000,000 for parity payments into the farm bill, in return for rural support of the WPA money (TIME, April 3). But when the farm bill came to a vote, the city men did not make good. New York's radical Vito Marcantonio and Chicago's old Adolph Sabath kept back their forces, without which the farm Democrats were powerless against a strong Republican phalanx. The parity payments perished 204-to-191.

That vote made Virginia's Woodrum, House champion of Economy, sure of another triumph. As Georgia's irascible Representative Edward E. Cox put it, the country Congressmen would cut the city men's throats.

To the floor to dramatize the Relief issue, Representative Keller of Illinois brought a display of WPA rations, a pitiably small pile of butter, prunes, etc., representing what one Reliefer gets in a week. He asked: "What would you do if you had to live on that?"

Economy's Woodrum leaped to his feet. "If I had to live on rations like that," he retorted, "I would write my Congressman here . . . and plead with him to do everything in his power to see that the WPA used the money Congress appropriated for it for food, instead of throwing it away on a lot of foolishness."

Mr. Woodrum got the $150,000,000 cut to $100,000,000, but saved it from being cut still more to $55,000,000. The House overwhelmingly voted an inquiry into WPA.