National Affairs: 71st's End

• Share

The hour of 12 o'clock having arrived, the Chair declares the 71st Congress adjourned without day.

In tune with the Constitution the bang of Vice President Curtis' gavel ended the session. It and Speaker Longworth's gavel-bang at the other end of the Capitol also ended the Congressional careers of 15 Senators and 78 Representatives who were either defeated in the November elections or voluntarily retired. It ended Big Business' fear of a special session. It ended legislative hopes embodied in some 23,000 measures that did not pass. But, most newsworthy, it ended a one-man filibuster that had tied the Senate into a knot of impotence all that morning.

The filibusterer was silver-haired Democrat Elmer Thomas, 54, of Medicine Park, Okla. Born in Indiana, he has been a lawyer in Oklahoma for 30 years, has grown up with the oil industry in that state. In the Senate oil is his chief interest—the oil of independent producers as distinguished from the oil imported by the big refining companies. He battled for a $1-per-bbl. tariff and lost. He battled for an embargo on oil imports and lost. The close of the Senate session found him tall and stubborn, battling no less vainly for a resolution whereby a Senate committee would investigate the oil industry. Chief objector to this resolution was Pennsylvania's Senator Reed, good friend of Secretary of the Treasury Mellon, whose family controls Gulf Refining Co., which in turn, according to Senator Thomas, fears tariffs, embargoes, investigations. If Senator Reed would not let the oil resolution pass, vengeful Senator Thomas would block everything else.*

The night before adjournment the gentleman from Oklahoma got the floor and continued to hold it through to the end by the simple method of refusing to yield to other Senators. From his backrow seat he talked slowly, steadily about Oil, pausing now and then to catch his breath while fumbling through stacks of papers on his desk. He reviewed the entire industry ; at great length he tried to give his colleagues a concept of ten billion dollars; he talked about Indians; he drawled over long wordy contracts. Nobody listened to him.

Once when a Senator tried to break in to have some postmasters confirmed, Senator Thomas, objecting, reached into a brief case, dramatically pulled out a pair of old overalls,† waved them defiantly. Said he: "These postmasters are not cold and hungry. They're not wearing clothes like these. It's the man recently associated with this uniform I have in view." (After the session Senator Thomas was photographed in his overalls, declared: "This is the campaign issue of 1932, typifying the under dog.")

Vice President Curtis' gavel cut off the Thomas filibuster just as the Senator was apologizing "to the Senate and the country" for taking so much time, and thanking everybody for their "courteous attention."