Wsm-News From Washington

Mother's Best Flower is distributed in the Nashville area by Charles C. Park's Company of Gallatin, Tennessee. The preceding program was transcribed. This is WSM, the National Life and Accident Insurance Company in Nashville, Tennessee. Good morning, friends.

Washington sizzled through another week of hot, humid weather with no immediate date in sight for an adjournment of the first session of the 81st Congress. The temperature here hit ninety-seven on Thursday, with a relative humidity of around seventy percent, and in the language of Rod Brazfield, that really is hot.

During the past week the House of Representatives moved ahead on its legislative program by clearing the calendar of the minimum wage bill, and by the approval of reorganization, plan number to, submitted by President Truman and in line with the recommendations of the Hoover Commission.

Minimum wage legislation was before the House for three full days on the part of the Fourth Day. Before a bill introduced by Representative Lucas of Texas finally was passed and sent to the Senate. Action in the House on the minimum wage legislation is an example of what I consider to be the general character of the present Congress. Early in the year I stated in a press

conference that the present Congress in my opinion was in no sense one that might be described as rubber stamp and that the record clearly would justify such an appraisal. As a matter of fact I consider this perhaps the most deliberative Congress in which I have served. Back to to the minimum wage bill as an example of what I mean. Early in the year Chairman Lezenski

of the House Committee on Education and Labor introduced a bill not only raising the minimum wage to 75 cents an hour for all persons working for companies doing business in interstate commerce, but rather considerably broadening the base of coverage and proposing a number of changes in the Basic Wage and Hour Act passed in 1938. That bill finally was reported