THE CONGRESS: Chairman & Cockroaches

• Share

Happy last September was Simon Moulton Hamlin, lantern-jawed, 240-lb. strawberry farmer, when Maine's First District elected him its first Democratic Congressman in some 70 years. Happy was he last month when, at 68, he married the only woman who had ever been a census supervisor in Maine. Arriving in Washington a week later he happily informed interviewers that he had no intention of abiding by the House tradition of silence for first-termers. Twanged he: "I'm almost always foolish enough to speechify."*

The precedent-breaking Representative was assigned to the House Memorials Committee, whose duty it is to compose sonorous resolutions of mourning on the deaths of Congressmen or notables. Because its other Democratic member was otherwise occupied, Congressman Hamlin was named the Committee's chairman. It was the first time in House history that a first-termer had been honored with a committee chairmanship, but the Gentleman from Maine did not rejoice. All one day last week eight large Negro charwomen toiled to prepare for him the House Office Building suite of the Memorials Committee chairman. But in his old office Congressman Hamlin mourned: "I just got the cockroaches cleaned out of this office and now I've got to move into another and fight 'em there."