The opening rounds were fired last week in what may become the great political battle of the second Eisenhower Administration. Principal opponents ranged against each other across a highly polished table in a Capitol hearing room: Texas' Democratic Representative Wright Patman, chairman of a joint congressional subcommittee on economic stabilization, and Federal Reserve Board Chairman William McChesney Martin. Their general subject: inflation. The specific issue: tight money v. easy money in U.S. economic policy.
Wright Patman, nursing (as the Christian Science Monitor noted) "an old-fashioned Populist's suspicion of Eastern bankers," unloosed the...
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