"We Have to Answer . . ."

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In the final hours before Congress recessed last week, Georgia's Walter Franklin George rose up to speak his mind. He was angered beyond the usual limits of his Georgia courtesy. Congress was bulling through its last day of business, scrambling to go home. But the Senate listened to Georgia's George. Said he:

"Is a majority of the Senate, is a majority of the House, to be forced to do what it does not desire to do simply because the President has vetoed another measure? If so, we are traveling a long way from the road which should be traveled by a legislative body . . . representative of the people. . . .

"The important question is: who has the right to make the laws? Are commissars sitting in the offices of every policy-making official of this Government? You and I cannot excuse ourselves. We will go back to the people and they will say: 'We sent you to Washington to represent us. We did not send [Jimmy] Byrnes, or [Prentiss] Brown, or [Fred] Vinson, or [Marvin] Jones.' And you and I will have to answer to the people. . . ."

Rest, Ruml & Revolt. What would the 78th Congress, First Session, have to answer for?

Its record was a curiously uneven document. It came into being as the people's answer to the wretched 77th, which had botched and boggled its way into history, cursed from coast to coast for its pensions-for-Congressmen, its personal X-cards for gas, its lack of statesmanship.

Among the 531 members of the 78th were 108 complete freshmen, and many another sophomore--men & women to whom Washington itself was a strange, curious place, to whom the actual process of legislation was now shown to be not a mere matter of making a deathless speech, or of voting courageously, but an extraordinarily complicated and wearisome process demanding long hours of excruciatingly boring work.

For three months the 78th did nothing worth recording: it was one of the longest gestation periods any new Congress had ever required. The press went after it hammer & tongs for its inaction while the world burned. But the new 78th poked cautiously along. Besides, there was nothing much to do in the way of legislating on a large scale. "Old Muley" Doughton had the tax bill before his House Ways & Means committee, and after a member had taken sides pro-or-con the Ruml Plan, he could drift on without mental travail--unless he was the serious kind of Congressman who faithfully attended all his committee meetings, answered his mail, ran errands for his constituents.

And that was the point about the new Congress. The new members worked hard at their lessons. They studied the issues carefully, read through the piles of bills and committee reports, asked searching questions, refused to take a senior member's offhand opinion as gospel.

Then the Congress finally bestirred itself. Up came taxes. The people wanted the Ruml Plan of pay-as-you-go tax collection. The President and the Treasury opposed the Ruml Plan. After two months of angry debate, in which, generally speaking, the oldsters supported the President and the new boys were pro-Ruml, Congress finally passed a bill 75% Ruml.

Then came the revolt, the harvest of the new Congress' education. In four short weeks, Congress rained blow after blow on Franklin Roosevelt, overriding his veto, lopping off pet agencies, forcing his hand on domestic issues. If there had been any one issue dominant in the 1942 Congressional election, it was that the people wanted better management on the home front. After five months, the new Congress had seen only worse management.

Unanswered Questions. In throwing off the shackles of a decade of dominance by the Executive, Congress sometimes spoke the will of the people, sometimes struck out wildly on its own. In the next two months back home, Congressmen will find out how closely they have echoed the people's desires.

But Congress left some big questions unanswered. The biggest unanswered question was the Congress' failure to come to grips with taxation. For this the blame is not solely Congress'. The Administration, although asking for $16 billion (later reduced to $12 billion) in added taxes, did not present any plan of its own; in fact, had none.

Consequently, the problem most central to home front stability, the job most necessary to stem inflation, faces Congress on its return to Washington in September. And the brunt of this job will fall on Walter George, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Though the House is constitutionally supposed to initiate tax legislation, of late years it is the Senate's bill that is most likely to become law. One substantial reason for this procedure is Senator George himself.

Old Independent. To the few rampant New Dealers left in Washington, Walter Franklin George is a black reactionary. He would never let an anti-lynching or anti-poll-tax bill come to a vote in the Senate; his influence has, on at least one occasion, spared the Coca-Cola Co., whose head quarters are in his home State, additional heavy taxes.

His record, viewed objectively, is that of an independent. New Dealers have called him the tool of Georgia Power Co., yet he voted for TVA anathema to all Southern utility companies. He was with the New Deal on NRA, AAA, invalidation of the gold clause, Wagner Act, SEC, and the Social Security Act; against it in opposing the Guffey Coal Act, Wages & Hours Act, the Supreme Court packing plan and the 1938 Reorganization Bill.

Walter George, 65, is a thin-lipped, medium-sized man without a paunch. His grey hair, turning white, is neatly combed except in rare moments of oratorical passion. Deliberate, serious and hardworking, dignified in dress and austere in habits, he is the kind of man who does not make up his mind until he has studied the facts. Urbane, he lacks humor. When a wide-eyed press agent informed him some years ago that he had been made honorary president of the Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters George, the Senator replied: "Why not just call them by their right name?"

