Last of the First

For 13 years Hattie Wyatt Caraway sat quietly in the U.S. Senate, doing nobody any harm. The small, 66-year-old widow never seemed to change; she always sat still and demure in her billowy Victorian black dress; when spring came, she simply added a white embroidered collar. Her habits and mind were simple and domestic. Outside "Miss Hattie's" door in the mahogany-&-marble Senate Office Building stood a little row of milk bottles. While her male colleagues bellowed and fumed and passed fateful legislation, she sat and worked crossword puzzles; often just sat listening, for hours. When she voted, her voice was hardly audible. In her 13 years she made fewer than 15 speeches,

Her strong interests were, in the main, legacies from her husband, Thaddeus Horatius Caraway, famed for his sharp nose and waspish tongue in Senate investigations. These were flood control, safety in commercial aviation and legislation against lobbies. At his death in 1931, Arkansas politicians could not agree on a successor; Mrs. Caraway was appointed to her husband's office. The next year Huey Long, eager to extend his political domain, brought his sound trucks into Arkansas and helped "the poor little widow lady" to become the first woman elected a U.S. Senator.* Thereafter, Huey Long could usually count on Senator Caraway's vote. In 1938, without Long, she squeezed by for her second elective term. By that time most housewives in Arkansas had received letters, often enclosing Government canning bulletins, from "Miss Hattie."

Enter Fulbright. Last spring she bought a new straw hat and headed back to her home town of Jonesboro for her third try. But this time she faced four opponents, among them Congressman James William Fulbright, who is young (39), well-educated (a Rhodes scholar, he was president of the University of Arkansas from 1939 to 1941), handsome, well-to-do and as friendly as an Arkansas hound pup. Two years ago Bill Fulbright shook hands into Congress by "visiting" with practically everybody in a ten-county Ozark mountain district.

Freshmen Congressmen rarely make a national name except by eccentricity. But Fulbright made Congressional history by writing and getting passed a one-sentence resolution. This, now famed as the Fulbright Resolution, served as a basis for the Republican Mackinac resolution, put the House on record against isolation and prodded the Senate into a similar stand, and thus prepared the way for the Moscow Agreement (TIME, Nov. 8, 1943).

In the Arkansas primary last week Congressman Fulbright led with over 60,000 votes--14,000 more than his nearest opponent, two-time Governor Homer Adkins. This was not quite enough to give him a majority over all his four opponents. To win the Democratic nomination--and, with it, sure election--he still must beat the potent Adkins machine, perhaps reinforced by support from defeated candidates, in the runoff primary next week. But the political career of Hattie Caraway, who ran a bad fourth, was over.

* In 1922 Mrs. Rebecca Felton of Georgia had been appointed to fill out an unexpired term of two days. Other Caraway firsts: first woman to chairman a Senate committee (Enrolled Bills), first to conduct a Senate committee hearing, first to preside over the Senate, first to serve as Senior Senator from a state.

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