National Affairs: The Speaker

A good place for a citizen to test his faith in democracy is the gallery of the U. S. House of Representatives. Down below, in that swarm of 435 members, small men, bound by the small necessities of politics, outnumber big men. House debate often sounds like an aimless caterwauling; order, purpose, logic more often than not seem lost in a parliamentary jungle. Yet there is order, of a kind. It is arranged and enforced by a few members: the Majority and Minority Leaders, the chairmen and ranking members of key committees (Rules, Ways & Means, Judiciary, Appropriations)—and above all by the Speaker of the House.

The Speaker of the House since 1936 has been William Brockman Bankhead of Alabama.* His way of rule was not the harsh tsarism of Joe Cannon (1903-11), the rough-&-tumble domination of Nick Longworth (1925-31). Partly from natural bent, partly of necessity, he used the gentler arts of persuasion, parliamentary device, friendship. His pre-New Deal predecessors had special patronage to dispense, and patronage was power. Franklin Roosevelt took away most of the Speaker’s patronage, leaving William Bankhead with no club to hold, no favors to give.

What tall, quiet William Bankhead had left was an unquestioned reputation for integrity, a thorough knowledge of parliamentary rules, a commanding presence. He was ill (heart trouble) when he stepped up from the Majority Leadership to succeed the late Speaker Joe Byrns of Tennessee. Yet he had to shepherd much unruly legislation through the House, keep a restive majority in hand (with the aid of Majority Leader Sam Rayburn who was elected his successor just before the state funeral in the House Chamber) at a time when impatience with Congress, impatience with the delays natural to democracy, was seeping through the U. S. Withal he sponsored some legislation of his own (cotton control, farm-tenant aid, soldiers’ rehabilitation). Loyal to Franklin Roosevelt at every pinch save one (in 1938 he refused to sign a petition for discharge of the Wages & Hours Bill from committee), he let himself dream of being his party’s 1940 nominee for President. He also let resentful delegates to the Democratic Convention in Chicago cast 329 votes for him for Vice President. But his claim to be remembered was that, despite his difficulties and his times, the House under him remained a place to test but not to forfeit the democratic faith.

Death, as it must to all men, came this week to Speaker Bankhead, 66, at the Naval Hospital in Washington.

*Other famed Bankheads of Alabama: the Speaker’s daughter, Actress Tallulah; his elder brother, U. S. Senator John Hollis Bankhead II; his father, the late Senator John Hollis Bankhead, who died in 1920.