Last week President Hoover had a Relief Bill he could sign. Speaker Garner had his Masses v. Classes campaign issue. The needy had what the White House would have denounced last year as a $300,000,000 Federal "dole." Reconstruction Finance Corp. had an increase of $1,800,000,000 in its capital. Private industry and individuals had an oblique chance to borrow from the Government. Taxpayers had a peephole through which to identify R. F. C. borrowers. And the country at large had a four-month rest from Congress.
Passage of the revised relief bill took five days, compared with five weeks spent on the bill President Hoover vetoed fortnight ago because, at Speaker Garner's insistence, it opened the R. F. C. to individual loans. The new measure, largely a duplicate of the original Wagner bill, contained the following principal provisions:
1) $1,500,000,000 for R. F. C. loans to States, counties, municipalities or other public agencies to finance self-liquidating public works like toll bridges, tunnels, water works, slum removals.
2) $300,000,000 in R. F. C. loans to States for direct relief to the jobless, distributed on basis of need but no State to get more than 15%.
3) $322,000,000 for a discretionary public works program, to be undertaken by the Treasury if & when it has the money. This program may never get off paper into stone and steel.
In the Senate Virginia's Glass got an amendment tacked on the bjll providing that "the Federal Reserve Board, by a vote of not less than five members, may authorize any Federal Reserve Bank to discount any individual or corporation paper eligible for discount after it has been determined that the borrower has been unable to obtain credit accommodation." This amendment meant that individuals and private industries could borrow directly from the Federal Reserve if member banks into which Reserve credit had been pumped refused to make loans. But so hedged about with restrictions was this authority for Reserve lending that Speaker Garner shrugged it off as a meaningless gesture compared with his own political plan for R. F. C. loans to all-comers.
Slapping at Charles Gates Dawes, whose Chicago bank got an $80,000,000 loan shortly after he resigned the R. F. C. presidency (TIME, July 4 & 18), the Senate forbade any advance to any institution with which any onetime R. F. C. director had been connected in the preceding year.
A House amendment, invented by Speaker Garner and sponsored by Representative Rainey of Illinois, the white-tufted Democratic floor leader, startlingly proposed that the R. F. C. report to Congress each month the names of borrowers, the amount and interest rate of each loan. Because all Government reports to Congress traditionally become public records, such a proposal could mean nothing less than full publicity for R. F. C. activities. When this amendment came to a House vote, the balloting stood 169-to-169. For the first time this session Speaker Garner had the satisfaction of breaking the tie, putting the publicity amendment into the bill.