The 79th Sits

When it met for the first time last week, nobody called the 79th a "Victory Congress." That bumptious phrase was tacked to the 78th, which had hoped to help write the peace, had watched Germany's stubborn legions postpone the day of victory. This setback had also changed the outlook for the 79th, which had anticipated in November's piping days that its main tasks would be to organize the peace and to legislate the U.S. back to a peacetime economy. Now the first job was an old job: get on with the war.

The Senate made its transition from old to new in less than an hour. Two by two the newly elected and re-elected marched forward along the worn green carpet to the president's chair, received a quick, hard handshake from Vice President Henry Wallace, whose unmanageable grey hair closed like a shutter over his forehead with each stiff bow.

It remained for newly elected Cowboy Glenn Taylor, the pride of Idaho, to supply the inevitable comic relief. Gathered with his wife & children on the Capitol steps, the wide-open Senator, banjo in hand, wailed his lament. Sample verse:

Oh, give me a home near the Capitol dome, With a yard where little children can play; Just one room or two, any old thing will do, Oh, we can't find a pla-ace to stay.

A posse of Washington landlords offered to accommodate the Senator. (They were probably not aware that his family also owns a saxophone, clarinet, guitar, trombone and piano because they "like to sit around after supper and have a jam session.")

Next day the Senate Republican conference, to fill the two Republican vacancies on the all-important Foreign Relations Committee, appointed New Hampshire's Styles Bridges, whose internationalist sympathies have sometimes been muted by party politics, and Wisconsin's loudmouthed Alexander Wiley, a determined pre-Pearl Harbor isolationist. To international-minded Senators, the new members were not much of an improvement over their predecessors: James J. ("Puddler Jim") Davis of Pennsylvania and Gerald Nye of North Dakota.

The House, to nobody's surprise, reinstalled stocky Sam Rayburn as Speaker. The voters had given him 31 more Democrats (total: 243) than he had wound up the 78th Congress with; the Republicans were down 22 seats to an even 190.

Sam Rayburn did not have too much to say. He spoke briefly, plainly, and the House, for once, kept still and listened. Reminding the members that America's young manhood was making "terrible sacrifices" overseas, he admonished his colleagues: "Let us not act here today, tomorrow, or throughout the coming years in any fashion so that any returning soldier may have reason to think that we have not, while he was offering the supreme sacrifice . . . done our full, our total duty."

The Speaker also had a word about isolationism: "I was not proud of my country after the close of the last war. We walked out on the rest of the world, stuck our head in the sand and said: 'Let the rest of the world go by; we can live here unto ourselves.' Sadly we found out that could not be done."

Democrats applauded. Republicans were notably silent. But everyone rose to cheer his closing words: "I trust, I pray, I hope that we will not fail the world."

Few minutes later Mississippi's rabble-rousing John Rankin brought the House back to its lowest common denominator, gave long life to the Dies Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities.

On this low note the 79th Congress, organized, sworn in and prayed over, took its first recess.

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