Back Talk

Attorney-General Murphy's pep meetings for U. S. District Attorneys (see p. 16) and the National Parole Conference were occasions in Washington last week calling for speeches by a man whose thin, shrill voice is seldom heard outside the House of Representatives, though there it commands respect: Representative Hatton Walker Sumners of Dallas, Tex., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Son of a scholarly, war-impoverished Tennessee slaveholder, stringy, hard-jawed Hatton Sumners, 63, is a self-taught authority on law and history (specialty: the 13th Century). When he rises to speak, the House hushes. On an automobile ride in 1937 with the late Majority Leader Joe Robinson, Speaker Bankhead, Majority Leader Sam Rayburn and Senator Ashurst, he announced the first serious opposition to President Roosevelt's plan for altering the Supreme Court by saying: "Boys, here's where I cash in." He would not receive the Court bill in his committee and forced the Senate to consider it first.

Last week Hatton Sumners spoke to the District Attorneys on Democracy. To the Parole Conference he spoke tartly on crime* and passed on to speak even more tartly on Government spending.

As one of the stalwarts of the Economy Bloc, whose leader is his old friend Jack

Garner, Hatton Sumners seized the occasion to talk back to the States whence the delegates came. With clenched fist he cried:

"You States come up here and ask for more and more money. Where does it come from? It comes from the pockets of your own people. We are signing the names of your children, and of children yet unborn, to pay off that 40 billion dollar debt. . . . You people out there look to Washington, but I look to the people. If the time ever comes when the American people are no longer able to operate their democratic system of government, that government will have to find a Hitler or a Mussolini to do its business.

"We get the money from you and even you don't get it all back. All you need to do is look at these big buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue to realize that. We take your shirt and give you a little piece of the shirttail. Then you go back home waving it and shouting 'Look what Uncle Sam gave me.' "