THE CONGRESS: Blood on the Saddle

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Like bird-dogs on point, newshawks and lobbyists clustered around a saloon-like swinging door in the U. S. Capitol one sticky morning last week. Behind that door sat bald-domed "Little Alva" Adams and the Senate deficiency appropriations subcommittee. Through it filed Government chiefs, great and small, to make their last pleas for money.

Colorado's Adams listened patiently, asked embarrassing questions, stuffed scribbled notes in his pockets, said "No" a great many times. To-Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace he said "Yes," and restored to the Third Deficiency Bill $119,000,000 for crop loans through the Commodity Credit Corporation—an item killed two days before by the slaughter-bent House.

At last Senator Adams popped through the swing-door, worries and pencils sticking out all over him, brushed through the hovering swarm and trotted upstairs to the Senate floor. The bare fact that he had emerged was hot news in Congress-wise Washington.

In the District of Columbia, news of the last Deficiency Bill's report to the Senate floor is treated as the year's best moment to buy a pint or more of hard liquor. Open house is declared in the Capitol from end to end. Even dignified Speaker Bankhead lets word get about that there is cracked ice in his office. Small groups of members gather chummily in cloakroom corners to sing the ancient adjournment favorite: There's Blood on the Saddle.

That afternoon Senator Adams had even more worries than pencils. The clerk's notes on the marble rostrum below John Garner's chair formed the only copy of the Deficiency Bill. Crumpled in Adams' pockets were the only explanations of the unprinted measure. Around his desk, like hawks hovering over a sidehill cornfield, were some 30 Senators intent on: 1) restoring the prevailing-wage principle to Relief, 2) softening the rule furloughing all WPA workers who have been on the rolls more than 18 months, 3) reviving the Federal Theatre project under WPA, 4) authorizing Farm Mortgage Corp. to refinance mortgages when normal farm income yields insufficient margin for debt service.

Forty other Senators sat in the chamber, grimly set on stiff-arming everything that might slow up adjournment. And between his afternoon naps in the cloakroom they had the support of Vice President Garner, who had a ticket to Texas in his wallet.

The afternoon waned, dinnertime came, then night, but still the Deficiency herdsman stuck to the floor: explaining, arguing, wheedling votes. Hot Senatorial tempers kept the galleries lathered with laughter. But Adams and his adjournment-bent majority held their lines, beat off all amendments, brought the Third Deficiency Bill safely through the gauntlet.

The bill now totaled $185,000,000. It had come over from the House at $54,000,000. Next day back it went for final House approval.

But the House of Saturday, August 5, was not the House it had been all week. The fever of killing had subsided. Members' shoes were full of feet; all they wanted was to go home. Throughout the week the slickly oiled Republocratic machine, working efficiently under the Republican strategy triumvirate of Leader Joseph Martin and Michigan's Mapes and Wolcott, had guillotined Administration spending bills while Congressional wives knitted excitedly in the galleries.