THE CONGRESS: Education of a Senator

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As the new Congress tried its wings last week, with the Democrats triumphantly in control, it seemed almost like old times. Old familiar faces, which had all but disappeared from sight during the two-year Republican interregnum, turned up again at the head of congressional committee tables. Veterans of the early New Deal, like West Virginia's demagogic Matt Neely, 74, unpacked in Washington, back from political exile. As in the old New Deal days, congressional corridors were crowded with eager Democratic freshmen, anxious to get their first speeches off their chests.

But this was no New Deal revival: the New Deal, accepted and respectable with age, was by now almost old hat. Harry Truman, in an offhand phrase that was his own, not his speechwriters', had called the new era the Fair Deal. The young bloods of the 81st Congress had not come to Washington, cheering and defiant, to start a revolution. They had come to consolidate one. As the Democrats heard it, what the people really said last November was that they wanted not new highways but a widening of the roads that Franklin Roosevelt had built.

The Fair Dealers. Who were the new men of the Fair Deal? Returning veterans, like Iowa's white-haired, 69-year-old Senator Guy Gillette were freshmen, and perhaps Fair Dealers, in name only. Texas' New Dealing Lyndon Johnson and Tennessee's Estes Kefauver had won their spurs in the. House, and now would wear them in the Senate. Illinois' able Paul Douglas, 56, was a onetime leftish college professor (University of Chicago) and a wounded, decorated Marine veteran.

Most of them shared in common the handful of ideas that Harry Truman campaigned on. They also shared among them a hatful of political savvy. Many of them had been stronger than the ticket, had got to Congress on their own merits. Ideologically, they were not coattail riders of Harry Truman either; they were men who had gotten their political doctrine from the same source: the collection of ideas known as the New Deal.

The man who was the most articulate spokesman of the Fair Deal among the newcomers was Minnesota's brash, bustling young Senator Hubert H. (for Horatio) Humphrey Jr., 37, a hardworking, fast-talking fireball from the Midwest.

The Rough & Tumble. Hustling Hubert Humphrey doesn't fit the usual conception of a U.S. Senator. A glib, jaunty spellbinder with a "listen-you-guys" approach, he talks and looks more like a high-school science teacher who coaches basketball on the side. He has the cyclonic attack of an advertising salesman. A charter member (and this week the new national chairman) of Americans for Democratic Action, a coalition of leftist, non-Communist intellectuals and displaced New Dealers, he has little use for the old party-machine school of politics.