THE HOUSE: The Year of the Incumbent

WHEN the 91st Congress convenes, it will seem like old home week in the House. In one of the most extraordinary elections on record, Americans voted with only a handful of exceptions to return incumbents to Washington. Far from making the net gain of 30 seats that they needed to control the House, the Republicans had gained only four, with a few races still undecided. The most likely party lineup was 245 Democrats and 187 Republicans--almost the same as that of the 90th Congress.

Among the Turnovers. Even in those few districts where seats did change party hands, the results seemed to depend far more on individual personalities and local conditions than on broad national issues--Viet Nam, law and order, inflation, the Negro revolution and the white backlash. In Ohio, for example, Republican Frances P. Bolton was defeated by Democratic Representative Charles A. Vanik. The deciding factor was Mrs. Bolton's age: she is 83, Vanik 55. In Missouri, Democrat James W. Symington, 41, handsome former chief of protocol for the U.S. State Department, took the suburban St. Louis County district that Republican Thomas Curtis left to run for the U.S. Senate. Symington's name did not hurt him: he is the son of Senator and former Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington.

As the returns started coming in from the Northeast, the first incumbent to lose his seat was Connecticut Democrat Donald Irwin. Representing Fairfield County, Irwin was elected in 1958, defeated in 1960, elected again in 1964 and sent back to Congress by a slim margin in 1966. This time he made things tougher for himself by calling Democratic Senator Abe Ribicoff a "creep" for his Democratic convention attack on Chicago police enforcement. Irwin lost to Republican State Representative Lowell P. Weicker Jr., 37, a lawyer who managed to unify the district's liberal and conservative Republicans.

No Fistfights. New Mexico, which has only two Representatives, bucked the stability syndrome by voting both incumbents out of office. Republican Manuel Lujan Jr. upset five-term Democratic Representative Thomas G. Morris mainly on the basis of local economic issues. Republican Edgar F. Foreman, 34, overturned Democratic Representative E. S. Johnny Walker, a member of the House Armed Services Committee. In his political past, Foreman has mainly attracted attention by getting into fistfights with political foes. This time he managed to keep his temper.

All of the party leaders in the House won--and almost all won handily. About the only one who had any trouble was Democratic Whip Hale Boggs of Louisiana, who got into trouble by supporting Administration civil rights bills. Even so, Boggs finally pulled through. Speaker John McCormack won in Massachusetts.

There will be no lack of interesting new faces in the House. One will be that of Democrat Shirley Chisholm, 43, who won in a newly created Brooklyn district. Mrs. Chisholm will be the first Negro woman ever to become a member of the House of Representatives. She defeated another Negro--CORE Founder James Farmer--in a contest in which sex, of all things, was the big issue. Farmer aides conducted an underground campaign based on the premise that "women have been in the driver's seat" in black communities for too long. Negroes did not significantly increase their House holdings, but another who will be watched when he arrives in Washington is Cleveland Democrat Louis A. Stokes, 43, brother of that city's mayor.

For the sports-minded, Republican Wilmer ("Vinegar Bend") Mizell, 38, onetime pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Pirates, won in North Carolina over Democrat Smith Bagley. Also certain to be heard from in the new House is Long Island's ultraliberal Democrat Allard K. Lowenstein, 39, a leader in the effort to land the Democratic presidential nomination for McCarthy.

Perhaps the strangest thing about the 1968 House races was that both parties ran scared. In private conversations, Democratic and Republican incumbents alike suspected that they would not be seeing a lot of their old friends when the 91st convened. But if the House contests proved anything at all, it was that the American voter was considerably less disgruntled with the state of the union than had been thought--or at least that he was not ready to blame his representatives in Congress for it.

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