Hundred Days

(See front cover)

In 100 days Napoleon gained and lost an empire. In 100 days the 73rd Congress patched together the crumbling U. S. banking system, set up the $2,000,000,000 Home Owners' Loan Corp., created NRA, substituted beer for Prohibition, confiscated all the gold in the U. S., appropriated $3,300,000.000 for public works, established CCC, TVA, FERA. AAA, cut veterans' pensions and, for good measure, put J. P. Morgan on the witness stand and a midget on his knee.

In 100 days, ending last week, the 74th Congress had passed only one Administration measure: the $4,880,000,000 Work Relief Bill. The rest of the time it spent on oratory and routine appropriation bills. The Administration measures which Congress has not acted on include:

1) Renewal of NRA.

2) Social security.

3) Regulation of holding companies.

4) A banking bill.

5) Ship subsidies.

6) Regulation for railroads, trucks and busses.

7) Pure food & drugs.

8) AAA amendments.

Up to last week none of these eight planks in the President's New Deal for 1935 had been voted by either House and the country had the definite impression that Congress for some reason was deliberately lying down on the job.

Furthermore, the only one of these measurer up for immediate consideration was the Social Security Bill, which last week started from scratch when the House took it up for debate.

Tanned Man. First thing Franklin Roosevelt did last week when he got back to Washington from his yachting holiday off Florida was to peep under Louis Howe's oxygen tent and say hello to his ailing No. 1 Secretary. Second thing was to summon to the White House Speaker Joseph Wellington Byrns and Chairman Robert Lee Doughton of the Ways & Means Committee to confer about getting the Social Security Bill passed by the House.

When the conferees left the Presidential presence, Speaker Byrns admitted that the "general legislative situation had been touched on." Obviously it had. The conference had lasted two hours. Obviously the President, tanned a deep brown from his outing, had an opinion about the House's activities. The Senate always dawdles, but the House, under the rule of strong Speakers, has a tradition of dispatch. As the tanned man looked up into the rough-hewn face of the successor of Henry Clay of Kentucky, James K. Polk of Tennessee, Howell Cobb of Georgia, Schuyler Colfax of Indiana, James G. Elaine of Maine, Thomas B. Reed of Maine, Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois, Champ Clark of Missouri and Nicholas Longworth of Ohio, he must have been tempted to point out that it was time for the House to live up to its tradition.

Aside from the Work Relief Bill, the House's chief contribution to the general legislative situation has been to throw to the Senate two bones of contention: 1) a Bonus Bill which the President expects to veto; 2) a War Profits Bill which the President expects the Senate tediously to rewrite. The tanned man might have added that Speaker Byrns had better hump himself before he is a year older, for July 20, the Speaker's 66th birthday, lay only 100 days ahead and, unless the House does a lot more in its second 100 days than it has done in its first 100 days, the Administration program will be left high & dry on the rocks of inaction. If that becomes imminent, the Speaker may have to be spoken to more sternly than he was at last week's White House conference.

Palsy. Several things contribute to the House's current attack of legislative palsy:

1) Two years ago President Roosevelt kept Congress moving at blind speed by having his young legalites prepare special legislation, by stamping the bills with a big red EMERGENCY and sending them to the Capitol with snappy special messages. Since 1933, however, the sense of emergency has died down throughout the country and with it the Rooseveltian strategy of demanding immediate enactment by Congress of predigested legislation. Simultaneously the New Deal has passed on into its social and economic reform stage where legislative rush would have distinct political disadvantages. Therefore President Roosevelt has given the House and Senate leaders more rein to do their driving. And as a driver Speaker Byrns is more accustomed to a pair of plodding mules in his native Tennessee than he is to Capitol race horses.

2) The huge Democratic majority of 210 elected last autumn has proved just as unwieldy as observers predicted (TIME, Nov. 19). With no sizable opposition to challenge the majority, party discipline has inevitably grown lax. A change in the rules, whereby 218 signatures to a petition, instead of 145, are now required to discharge a balky committee, has prevented any serious rebellion in the House but something more is needed to prod 319 Democrats forward into united action.

3) The Democratic leader of the House, William ("Tallulah's Father") Bankhead of Alabama, who ought to be the Speaker's chief aide, took to his bed in Washington Naval Hospital the day he was elected (TIME, Jan. 14), is slowly recovering at home.

4) Joseph Wellington Byrns has a heart as big as a water bucket.

Head of the House. Save for James K. Polk, no Speaker of the House has ever become President of the U. S. But the roster of speakers since 1789 is a roster of men who have left their mark on U. S. history. In legislative power and prestige, the job is second in importance only to that of the Presidency itself. A good strong speaker, like "Tsar" Reed or "Uncle Joe" Cannon or "Nick" Longworth, can give the House the kind of self-discipline it needs to do its best work. In such company now is enshrined Joseph Wellington Byrns but with a notable difference which last week was enough to concern the White House.

Faced with an unruly party caucus, Speaker Longworth was apt to rock back on his patrician heels and remark with ominous mildness: "Some of you won't be back here next year, and the roll call is going to show who some of them are." In a similar case, a small slit would open in Speaker Garner's cherry-red face and he would say: "There's no use fooling yourselves, boys. The old man's got four aces showing already. You can't possibly call." To face such a situation the best that Speaker Byrns can muster is a heart-rending plea in a high-pitched voice: "Are you going to let them make a fool of your President? Are you going to let them wreck the Administration ? Don't do it!"

