THE CONGRESS: Historic Spot

For a few moments last week the House got down to its only business. The roll was called on adjournment. While Speaker Sam Rayburn looked on moodily, one after another 44 recalcitrant Democrats joined with a solid bloc of Republicans, voted down the motion 191-to-148. Jubilant was Minority Leader Joe Martin as he crowed: “Mr. Roosevelt said . . . that he could not go outside of a twelve-hour traveling radius of Washington. If that is proper for the President, then it is proper for Congress.”

That the vote to stay in session was a slap for President Roosevelt, who has been hinting since May that Congress ought to go home, every member knew. A New Deal Democrat, Senator Carl Hatch of New Mexico, put it into words when he told the Senate: “I am not one of those who feel that the Congress must remain in session to watch the President of the United States.”

New Quarters. Adjourn or not, Congress had to vacate its chambers, find a temporary meeting place for the remainder of the session. This week repairs are scheduled to begin on the cast-iron trusses holding up the heavy glass-and-iron roofs over the House and Senate (TIME, Nov. 25). The House takes up its quarters in the bright, modern, octagonal Ways & Means Committee room of the House Office Building across the street. The Senate moves into the cramped, musty old Capitol chamber, with busts of long-dead Chief Justices peering down from niches in the wall, which it first occupied 121 years ago next week.

The Capitol, burned by invading British troops in 1814, had just been rebuilt when Congress moved in on Dec. 6, 1819. In the tiny Senate Chamber (more than ample for the 42 Senators who then occupied it) off the domed rotunda of the Capitol, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John Calhoun spat tobacco juice and rolled out their thunderous periods. Irascible John Randolph of Roanoke used to brandish a tankard of ale as he spoke, while his hunting dog slept under his chair.

Last time the Senate occupied its old chamber was on Jan. 4, 1859, Civil War’s eve. Jefferson Davis, soon to be President of the Confederate States of America, was a Senator, and so was old Sam Houston, who had been President of the Republic of Texas. The Senate by then had 64 members, and the chamber was getting crowded. Two days after Vice President John Cabell Breckinridge led the Senate ceremoniously to its new wing in the Capitol, Senator Stephen A. Douglas defeated Abraham Lincoln, who had tried to win his seat in the Senate.

From 1860 until it moved reluctantly into a spacious new building five years ago, the Supreme Court sat in the Senate’s old chamber. The narrow gallery where spectators had once listened to debates is cluttered up with air-conditioning apparatus. This week, as a solemn Senate crowded into its historic meeting place, a row of seats was found for reporters at the back of the hall.

Work Remaining. There was little left for the 76th Congress to debate. Sam Rayburn told members of the House they could go home, assured them that “if any matters come up that require attention . . . they will be notified in plenty of time to get here. …”

In the Senate two bills remained for consideration. One was the bill to amend the National Labor Relations Act, sponsored in the House by wing-collared Representative Howard Worth Smith of Virginia. The other was the controversial Logan-Walter Bill to subject the rules and decisions of Government agencies to review in the courts (TIME, April 29). Both bills passed in the House with big majorities, both were sidetracked in the Senate. Both were slated for a Presidential veto, if they got by.

The Smith amendments seemed to be safely stalled, since the Committee on Education and Labor had not even found time to study them. But this week, over the protestations of Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley that the Logan-Walter Bill was “crudely drawn” and that a new report on the whole subject of administrative procedure was due to come from the Attorney General’s office on Dec. 1, a recalcitrant Senate called the bill out for debate.

Administration Senators last week threatened a filibuster to keep the Logan-Walter Bill from passing, threatened (if that failed) to tack an anti-lynching amendment on to it, which would force Southern Senators to filibuster. Unless Congress changes its mind and adjourns, the last days of one of the longest sessions in history* may end in a welter of futile harangues among the ghosts of Webster, Clay and Randolph of Roanoke.

*Longest, 354 days in 1917-18. To equal this record, the present session will have to last till Dec. 19.