Mr. Speaker

(See Cover)

About all that little Joe ever did was brush the flies off the horses' big rumps while his old man did the shoeing. Little Joe never actually worked at his father's trade. But he grew up to have his old man's squat, thick-knit build. And in the politician's trade, which Joe Martin took up, he worked somewhat in the manner of a blacksmith--a nail here, a nail there, working most of the time close to the ground.

It was as good a method as any. The voters in his district started sending him to Congress in 1924 and kept it up without a break. His Republican Party was beaten to a frazzle by Franklin Roosevelt, but Joe kept going back. In 1938 he took over the leadership of the beaten G.O.P. in the House. He was thwarted and jeered at, but Joe kept hammering away.

On election night last week Joe Martin sat in the one-room editorial office of his Evening Chronicle in North Attleboro, Mass., his ear at the telephone. His face was puffy with fatigue; the corner of his left eye twitched constantly. He looked even more rumpled than usual. His own campaign for re-election had not been hard. When the State Legislature had redistricted Massachusetts six years ago it had included Wellesley in Joe's district. "A breeding place for candidates," Joe had remarked at the time, thinking of professors; and sure enough, Wellesley had produced a candidate, although not a professor. The candidate was a college woman named Martha Sharp. But she had never worried Joe. "Do you want to take your troubles to a little girl?" Joe asked the Portuguese workers at a Fall River clam boil.* It wasn't necessary to say much more than that. Joe was not worried about his district. What he was tensely waiting for were the results which would tell him whether the Republicans all across the U.S. were back in power.

Hot Night. Connecticut called. Pennsylvania called. Denver called. Republican headquarters telephoned from Washington (the news was good). A radio man set up his equipment and at 11:38 Joe nervously spoke into the mike. "The Republicans are ready," he said.

The little office was jammed. The Boston Daily Globe's 80-year-old political reporter, Mike Hennessy, sat beside Joe scribbling dispatches which Mr. Hennessy's two middle-aged daughters took to the local Western Union office. Several elderly men in overcoats sat in a corner, staring admiringly at Joe. The boys came in from the Elks Club, and the office filled with noise. Joe grinned indulgently. Brother Charlie winked at some of the boys and invited them upstairs for a quick one (Joe does not drink). Mrs. Lila W. Doe, secretary of the Republican Committee for Franklin, Mass., arrived. LIFE Photographer Allan Grant was there to take pictures (see cut). Joe was back on the telephone. "Send out the notices for the Steering Committee meeting," he said, getting down to business.

At 3 a.m. Joe went home to his old house on Orne St. His horse was shod. Joe could hear it galloping through the silent streets of North Attleboro, through old Boston, across Massachusetts, across Connecticut and New York, across Illinois, across Missouri, across Nevada and California, galloping up the coast to Washington.

Cold Dawn. In the Republican dawn, Ohio's Congressman Clarence J. Brown, campaign director, crowed: "We will open with a prayer and close with a probe." But Joe Martin, the blacksmith's son, approached the New Day with a little more caution.

He would be Speaker of the Republican House, and as such he had much more responsibility and a lot of work. The Steering Committees of both Houses would meet this week. One of the party's first, minor jobs would be to throw out some 600 Capitol police, messengers, elevator operators, etc., and distribute that patronage among deserving Republicans. Leslie Biffle, Secretary of the Senate, whom even Republicans liked and admired, would be a casualty of the patronage system.

A majority leader would have to be elected. Charlie Halleck, of Indiana, thought that was already decided: "Hell, I am the next majority leader. Clarence Brown 'hasn't got a chance." But Brown, who is National Committee Chairman Carroll Recce's man, might not know it. Joe had to hammer out harmony.

There was the question of the La Follette-Monroney reorganization bill, passed by the 79th Congress, which reduced the old hodgepodge of 81 Congressional committees to 15 in the Senate, 19 in the House. The 80th Congress, however, was not bound to go through with this streamlining. Many would prefer the old committee system, because there were more chairmanships to go around. A fight was due over that.

And with a new sense of responsibility Joe looked over the men who would run the committees in his House. Were the Republicans in line for the jobs the best the party had? There was, for instance, John Taber of New York, due to head up Appropriations. Bull-tongued John Taber, blaring away in a speech on wage-hour amendments in 1940, had restored the hearing in the deaf ear of the late Congressman Leonard W. Schuetz of Illinois. Schuetz had been deaf since birth. The effect, Schuetz said at the time, made him dizzy. "I had spent thousands of dollars on that ear." But that was one of the few outstanding things John Taber had ever done in Congress.

