CONGRESS: Phantoms

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In the echoing rotunda of the U. S. Capitol, when the last creaking footstep of the final tourist has died away, when the Capitol police unbutton collars and open night-school lawbooks, and the fat rats begin their soft scuttling around the old statues—then, says legend, the great ghosts of the U. S. past meet for nightly debate over the day's issues. One sweet autumn night last week those historic phantoms had a new historic event to talk over. For as surely as if the votes were already counted, as definitely as if the President had already signed the bill, the U. S. had that day finally jettisoned a principle as old as John Paul Jones, a principle for which it had twice gone to war—the freedom of the seas.

Upon a time those words made U. S. bugles blow, flags wave, men march. Last week the bugles were still; the flags gathered dust in museums; many of those marching men had made a separate peace. And into another sort of grave—the pigeonholes of diplomacy—went the principle for which U. S. blood made red puddles in French mud 21 years ago.

No tears fell, no voice was lifted in lament. No one recalled that, rather than face such a "humiliation" of national honor as abandonment of the seas to the belligerents of World War I, President Wilson asked the Congress on April 2, 1917 to declare war on Germany.

The men who quietly closed that chapter last week had begun to write it in 1935, when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee drafted the first, misnamed Neutrality Act. In 1937 they had tied further hobbles on Presidential discretion. Last week, counting any sacrifice cheap that would keep the U. S. out of war, these men-consigned the freedom of the seas to the history books.

A former Klondike Gold Rush lawyer named Key Pittman was primarily responsible. Nevada's Pittman, a tall slender gentleman with a discriminating tongue for fine old whiskey and a talent for bumming cigarets from reporters, has one prime faculty—an ability to keep his mind's eye focused on the ice-cold political realities.

Never minding might-be or has-been, Key Pittman last week ran his committee straight down the track of what-is. He gave only a minimum of lip-service to Franklin Roosevelt's desire for a return to the indefinable fog of international law —where an energetic President could easily get lost from Congress' view. Then he set himself to his dual task: the drafting of a bill which would provide national security insurance against involvement in war, and the spiking of his opponents' guns.

Key Pittman believed that the mere question of repeal of the arms embargo was but a minor phase of the problem of national security. But as a practical man he knew how thunderous a drum-roll his Isolationist foes could beat up over that single issue. He set himself to smash their drumheads, roll the drum himself.

When the full committee filed in around the baize-covered table, they found before them one of the tightest prohibition bills in history—a bill in effect forbidding any U. S. citizen from leaving the Western Hemisphere while war raged outside it.