For "Joe" Byrns is not the man his fierce eyebrows make him out to be. Senator Borah, whose eyebrows are equally bushy, licks his thumb and smooths them down to polite dimensions. Speaker Byrns lets his grow wild and in so doing they belie him. For 40 years, ever since as a country boy he talked his way into the State legislature at Nashville, he has put a friendly arm around the shoulders of his constituents and told them they "ought to be comin' up to see" him oftener. In 1908 he got himself elected to Congress in place of Nashville's fire-eating Representative John Wesley Gaines but ever since he has dodged political combat. In 1930 he gave up his ambition to be Senator rather than risk a campaign with Cordell Hull for opponent. In 1933 he gave up his ambition to be Speaker rather than risk a three-cornered fight with Henry Rainey and John McDuffie.

Last January when the Speakership plunked into his amiable lap, he was happy. In the Speaker's V12 Cadillac he now rides about, the most contented man in the Capital. No less contented is his wife, daughter of one of Nashville's first families, who now can fulfill her social ambition to sit with him above the salt at Washington's official dinner parties. And "Joe" Byrns, from whose mouth a cigar is rarely missing, seldom buys White Owls or Portinas as he used, to, for the world is only too glad to present the Speaker of the House with fine cigars. For the whole U. S. and its representatives in Congress, gangling Joe Byrns has a warm place in his heart. Even his friends agree that if his heart were a little colder, the House of Representatives might move a little faster.

Body of the House. As head of the House, Speaker Byrns is discomfited only by the fact that he is expected to rule that body. At White House conferences he is often urged by Vice President Garner to use his power, to make "the boys" toe the mark, but there is not even a rambunctious Congressman whom Speaker Byrns has it in his heart to offend by being sternly autocratic. "We'll take care of that all right," he says pacifically. "Don't worry about that."

In the 74th House he has to worry not only about Congressmen who made grief for other Speakers, but also about an unusually vigorous crop of newcomers. The House has a new clown in Representative Percy Gassaway of Coalgate, Okla., who wears cowboy boots, talks loud about fist fights, poses interminably for pictures and calls himself "OF Gassaway, the Oklahoma cowhand."

Oklahoma also furnished Speaker Byrns with Josh Lee. Literally Joshua Bryan Lee, his name like those of other Oklahoma Congressmen is written short on the ballot but his words are long extended, for he was the "national collegiate oratorical champion" in 1916. Something of a poet and artist, he rates today among the most effective speakers in the House. For ten months during the War his oratory was confined to a trench opposite the Hindenburg Line. Fortnight ago when the War Profits Bill was before the House, his oratory burst forth to demand nationalization of munitions plants.

Another Congressional neophyte whom the same bill roused to fury was Maury Maverick of San Antonio, Tex. Youngest of eleven children in the famed family that gave its name to the language as a synonym for all unbranded cattle, he still walks with a cane as the result of his War wounds and flares up, with an eye on the camera, at one mention of the hated name of war.

Perhaps most vigorous of all the House's youngsters is swarthy, little Vito Marcantonio, onetime law associate of Fiorello LaGuardia, who now represents that part of Manhattan which the present Mayor of New York City used to speak for.

With these troublemakers stands John Steven McGroarty, a newcomer of an-other calibre. He is a 72-year-old newspaper columnist from Tujunga, Calif, (publicized as California's poet laureate) whose capacity for troubling the House lies purely in the fact that he is the legislative general for Dr. Townsend and his pension plan.

Arms for the Head. Before his roistering House, Speaker Byrns would be completely at a loss without two arms that help to uphold the Head of the House. One of them is bland, supercilious Representative John J. O'Connor, Tammanyman and brother of Franklin Roosevelt's oldtime law partner. Democrat O'Connor, as Chairman of the Rules Committee, has helped in part to make up for the absence of Leader Bankhead. Only trouble is that Chairman O'Connor is so willing to stiff-arm opposition that he is not overly beloved by the House.

The Speaker's other arm is Lewis Deschler. "Lew" Deschler is neither a Democrat nor a Representative. He is a young, black-haired Republican who was brought to the House by Speaker Longworth. He sits below and at the right of the Speaker, playing the role of House Parliamentarian. Regardless of politics, he holds his job because he is able to advise the Speaker how to dissolve parliamentary tangles as the Administration wishes them dissolved. He shies at photographers and blushes when he talks but is one of the most important people in the House, the brains which make the Speaker seem omniscient.

To these assistants President Roosevelt last week added a third. Charles H. West was a teacher of political science at Denison University when in 1930 he was elected to the House from Ohio. He proved able and was placed on the Ways & Means Committee. Last summer his promising career was cut short when the New Deal picked him as a candidate to run in the Democratic primaries for Senator in Ohio. After Alvin Victor ("Vic") Donahey had handily carried off the honors, the New Deal gratefully found Charles West an $8,000 job as assistant to Governor William I. Myers in the Farm Credit Administration. He still holds that office but last week he was promoted to an unofficial position best described as "Chief Lobbyist for the Administration."

Smart, like other young New Dealers, but a far better politician than most, he had already proved himself useful in securing support for the Works Relief Bill. Last week the President called him to the White House to consult with Speaker Byrns on getting the Security Bill passed. If the Speaker could not lead the House, the President was willing to send a leader from the White House. Thoroughly bucked up, Speaker Byrns shortly spoke up to say that the Security Bill would pass.

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