Elder Statesman

THE CONGRESS Elder Statesman

In a Mayflower Hotel apartment in Washington lay Carter Glass, dean of the U.S. Senate. Now 87, the distinguished senior Senator from Virginia was frail and silent, enfeebled by age and long illness. Not for more than two years had he answered a roll call on the Senate floor. Virginia's junior Senator, round-faced, economy-minded Harry Byrd, had carried on for both.

Virginia's people had deep respect for Carter Glass; they knew he had a place in U.S. history. Nevertheless, last week Virginia newspapers, respectfully but almost unanimously, were urging the aged Senator to retire.

It started in the Senator's home town, Lynchburg. There, Dr. Robert Douthat Meade, professor of history at Randolph-Macon Women's College, had written an article discussing Carter Glass's long absence from the Senate, pointing out that this left Virginia with only half its proper representation. When the last measured sentence had been written, Dr. Meade sent off copies of the article, for sale, to newspapers throughout Virginia.

The Staunton News Leader bought it, and on Feb. 4 printed the article, ran an approving editorial. Said the News Leader: "It is plainly the duty of Mrs. Carter Glass to make it clear to her husband that his age and physical condition disbar him from further duty in the Senate and to prevail on him to tender his resignation. ... It is imperative that another Virginian . . . willing to fight against the march of radical forces ... be sent to Washington immediately."

Within a few days other Virginia papers reprinted the Meade article, ran editorials agreeing with the News Leader. The tradition-bound Richmond Times Dispatch, long a staunch Glass supporter, regretfully announced: "We join in the call." From the Richmond News Leader and the Alexandria Gazette came dissenting opinions. Able Powell Glass, the Senator's eldest son, who runs the Glass-owned Lynchburg News and the Lynchburg Advance, dutifully gave his readers a report of the discussion, without comment.

Virginia politicos were stonily silent. From grey Mrs. Carter Glass, the Senator's second wife and constant, devoted attendant, came a terse "no comment"; from the onetime Secretary of the Treasury, who had taken his last Senatorial oath at his Lynchburg home, in carpet slippers, came no public response whatever. But this week reporters heard that the question of resignation had been put up to him. The man Franklin Roosevelt once called an "unreconstructed rebel" gave his answer: no.