(See Cover)
The dew of innocence in its eye, the fires of youth in its breast, the 86th Congress this week was still in the beginning of its beginning. It was the most heavily Democratic Congress since the glad, gone days of the New Deal. New plans, new programs, most of all what columnists have long called "new approaches," hung high like pie in the sky. Any bright young Senator could make headlines by calling a press conference to tell how the U.S. could become the Man in the Moon. Even hard-bitten Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson had become a space specialist, gone clean out of this world.
But as certain as Congress is Congress (and Article I of the Constitution still says that it is), before too many months some of the dew will have dried and some of the fires banked. The U.S., in the wonderful sum total of its governmental parts, will be operating on a reasonably down-to-earth basis. And one of the big reasons will be that improbable stabilizer called the House of Representatives.
Men v. Pinwheels. As a steadying influence, the House is improbable because, by its very nature, it is divisive. From the 64 members of the original 13 states (who thought they had troubles enough), the House has grown to 435 (plus one vacancy). It is divided into 282 Democrats and 153 Republicans.* Or, depending on who is doing the counting, it is divided into 129 Easterners, 120 Southerners, 128 Midwesterners, 58 Westerners. Or it can be divided into 16 women and 419 men. Or 228 lawyers and 207 nonlawyers. Or 261 veterans (including Spanish-American War Corporal Barratt O'Hara, Chicago Democrat) and 174 nonveterans.
In such divisions is the raw material for chaos, and under the pressures of Year 1959 the House might even be forgiven for flying off like pin wheels in 435 different directions. Small chance. In the 170 years of its existence the House, through trial and error (with plenty of both), has developed a remarkable system of self-government, comprised of hard rules and of a hard breed of men who, however else they may differ, live by their rules. The five top leaders of the House have only one thing in common. They can all say with Speaker Sam Rayburn: "I love this House. It is my life." Through the Big Five, both in their personalities and their positions, the House can best be understood:
TEXAS' SAM RAYBURN, 77, the 44th Speaker of the House, has held his office 14 years, far longer than any other man (Henry Clay, elected Speaker his first day, served ten years). Eighth of eleven children of a Confederate cavalryman, Rayburn comes from tough, Bible-reading ("Every bit of wisdom is written somewhere in that book") people, who scratched a living from 40 sun-baked acres of cotton at Bonham, Texas. Folks such as his family, he thinks, are the "real people," and his feeling for them forms the basis of his political liberalism. Since 1913 Rayburn has represented Texas' agricultural (cattle, corn, cotton) Fourth
Congressional District, whose seven counties cover 4,827 sq. mi. from the Red River to Dallas County. Publicly grumpy, egg-bald Sam Rayburn in private is gentle and old-school courteous, presides over the House, at $45,000 per year, with a strange and astute mixture of paternalism and institutionalism. Sam Rayburn has made the House his home, its members his family.