No mellow statesman is fire-breathing Hamilton Fish, since 1919 the chosen U. S. Representative of the 249,589 inhabitants of Orange, Putnam and Dutchess counties in New York. To onetime Tackle Ham Fish, who represents in Harvard football history what the late Big Bill Edwards did in Princeton's, the day is lost that brings no new scrimmage, no fresh fray into which he can charge with windmilling arms, roof-raising voice and not-quite legal logic.
Sharpest possible contrast to loud, big boned Mr. Fish is Virginia's quiet, studious Clifton Alexander Woodrum. If a composite of typical U. S. businessmen could be assembled and varnished, he might look like Mr. Woodrum. The gentleman from Roanoke is milk-mild about everything but the public debt; only New Deal extravagance burns him up.
Last week, to the delight of tourists contemplating the usual spectacle of a Houseful of sleepy fat men, quiet Mr. Woodrum spotted a hole in Ham Fish's position, crashed through it to score standing up. He charged that 37 Republicans and one Democrat, led by Ham Fish, had organized a "propaganda racket that makes the utility outfit and that of Dr. Townsend look like pikers."
Withdrawing the word "racket" on a point of order, Mr. Woodrum said that the Fish organization—the National Committee to Keep America Out of Foreign Wars—with headquarters in Fish's office, using Government facilities and employes, had been sending out appeals for campaign funds on official stationery. The funds were to offset what the Fish committee called "the New Deal war-hysteria campaign" and "to expose these efforts to involve us in war."
Said Mr. Woodrum: "I have never heard of such a colossal propaganda undertaking in the 16 years I have been a member. We have condemned the utilities, we have condemned Dr. Townsend; but at least they had to have offices downtown. They had to employ secretaries. They had to buy typewriters and, at least, they did not set up their committees under the dome of the Capitol."
Pointedly Mr. Woodrum read the record of Mr. Fish's Grand Tour of Europe's chancelleries last August: Fish's arrival in Oslo in the personal airplane of Joachim von Ribbentrop, German Foreign Minister; Fish's proposal to the Inter-Parliamentary Union of a 30-day armistice for the "four great powers" to settle European problems; Fish's statement that Germany's claims are "just." Mr. Woodrum passed over Mr. Fish's modest willingness, expressed in Berlin, to arbitrate the Danzig dispute personally.
Said Mr. Woodrum: "There is no member of this body or any other body who has so unfailingly, so persistently, so regularly, so systematically and so ineffectively opposed the present Administration."