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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.