Word: hendersons
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After two weeks, 200 cigars and thousands of words. Leon Henderson lifted his bulky body from the witness chair of the House Banking & Currency Committee at last week's end, trudged back to his office. The committee was tired of hearing about price control (TIME. Aug. 11), was going home for a vacation...
Politics-as-Usual. Like many another defense project, price control got lost somewhere in Washington's maze of politics-as-usual. When Henderson sat down with the committee fortnight ago, the job of talking the bill through Congress looked easy. His thesis that the nation was "on the brink of inflation" could be substantiated by simple charts: wholesale prices of 28 basic commodities were up 50% since the beginning of the war; from the pre-war level food costs were up 13%, house furnishings 4.7%, clothing 3%. Without the price bill, the U.S. would repeat its experience of World...
...Once Henderson finished, questions and fun began. Although the bill permitted farm prices to go to 110% of parity, farm-bloc Congressmen wanted the figure raised to 120%. Because it provided for no wage controls, right-wing Congressmen thought they saw a New Deal plot to squeeze manufacturers. Republicans and conservative Democrats alike objected to putting control in Leon's New Dealish hands, wanted to create instead a five-man board...
...introduced, the bill was a muddled compromise with which Henderson himself was privately dissatisfied. And he had to defend it against attacks which had nothing to do with the issue...
Comic-Opera Finish. One day red-hunting Martin Dies charged on the floor of the House that Henderson had sponsored Communist-controlled organizations. At the next committee hearing Leon jumped to his feet, blurted that Dies was "not a responsible member of Congress." When Georgia's Edward Eugene Cox described him as "a man operating under the alias Leon Henderson," Leon angrily cited his family tree back to 1800 to prove that he was no alien with an Anglicized name. Winding up like a badly written comic opera, the hearings proved only that politics and economics cannot speak...