There was Harold Knutson of Minnesota, due to be chairman of the Ways & Means Committee, which handles all tax and tariff legislation. Before Pearl Harbor, Knutson opposed nearly every defense measure, once proclaimed: "Hitler is displaying a forbearance that might be emulated by statesmen of other countries.

Personally I cannot see much difference between Germany's action in Norway and the New Deal program in this country."

Taber and Knutson had been merely obstructionists when their party was in the minority. Would responsibility sober them up? These were things for Joe Martin to worry about. But Joe does not worry much. He knows how to handle his colleagues. He also knows that he will have some excellent committee chairmen (Jesse Wolcott of Michigan, Charles Eaton of New Jersey, et a/.) and that he will have some good new blood in the House. One of the freshmen, Connecticut's John Davis Lodge, put the problem of the Republicans.

"Now we will be on the inside receiving brickbats, instead of outside throwing them. We must be alert and liberal in the sense of Abraham Lincoln's concept that the individual is the complex heart of society. We must not be a stuffy and pompous party."

The Republican Party had a program--in outline. It was committed to ending any Government controls that were left. It was committed to some kind of housing program, to solving the problems of industrial strife, to trimming the budget, reducing the national debt, and cutting federal taxes. It was also determined to clean out the federal payroll, although this is always a difficult job.

Democratic Congressman Robert ("Muley") Doughton, who surrenders the chairmanship which Knutson assumes, drily observed: "The Republicans have promised more than they ever can accomplish. And now that they have the opportunity we will see just how they do it."

The Horsemen. Democrats had watched the Republicans in action before, and Joe Martin could ponder some of that history. The position he found himself in was not without historical parallel, but it had an unusual aspect. Harry Truman, his party rejected, would have trouble functioning effectively as President. Many of the Executive functions, for all practical purposes, must be taken over by Arthur Vandenberg and Robert Taft in the Senate; Joe Martin in the nation's most representative body, the House.

There was little that Harry Truman could or probably would do to prevent this assumption of power. He could lay about him with his veto, and the Republican majority alone would not be strong enough to override him. But Mr. Truman said he would not follow such tactics. If the Republicans would work with him he would work with them. The major conflicts might well come within the Republican Party. In any case, the Republican legislators, led by Martin, Vandenberg and Taft, will have the task of guiding the nation for the next two years, at least.

They had their mandate, but they could not merely pick up where they had left off in the Hoover days of 1930. The nation, and the world, had changed.

For one, Franklin Roosevelt, after his unprecedented third-term election in 1940, had shepherded the people squarely into the middle of international politics, and the people, after some backing & filling, approved. The Republican horse that galloped across the country on Election Night had had some ghostly riders--Henry Cabot Lodge and "a little group of willful men" who killed Wilson's League; Reed Smoot, Joseph R. Hawley and the high-tariff men who started a world economic war.

Joe Martin approved the bipartisan foreign policy of Vandenberg. But Taft had voted against many of the instruments of that policy: the World Bank and the World Fund, reciprocal trade agreements, the British loan. The continuation of such national policies could crack open and vitiate U.S. foreign policy.

Americans would soon forget why they had turned the Democrats out--good as those reasons seemed to be at present. But they would remember the social gains of the New Deal.

The Boy from Orne Street. Altogether there was a great deal for Joseph W. Martin Jr. to cope with.

Joe was not afraid; he is a man who has the confidence of his friends. Once when President Calvin Coolidge asked which legislator was in charge of a bill in the House and learned that it was "Joseph," Coolidge snapped: "Good. It will be done." Joe is a git-up-and-git, self-made, authentic small-town man.

His mother was Irish, his father was

Scottish; his plain Yankee twang has a mellow brogue. He was born in 1884 in a two-family house across from John Stanley's blacksmith shop, where his old man worked. He stuttered in school and became so embarrassed that he wept. When he got into fights, an old friend remembers, he got so mad he would "cry and fight like hell all at the same time." He delivered newspapers, earned $4 a week. He started a savings account, which he still has (balance: around $7,000).

At high school he played baseball and was a good enough athlete to be offered a Dartmouth scholarship. But he had a job on the town paper. Instead of going to college he stuck to newspaper reporting and bought the Evening Chronicle.

