The Congress: Lyndon’s Full House

The House went sweepingly, spectacularly Democratic.

Despite Republican raids in the Deep South, the Democrats gained a net of some 35 seats. The 89th Congress will line up roughly 290 Democrats against 145 Republicans.

In states as distant and disparate as Colorado, Texas and Connecticut, the Democratic congressional candidates swept clean. By latest count—subject to last-minute change—they had picked up 16 seats in the Midwest alone, including three in Ohio, two in Indiana and Wisconsin, one each in Illinois, Nebraska and North Dakota. The Democrats won at least six of Iowa’s seven seats; many of the victors were young upstarts, notably John Culver, 32, former aide to Teddy Kennedy. The Democratic phalanx marched from Maine, where at least one out of two Democrats triumphed, to Washington, where the state’s congressional composition changed abruptly from 6-to-l Republican to 5-to-2 Democratic.

Connecticut’s only Republican Congressman, Abner Sibal, lost narrowly to the lawyer he had beaten in 1960, Donald J. Irwin. Four New Jersey Democrats defeated Republican incumbents, giving that state its first Democratic congressional majority (eleven seats to four) in 52 years. Louisville’s former Democratic Mayor Charles Farnsley, a lanky eccentric who affects custom-made ante bellum clothes but is nevertheless a popular middle-reader, unseated Republican Incumbent Gene Snyder, who angered the district’s 78.000 Negroes by voting against the civil rights bill. Across the nation, a dozen other conservative Republicans also toppled. Among them: Colorado’s J. Edgar Chenoweth, Indiana’s Earl Wilson, New York’s Katherine St. George and Steven B. Derounian.

Dallas business leaders rallied around former Democratic Mayor EarleCabell, helped throw outfive-term Republican Bruce Alger, a right-winger who had opposed federal aid projects for his area, was rated in a poll of his fellow Congressmen the least effective Republican in the House.

The Deep South was a different story. Not since Reconstruction had Georgia, Alabama or Mississippi sent a Republican to Capitol Hill. But in 1964, the only Republican on Mississippi’s congressional ballot scored the state’s greatest political upset in memory: Prentiss Walker, a hard-shell poultry farmer, ousted William Arthur Winstead, who had been in the House for 22 years. In rural Georgia, Republican Howard (“Bo”) Callaway, a slick-campaigning textile millionaire, topped former Lieutenant Governor Garland T. Byrd, who was hurt by Johnson even though he had refused to go even halfway for L.B.J. In Alabama’s eight districts, the G.O.P. put up candidates in six, won five. The victors: W. Jack (“Thank God for Goldwater”) Edwards, William L. Dickinson, Glenn Andrews, John H. Buchanan, and James D. Martin, who in 1962 had come with-in an ace of upsetting U.S. Senator Lister Hill. All are against civil rights laws. Elsewhere, the Democratic domi nance of the South was undiminished. Florida’s congressional lineup was unchanged: ten Democrats, two Republicans. So were North Carolina’s and Virginia’s, with nine Democrats and two Republicans each. Though their electoral votes went to Goldwater, South Carolina returned six Democrats, Louisiana eight Democrats—and no Republicans. The only Deep South Congressman to vote for the civil rights bill, Georgia Democrat Charles Weltner, benefited from a heavy Negro vote in Atlanta to pull through.

The nation’s biggest city had some of its most fascinating House races. In Manhattan’s 17th (“Silk Stocking”) District, where everybody wears nylons, able, articulate Republican John V. Lindsay, 42, spurned Goldwater and captured a fourth term by a 2-to-l margin over the combined totals of Democratic-Liberal Eleanor Clark French and the Conservative Party’s Kieran O’Doherty. By bagging the biggest G.O.P. victory in New York, Lindsay became a voice to be listened to on the national scene. Democrat Adam Clayton Powell, the nation’s worst Congressman according to a poll of Washington correspondents, easily clobbered three Harlem opponents. Westchester County, Manhattan’s wealthy suburban bedroom, elected a Democratic Congressman for the first time in more than half a century; he is Richard L. Ottinger, former Peace Corps assistant director, who beat the lackluster, conservative incumbent, Robert Barry. But also in Westchester, in the only contest between two newspapermen, Republican Ogden Reid, former publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, scooped Frank Coniff, Hearst’s national editor.

Almost without exception, the most powerful men in the House were returned to office. Speaker John McCormack predictably cleaned up in South Boston. Among other victors: Democratic Whip Hale Boggs of Louisiana; Ways & Means Chairman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas. Rules Committee Chairman Howard Smith of Virginia, Agriculture Committee Chairman Harold Cooley of North Carolina. Top Republicans also breezed in: Minority Leader Charles Halleck of Indiana, Republican Whip Leslie Arends of Illinois, as well as Michigan’s Gerald Ford, Wisconsin’s Melvin Laird and John W. Byrnes, Ohio’s Clarence Brown. In the nation’s only all-women race, Mrs. Poppy X. Mitchell, a liberal Illinois Democrat, lost to Charlotte T. Reid, a onetime singer on Don Mc-Neill’s Breakfast Club (where her stage name was Annette King): Mrs. Reid, the Republican incumbent, has opposed the civil rights bill, the tax cut, the anti-poverty bill and the food stamp program. Patsy Mink became the first Japanese-American woman and the second Hawaii Democrat (along with Spark M. Matsunaga) in Congress. Michigan became the first state with two Negro Congressmen, as Democratic Lawyer John Conyers was elected in Detroit, which also re-elected Negro Charles Diggs Jr.

In Pennsylvania, 26-year-old William Green III, son of Philadelphia’s late, longtime Democratic boss, won a full term in the seat left vacant by his father’s death last December. The retired Navy captain who skippered the Nautilus under the North Pole, Democrat William R. Anderson, 43, cruised into Congress from west central Tennessee by almost a 4-to-l majority. Southwest Oklahoma sent the youngest member to the next Congress, Demo-crat Jed Johnson Jr., a onetime U.S. Senate page and president of the U.S. Youth Council; Johnson is 24. but will reach the minimum age of 25 by the time Congress convenes.