96 CONGRESSMEN MAKE UP THEIR MINDS.

This article discusses factors that determine the Congressional voting behavior on the repeal of the embargo provisions of the Neutrality Act in the U.S. Voting behavior typically represents only the end product in an involved process which throughout is exposed to a variety of influences. The importance of a continuing assessment of the influences which determine a legislator's votes should not be underestimated. Such factors constitute the real dynamics of the political process and may be viewed profitably in terms of the effects they produce as well as in the circumstances attending their inception. This is the problem which is investigated here. The article talks about the special session of September 1939. A glimpse is given over the field of both voting behavior and the mail. One is driven to the conclusion that basically the mail was a sincere and accurate picture of how the letter-writing electorate felt about the lifting of the embargo. Those who wrote did not want the embargo lifted, basically because they thought it would lead to war, but likewise because they were not certain that all the blame lay on one side, and because they feared the effects, economic, political and moral, of a war boom. It is true that they did not seem to grasp that there was no necessary sequential order in the two phenomena of lifting the embargo and war. As usual, national origins apparently played some part in determining their attitudes. By and large the more wealthy and educated classes were relatively more favorably disposed toward lifting the embargo, but even within these classes, there were numbered more supporters of retention than repeal.