AMERICA AND WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 38, 14 February 1941, Page 6

AMERICA AND WAR

THE VITAL BILL

HOUSE GIVES PRESTIGE

AN IMPORTANT WEEK

(By Raymond Gram Swing.)

(World Copyright Reserved by Colum-

bia News Service.)

NEW YORK, February 8.

The large majority by which the House of Representatives ..-will pass the Aid to Britain Bill will send it to the Senate with enhanced prestige. (The Bill was,passed by 260 votes to 165.)

This has reversed the usual procedure by which the House gives foreign affairs a mere dress rehearsal before the Senate puts on the real show. This time it was the House that put on the show.

For the first time since the New Deal's early days White House Democratic Congressmen formed a smooth team, due to the fact that the South, which supplies the majority of Democratic leaders, also is more earnest about the defence and aid of Britain than elsewhere.

In the Senate the Isolationists remain adamant, but the Republicans are no longer trying to introduce a substitute Bill and intend to concentrate on amendments. Setbacks experienced by the Adi ministration were from the United States Chamber of Commerce, which, while not objecting to aiding Britain, objected to. the President's powers, and from the C.1.0., Which has sent a memorandum to the Senate pointing out that that Bill empowers the President to suspend laws safeguarding Labour's rights. Most Congressmen have already made up their minds, but Isolationists i hope that somebody will blunder and permit them to sweep the country with their persuasive wrath. So far nobody has blundered. The Scripps-Howard newspapers seized on the British Ambassador's, Lord Halifax, visit to Representative Bloom, chairman of the Public Relations Committee, but it was a damp squib and failed to explode. LABOUR LEGISLATION. A notable event this week was Henry ; Ford's reduction to a lowly place in American life. He henceforth does not count any more than any other industrialist. His long success in flouting labour legislation, while still doing business I with the Government, is now over. He lust a large lorry contract because he refused to promise to agree to observe the Government's labour standards. It was the Government's way of "cracking down" on Ford's rugged individualism, and Mr. Roosevelt finally deflated him at a Press conference when he said the Govjrnment was prepared to take over Ford's or any other factory in the nation, if needed for defence. j It is no exaggeration o say that the week has been an important one to American democracy, for two Supreme Court decisions made it so. Nothing has recently contributed more to democratic morale than the Court's unanimous upholding of the constitutionality of the wages and hours Act, setting the nation's minimum standards. These minimum standards are now j formally embedded in the nation's | social structure, whereas a minority j oi businass men could have delayed, parried, and obstructed them as long as the Supreme Court had not ruled i on them. j The other decision was the Supreme i Court's reversal of a previous finding that the Government is powerless to prevent products of child labour to enter interstate commerce.

Thus, after 10 years of agitation and effort, the door has opened to the Federal Act prohibiting child labour.