THE CONGRESS: Toward Freer Trade

An expectant stillness, the silence of men aware that they are witnesses at a moment of history, gripped the House of Representatives one morning last week as members waited for Speaker Sam Rayburn to announce the result of the roll-call vote on the session's most important bill. "The yeas were 317," he intoned, "and the nays were 98." Members gasped and whistled: the House had passed the Administration's reciprocal trade bill by a surprisingly decisive margin.

The House had done much more than okay another lease on life for the Trade Agreements Act, originally passed in 1934 and extended ten times since. Taking a long stride toward freer trade and away from isolationism, the House extended the act for five years instead of the previous maximum of three, granted the President broader trade powers than ever before, including authority to pare tariffs by as much as 10% in a single year (but not more than 25% over the five years). "This is an historic action," said Arkansas Democrat Wilbur D. Mills, the Democratic strategist who guided the bill to victory. "It tells the world that we are not pulling back."

Early this year, with the U.S. worried about unemployment at home, the outlook for freer trade seemed bleak. Only three weeks before the House voted, it looked as if the Administration bill was still in serious trouble. What routed the protectionists against apparent odds was a shrewd, hard-hitting campaign waged by an alliance between the Administration and House leaders of both parties. The major influences:

Dwight Eisenhower labeled reciprocal trade one of the session's three "imperatives," pleaded his case in speeches, meetings with congressional leaders, private sessions with visitors. He got influential businessmen to send the Congressmen letters plugging the bill. He supplied Democrat Mills and House Minority Leader Joseph W. Martin with powerful ammunition: individual letters from the President warning that adoption of the Simpson bill would be a "tragic blunder."

The White House put so much behind-the-scenes heat on wavering Republican Congressmen (who voted 2 to 1 for the bill) that baffled Tariff Lobbyist Oscar R. Strackbein, after betting a month before on a victory for the protectionists, glumly observed: "I have never seen such pressure since the days of Franklin Roosevelt." In the last days before the floor debate, Republicans trudged into Dick Simpson's office to ask him to release them from their promises to vote with him. A vote against reciprocal trade, one explained, would cost him White House support for a bill that he badly wanted for his district. Other helpful Administration tactics: weakening the tariff urge among Congressmen from oil and mining states by announcing a program of voluntary oil-import curbs and a plan to stockpile up to 150,000 tons of U.S.-mined copper (see BUSINESS).