Face of the Victor

One day last September, in California's Central Valley, Candidate Harry Truman made his political advisers wince with an off-the-cuff attack on hard-shelled Republican Congressman Bertrand W. Gearhart. Said Harry Truman: "You have got a terrible Congressman here. He has done everything he possibly could do to cut the throats of the farmer and the laboring man." Some of his aides, remembering the lesson of F.D.R.'s purge, argued that personal attacks often boomeranged in favor of the target. But wherever he went, Harry Truman never ceased to "pour it on" Republican members of the 80th Congress.

When the count of the new House of Representatives was completed last week, seven-termer Bertrand Gearhart was at the bottom of the wreckage of 75 Republican seats. He was soundly beaten by a man who had never before run for public office: tall, 47-year-old Cecil White, a cotton rancher who campaigned by radio and in his small airplane.

Not every one of the new Democratic Representatives in the 81st Congress owed as much to Harry Truman directly as did Cecil White. But most of them did owe their election to the issues which the President raised in his attacks on the 80th Congress. A few unknowns, who thought they had no chance to win, were swept in. Some, who did not subscribe to all of Harry Truman's campaign promises, were elected because of local issues. But a composite of the new congressional faces showed a political complexion much like Harry Truman's. Representative faces:

HUGH B. MITCHELL, 41, had served two years in the U.S. Senate as an appointee and protege of Washington's defeated Governor Mon Wallgren, but was beaten in the Republican sweep of 1946. A scholarly ex-newsman, his legislative passion is extension of public power projects.

FRED MARSHALL, 42, a lean, hard-muscled farmer, uprooted Minnesota's stubborn Harold Knutson, chairman of the Ways & Means Committee, whose 32 years in Congress had lulled him into thinking he could never be beaten. Marshall, who had been Minnesota's Farm Security administrator for six years, picked up Harry Truman's line, argued that Knutson's 1948 tax-cut bill was "a rebate to the rich."

ROBERT L. COFFEY JR., 30, is a onetime coal miner. He resigned his Air Force lieutenant-colonelcy and his post as air attache at the U.S. Embassy in Chile to run for office in a traditionally Republican district of western Pennsylvania. With little money or organization, but with labor's help in ringing doorbells, curly-haired Bob Coffey, a veteran of 97 fighter combat flights in Europe, strafed five-term Congressman Harve Tibbott's isolationist record. Coffey is one of eleven new Democratic Congressmen from Pennsylvania ; President Truman had campaigned in all but one of their districts.

M. G. BURNSIDE, 49, is a professor of political science at Marshall College in Huntington, W.Va., who failed to win in 1946. This time, with coal miners out in full cry to show John L. Lewis that he could not tell them how to vote, Burnside and three other Democrats toppled Republican incumbents.

JAMES NOLAND, 28, is a small but energetic World War II veteran of Bloomington, Ind. He rallied coal miners and other labor support against five-termer Gerald Landis, who voted for the Taft-Hartley law and who was in line, if elected, to become chairman of the Labor Committee. The Democratic gain in Indiana: five seats.

The pattern was the same across the land. Harry Truman's home state of Missouri elected RICHARD BOLLING, 32, a New Deal zealot who campaigned for repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act; his home district named LEONARD IRVING, 50, a labor leader.

This week, with a few changes still possible because of recounts, the House score for the 81st Congress stood at 263 Democrats, 171 Republicans, 1 American Laborite. The final Senate count: Democrats 54 (up 9), Republicans 42.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.