National Affairs: New Session, Old Scene

To re-enter a closed house; to stumble over a chair lying on the floor where it was overturned in the haste of departure; to discover the morning paper lying as usual on the sideboard where it was left four months earlier; to find a forgotten quarter-pound of butter in the icebox— such will be the experience of the 74th Congress as it meets this week. This will be no new Congress but merely a second assembly of an old one picking up where it left off Aug. 26. The bills then in committee pigeonholes will be found in the same pigeonholes. The status of legislation on the calendar will not have altered by so much as a comma. The old officers of both Houses will resume their duties without reelection. The same committees will automatically begin to function where they left off. And the same faces will appear on the floor.

Well Leader, A sprinkling of new faces will also be there. In the House will appear Representative Verner Wright Main of Michigan, whose election as an advocate of the Townsend Plan lately stirred politicians (TIME, Dec. 30). The Senate will have a new Farmer-Laborite in the person of Elmer A. Benson, appointed by Minnesota's Governor Olson to succeed the late Senator Schall (see col. 1). But in many ways the most interesting new face in the 74th Congress will be that of Alabama's Representative William Brockman ("Tallulah's Father") Bankhead, who has sat in the House for 18 years. A year ago. on the day before Congress met, he was chosen Floor Leader of one of the biggest Democratic majorities in House history (TIME, Jan. 14). Same day he went to the hospital with one of his repeated attacks of acute indigestion followed by a heart attack. So poor was his health that all last winter, spring and summer he was unable to assume his House duties, and the New Deal had to get along as best it could without a floor leader. Part of those duties were assumed by goodhearted Speaker Byrns, part by aged Representative Edward Thomas Taylor of Colorado, part by un- popular Chairman John J. O'Connor of the Rules Committee. But of able leadership there was little.

Last week Leader Bankhead was back at his Capitol office, promising that this year the New Deal should not go leaderless in the House. Already Washington was filling up with the bigwigs of Congress. Democrats from Speaker Byrns to Senator Harrison were singing the same old tune: a short and peaceful session adjourning in May. If that was to happen it would require much good work on Leader Bankhead's part, and he himself had no illusions. Said he: "I look for a snappy session but not necessarily a short one."