Manger Birth

Last year Representatives were thoroughly embarrassed when Mr. & Mrs. Everett Parker of Newport, Tenn. settled down with their four children in the House gallery, and Mother Parker, undoing her dress, gave her youngest suck. As tactfully as possible the House doorkeeper ushered the jobless family out while Congressmen, torn between personal modesty and political respect for motherhood, felt their ears grow red (TIME, July 8). Last week the luckless Parker family again made front-page news on the floor of the House.

Mississippi's husky Aubert C. Dunn, 39-year-old War veteran who in 1934 defeated Rev. W. Lycurgus Spinks for his House seat, uprose to boom in a bullfrog voice: "I have not been boisterous since I became a freshman in this Congress. ... I have been the recipient of so many kind and courteous favors from my senior colleagues, until it makes me feel fainty. ... I want you to go with me to a place down at 311 D Street, NW, in the city of Washington."

Representative Dunn described how Everett Parker, a fellow War veteran, came to his office last January to ask for food for his family, how he had gone to the Parker home at 311 D St., only four blocks from the Capitol. There Representative Dunn found "this little woman and her babies sleeping in two smutty three-quarter beds in one little room where there were no sanitary facilities; no running water, all huddled there together." Of Father Parker, who has an impediment in his speech and a hernia which prevents him from doing any heavy work, Representative Dunn declared: "This man . . . is not a chap that could become an executive. He perhaps could not do ordinary clerical work. ... In fact I found that he could not even read or write."

Representative Dunn had tried to get work or relief for the poor Parkers. The District authorities, said the Congressman, had told Parker to go back to Tennessee. When it was discovered that "this little woman was about to become a mother again," Father Parker was turned away by the Public Health Service when he asked to have his wife taken to a hospital. Finally Representative Dunn got her a permit to go to a hospital. The Mississippi Congressman continued: "She was told to go back home and there to repose herself as best she could until she came to that particular period in her life which every woman who knows motherhood must face, and then to come back.

"So day before yesterday, if you please, there in this manger, there in this place, a baby girl was born. I took three witnesses with me, and at the same time we saw four other little babies looking out of iron bars begging Almighty God somehow to get them into the sunlight. They were pallid and rat-eaten, so to speak, and a further description of the synthetic maternity ward was beyond human description.

"She had her baby, nobody attending her during hours of labor; nobody by her side then except that man who walked yonder in the war valley where the poppies somehow give off a new blood color to the taproot and make it redder by virtue of the selfsame blood that gave this country birth. And this morning she is there in that manger. Why, she has been feeding all of her babies on oatmeal soup for a week, please God, with the aid of her husband while she lies there without any sort of comfort whatever. ..."

When Representative Dunn paused, Rev. Henry Elbert Stubbs, Representative from Santa Barbara, Calif., leaped to his feet. "This may not be strictly in order," he declared, "but if there are 100 Congressmen here who feel as I do, I would like them to stand with me each to give $1 to this family."

Parson Stubbs had passed the hat before Speaker Byrns mustered up sufficient hardheartedness to point out that it was strictly against the House rules to take up a collection on the floor. By that time, though, Representative Dunn had $44 for the Parkers, had dealt a solid rebuke to Washington's local relief authorities.

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