Word: program
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Abroad. In international affairs, the 81st's record-like the 80th's−was good. Under bipartisan leadership, the Senate approved the North Atlantic Treaty,, the first peacetime alliance with European nations in U.S. history, and a $1 billion program to help arm the alliance. After a seizure of quibbling, Congress authorized a generous $5.4 billion appropriation for EGA. The hobbling "peril-point" amendment was struck off the reciprocal-trade program, and the authority extended two years. The 81st also gave U.S. defense all that the President had asked-and decided that he had not asked enough...
...House. Politically, Congress was considerably more conservative than the President. His leadership was frequently overturned on critical issues by a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats, an unstable alliance which provided no consistent leadership of its own. A Republican-Dixiecrat coalition filibustered and voted to death his civil-rights program. A wider coalition of Democrats and Republicans crushingly repudiated another major Truman election promise: repeal of the Taft-Hartley law. The Senate rejected three of his personal appointees. Congress ignored his request for compulsory health insurance, refused to try the Brannan plan even as an experiment...
...refusals, Congress often showed better sense than Harry Truman in his requests, and sometimes it saved him later embarrassment. When he asked for an anti-inflation program (including wage & price controls, Government authority to build steel plants) at a time when deflation was obviously in progress, Congress brusquely threw it overboard, lock, stock & barrel. His demand for $4 billion in new taxes was similarly ignored; so was his request for $800 million for universal military training...
...Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn: 1) keep Congress in session, let it talk itself out, hold its nose to the grindstone, and blame Republican obstructionism for Congress' inaction; 2) let Congress know that if it got down to work on what was left of the Truman program, it could go home...
There were some failures. The 81st Congress had meanly failed to liberalize D.P. legislation. It had approved six executive reorganization plans submitted by Harry Truman, but ignored the basic reforms outlined by the Hoover Commission. It had failed to authorize funds for President Truman's Point Four program for foreign investments...