He got himself elected to the State House, later to the Senate, retired from politics for a while to buy a North Attleboro insurance business; got back into politics again and ran for Congress.

He was respected, well liked. He was too busy to get married. He put two brothers through college. He lived with his mother and father on Orne Street. His district sent him to Washington.

Every two years after that they returned him. Roosevelt carried his district in 1936, but Joe won. The Administration poured WPA money in to beat him in 1938. Joe still won. Big-bellied, good-natured brother Charlie said: "He's a conservative Yankee. They'll never lick him. He gets too many Democratic votes. They all like him." Charlie, who likes a good time, added as an afterthought: "I get the sinners, Joe gets the saints."

Middle-Class Man. Joe followed in the steps of that other Massachusetts legislator, dignified, tactful, goateed Frederick Gillett, who capped a long career in the House by becoming Republican Speaker in the Democratic Administration of Woodrow Wilson.

Joe was chairman of the Republican National Convention in 1940 and he might have won the nomination for President if he had been willing to deal with the anti-Willkieites. Roosevelt, who liked him personally, singled him out for personal attack in the famed "Martin, Barton and Fish" crack of the '40 campaign. "I only used your name because it rhymes with Barton," Roosevelt laughingly told him. But Joe had the last laugh. He ran in 1940 and won, and also in '42, '44 and '46. His voting record was "regular"--he voted along the party's line. But as minority leader he helped lay out the line. Opponents charged that it was a line of sullen opposition. Martin defends it as an effort, in general, to keep the Government i) honest, 2) within its democratic prerogatives.

In early pre-Pearl Harbor days he voted consistently against aid to the Allies. But finally, in 1941, he voted for Lend-Lease. He voted for the draft but against extending it in 1941, on the grounds that this was breaking the original contract with draftees. He voted against arming U.S. merchant ships in 1941 because the U.S. had nothing with which to arm them and he believed that the bill would only provoke U-boat attacks.

He voted consistently against parity and subsidy payments. He opposed the 1937 Wagner housing act. He voted for the 1938 Wage-Hour Act. but he voted for most bills (Smith-Connally, Hobbs, Case, the President's emergency strike bill) which sought to put some kind of control over labor. He voted for price controls during the war and against price controls after the war.

He said yes to the British loan. He has voted both ways on questions of reciprocal trade, conscious of a new need for international amity and conscious of his party's tradition of protective tariffs and his district's manufacturing interests.

Joe Martin was less troubled than some by the eternal dilemma of a Congressman: should he vote for the best interests of his district or his country? Martin sees no particular conflict. "What's good for one section is pretty much good for the country," he says.

In his stub-toed policeman's shoes he trotted around the chambers of Congress, a squat little man with a black-browed, square Irish face. Occasionally he slicked himself up. He appeared at Roosevelt's third inaugural wearing his blue serge coat, morning pants, wing collar, black tie and bowler. The rain came down in sheets, filling the little derby's brim.

In Washington, Joe lives at the famed

Hay-Adams House, across Lafayette Park from the White House. He never shuts off his phone at night, with the result that he is frequently awakened early in the morning by constituents demanding favors or just in need of conversation. He doesn't mind. "I go right back to sleep," he says. He is casual, genial and wears well.

His old suite in the Capitol is three dark cubicles off Statuary Hall. He may keep the suite; he hates to move. But he will also have the use of the regular Speaker's office, vacated by Sam Rayburn --a room with vaulted ceiling and elaborate crystal chandelier, thick red rug, pictures of staring, bearded, long-dead Congressmen.

A long-dead President-elect, George Washington, once observed: "My movements to the chair of government will be 'accompanied by feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to his place of execution." Joe Martin had reason to feel the same trepidations. Daily, after Jan. 3, he will climb the stairs to the lofty throne which is the Speaker's chair. More than 71,000 voters in the 14th District of Massachusetts put him there. Millions of Americans will have their eyes on him.

One of his closest friends describes him thus: "He is middle-of-the-road. He was not an opponent of the New Deal because it recognized problems and tried to cure them. He opposed the methods of the New Deal, because he believed the New Deal robbed Congress of its dignity and authority." Now Congress has more authority than it has had since the late '30s, and Joe Martin, the blacksmith's son, the politicians' politician, will be in charge.

*Not to be confused with "clam bake": clams baked over hot rocks and seaweed, preferably outdoors. "Clam boil": a mess cooked in a kettle.

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