THE CONGRESS: Voice of the 84th

• Share

(5 of 9)

George moved up to the State Court of Appeals, then to the Georgia Supreme Court as an associate justice. He resigned in 1922, and went back to Vienna to handle the estate of his late father-in-law, hard-bitten old Joseph Heard, a cotton grower, undertaker, warehouseman, building contractor and mule trader, whose bouncing, irrepressible daughter Lucy had become George's wife in 1903. One lazy summer afternoon George was fishing on the Flint River near Vienna when he got word of the death of rabble-rousing Senator Tom Watson, bitter isolationist and onetime Populist Party candidate for President. George ran for the vacant place, and won. On Nov. 22, 1922 Walter George took his seat in the U.S. Senate, has been there ever since.

He arrived in Washington as an avowed dry and an outspoken opponent of the League of Nations and of U.S. loans to foreign countries—especially Negro Liberia. He rapidly became less doctrinaire, and moved toward the middle course.

In 1928 George got 52½votes for President at the Democratic National Convention, but he loyally supported Nominee Al Smith, the champion of the wets (George later voted for repeal, and now enjoys sipping a bourbon and water, preferably when his wife is not around). George has been a member of twelve Senate committees and has been chairman of five, but his assignment in 1926 to the tax-writing Finance Committee and in 1928 to the powerful Foreign Relations Committee started him in the fields that became his specialties.

Know-Nothing. After Pearl Harbor George worked with the Roosevelt Administration to raise the billions necessary for war. Only once was there anything that approached a raking-over of past unpleasantness. That came when George was called to the White House to discuss a new tax proposal. President Roosevelt, arguing that the tax would be good politics, said expansively: "Walter, if I know anything at all about Georgia politics ..." Into George's eyes came a warning glint. The President caught the look, laughed sheepishly, concluded hastily: "And I certainly don't."

While George's tax theories have remained nearly constant since his early Senate days, it took years—and personal tragedy—for him to arrive at his present foreign-policy views. He tended toward the isolationist side (although, as in all things, he was far too moderate to rank alongside the Burton K. Wheelers and the Gerald Nyes), he supported the neutrality laws, and argued eloquently against any U.S. participation in Europe's affairs.

On Sept. 1, 1939 George was in a New York hospital undergoing eye surgery. His wife, worried lest he be upset, withheld from him for several days the news that Hitler had marched on Poland. After he learned that Europe was aflame, George realized that the time for neutralism was past, returned to the Senate to help lead the fight for lend-lease. But he was still by no means a convinced long-term internationalist.