National Affairs: Debate's End

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To the House of Representatives this week came at last the Pittman Neutrality Bill. With it came hordes of newsmen, shoals of tourists, and Franklin Roosevelt's hopes of quick enactment and adjournment. House leaders maneuvered the Neutrality Bill to the floor under technical safeguards that guaranteed swift action. Only a major upset now could plant new barriers in the path of U. S. aid to the Allies — and no upset was expected.

Two men prepared themselves to cushion any thank-you-ma'ams along that road —a slight, stooped Pennsylvania Irishman with grey hair frizzled in a permanent wave, Pat Boland of Scranton; and a short, old-fashioned general law practitioner, perfecto-puffing Luther Alexander Johnson of Corsicana, Tex.

On their small rounded shoulders weighed a solemn responsibility, as the House strategists of a bill that would take the U. S. around an unlit, unmarked curve in the historic road of its foreign policy.

But Mr. Boland and Mr. Johnson, prac tical and earthy men, saw their job as getting out the vote and to their job they swung with vim.

Before the House stretched a week's brass-knuckle debate. Until the last chap ter, the Senate's had been a different and duller story. For three stodgy weeks that body had shifted uneasily about in the un accustomed formal garments of full-dress debate. But last week the Senate, almost to a man, happily shucked its tight collar, stripped off the white gloves. The nodding press gallery awoke, and in five days of catch-as-catch-can heckling the Senate finished its task, passed the Pittman Bill after 26 days and 1,000,000 words of the Great Debate.

Bill. The Pittman Bill, in final Senate form, repealed the controversial arms embargo. But the bill did many other things of possibly greater significance. It provided, following proclamation of a state of war either by the President or Congress, that thereafter no U. S. citizen may travel on the ships of any belligerent named; that no U. S. ship may carry passengers or goods to any belligerent.

Thereafter no belligerent may buy arms in the U. S. without paying cash on the barrelhead. No belligerent may buy other materials until title has been transferred abroad. But the Senate left a large credit loophole in its ban of the purchase or sale of belligerent securities by U. S. citizens. It provided that this ban did not apply to "renewal or adjustment'' of existing debts —which would permit further vast credit extensions.

U. S. ships may carry any goods but arms to any port in the Western Hemisphere south and west of an imaginary fence set around the North Atlantic Ocean; and anywhere in the other world waters. The President may declare any region a combat area—which would automatically ban U. S. citizens, ships, planes from trespassing in that area. Minor provisions bar alien seamen from U. S. entry, mounted arms on U. S. merchant vessels, use of the U. S. flag by foreign ships. Penalties for major infractions: $50,000 fine, five years in jail or both; for minor $10,000 fine, two years in jail or both.