The Simple Life. In Washington, Senator George lives with his wife in a three-room apartment in the Mayflower Hotel. (Their two sons, Lieut. Heard F. George of the Army Air Forces and Lieut. J. Marcus George of the Naval Air Corps, are married.) The Georges have no maid. Mrs. George, an ample, imperious-looking yet jolly woman--known to all her friends as Miz Lucy--cooks all the meals. The Senator is usually up by 7 a.m., takes a quick shower, breakfasts on orange juice, eggs and fried Georgia ham (his favorite dish), and is in his air-conditioned office in the Senate Office Building by 8:30. His office is a model of neat efficiency.

By 10:30, the Senator is usually at a committee meeting, by noon on the Senate floor. During the afternoon he will stride out of the Senate Chamber back to his office to read bills, reports, memoranda -- mostly on taxes.

An ideal evening for the Georges has the Senator turning the radio on loud, sitting spang in front of it and reading tax reports, while Miz Lucy does needlepoint at a slightly safer distance. The Senator pores over data, laughs at Fibber McGee & Molly (his favorites), dives back to his reports. The Georges dine out infrequently, almost never dress for dinner. Senator George does not own a silk hat. He used to get his greatest relaxation fishing, with cotton caterpillars, in the Flint River near his five-room home at Vienna (pronounced, in Georgia: Vy-enna).

Up from Tenancy. Friends of Senator George, who admire his stern, Baptist-bred rectitude, like to say that he was born poor and will die poor. But he will not die as poor as he was born. His father, Robert T. George, was a tenant farmer, grubbing a scant existence out of the red clay Georgia plain. (Father George, now 90, subsequently made a modest fortune in Florida real estate, lives nearby.) At 16, young George had put himself through high school, won fame as a boy orator. With a law degree from Mercer University (1901) he went to Vienna, a county seat of 2,000, as the place to hang out his shingle. Vienna legend has it that after a few years all the other lawyers worked on Walter George to go into politics, because he had all the business.

In twelve years, he rose from city solicitor to judge of the State Supreme Court, where he stayed five years. He left the bench in 1922 in disgust over crooked Georgia politics when his term still had five years to run.

"God Bless You, Walter." Succeeding to the Senate seat of tub-thumping Tom Watson nine months later, he was re-elected in 1926 and 1932. But his great test came in 1938. His career as something more than run-of-the-mine Senator began on a hot August day in Barnesville, Ga. Franklin Roosevelt had marked him as a Southern conservative to be purged from the Senate. George had opposed the Court-packing bill, and he was too stubbornly independent to be counted on as a 100% New Dealer.

On that day the President came to Barnesville to start the purge himself. With Walter George on the platform, the President pronounced his excommunication. Senator George, cool in a white suit, stepped to the microphone, said: "I accept the challenge."

Said the President, with a smile: "God bless you, Walter. Let's always be friends."

That summer marked a change in Senator George's quiet, dignified campaigning habits. He stumped the State with impassioned speeches. At Waycross, four days after Barnesville, he was in tears most of the time. After his peroration--"I am persuaded that this generation of white Democrats will not let Democracy down in our beloved State"--and the playing of Dixie, most of his audience, too, were in tears.

New Dealers have watched him narrowly, and at times anxiously, ever since; yet not once since then has Walter George let that attempted purge influence his views on legislation. No one has ever charged that Georgia's George has yet cast a vengeful vote. This farsighted forbearance seems more remarkable to others than it does to George; his view is that past differences must not sway honest consideration of the present.

Rapprochement. The war and the accidents of politics brought Franklin Roosevelt and Walter George together again. When Nevada's Senator Key Pittman died in November 1940, Walter George became chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He worked hard for revision of the Neutrality Act and Lend-Lease.

But on questions of taxation and inflation Senator George does not see eye to eye with the Administration. He is in favor of a sales tax, which the President opposes. He favors compulsory savings, which Henry Morgenthau opposes. He opposes subsidies, and about a year ago expressed himself against price ceilings, arguing in favor of increased production of civilian goods to hold prices down through normal competition, and the normal operation of supply & demand. George had raised an alarm over Army spending. He insisted that somewhere, some place, some time, there must be a limit to war spending. He does not do this because he is a pinchfist or is reluctant to win the war, but because he is a man of solid sense, who was raised to respect plain arithmetic. He knows that a public debt of $137,000,000,000 cannot be merely whooshed away by wishful thinking; that some time someone must put cash down on the barrelhead. In brief, war or no war, he does not live in a dreamworld of frenzied finance.

What is Congress? When he and the 530 other Senators and Representatives come back to Washington, the burning questions of Congressional independence and Congressional value will be fresher than ever. In 154 years, Congress has often been the butt. Mark Twain put it savagely: "Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." Artemus Ward cried: "Congress, you won't do. Go home you mizzerable devils--go home!" But Congress is used to brickbats and other forms of political rudeness native to the U.S. scene. Congress knows that it can discount a good deal of the characteristically jeering American attitude toward the elected representatives of the American people. For the U.S. Congress knows--as the American people know--that, in spite of sectional differences, in spite of politics and politicians and party lines, E Pluribus Unum is more than a coin-worn phrase.

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