Five Southern Democrats and four Republicans sat smiling at a lady one day last week in the cramped, dim-lit House Rules committee-room on the third floor of the Capitol. The nine smug gentlemen, key bloc of the conservative coalition now dominating the House, could afford to be gracious to hard-plugging Mary Norton, Labor committee chairlady, because they had just finished trampling roughshod over her.
Buxom Mrs. Norton, no tearful, bumbling matron but a toughened politician of Mayor Frank Hague's hard-boiled Jersey City school, well knew what was about to happen. For while her New Deal colleague, ancient Adolph Sabath of Illinois, sat at the head of the long billiard-baized table as Rules Chairman, all eyes watched the committee's real overseer, Eugene ("Goober") Cox of Georgia, head hatchet-man of the conservatives.
Mrs. Norton repeated her plea of many months: that the committee either grant an out-&-out "gag" rule to her New-Deal-approved amendments to the wage-hour law when they reached the House floor, or grant no rule at all. Chairlady Norton, whose crisp black (undyed) hair belies by 20 years her age (64), feared the committee would grant her only an "open" rule. That would let Graham Barden of North Carolina substitute on the House floor his own wage-hour amendments, which are anathema to the New Deal. Mr. Barden's amendments would take 2,000,000 workers out of wage-hour law benefits; permit their employers to pay less than 25¢ an hour, work them more than 44 hours per week.
Only too well Mary Norton realized that Barden's amendments would pass on the House floor with a whoop and a holler, in the present rattlesnake mood of that chamber.
After a confused, bitter session, "Goober" Cox and his eight stalwarts held off action, countered with the proposition that Mrs. Norton's committee confer the next day with both warring factions of organized labor and representatives of U. S. business in an effort to reach an all-around compromise. Trap-mouthed "Goober" Cox knew as well as Mrs. Norton that nothing but hot words would emanate from such a session. So the nine Congressmen smiled, and Mrs. Norton trudged wearily away to arrange the "conference."
At 10 a.m. next morning, only one man knew how hot would be the words at that session. This was Labormaster John L. Lewis, the first—and next-to-last—witness. Solemnly and heavily he sat in the witness-chair, his coal-miner's pallor* heightened by his rumpled white suit, a Havana perfecto gripped deep in his big chops. In his usual low rumble he began to speak. Gradually the rumble rolled up into a basso roar as his jowls filled with rage. He pounded the committee-table till the ashtrays jumped, then exploded in a statement which will be remembered long after the election of 1940:
"This spectacle . . . where the Republican minority, aided by a band of 100 or more renegade Democrats, has conducted a war dance around the bounden, prostrate form of labor in the well of that House, whirling like dervishes and dancing with glee when [it] is able to do something to hamstring labor. . . ."
"All labor asks is ... 25 lousy cents an hour."