Word: 77th
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...77th U.S. Congress was ready this week to throw in the sponge. Its term had begun in the ominously peaceful days of January 1941, when an owlish, cactaceous man named John Nance Garner still presided over the Senate; any hope of ending its term in an aura of statesmanship had now faded...
Counterpoint. No U.S. Congress had ever been on such a spot as the 77th. It was hard to imagine in all the history of parliaments, a time when ordinary men had to grapple with issues of such magnitude; they surpassed the grasp of many a legislator from the creek bottoms. But in its own way-which is not the way of direct approach-Congress tackled them...
Congress is a stubborn body, proud of its rights. Yet the 77th signed away many of its powers to the President. It watched him delegate the powers to administrators and bureaucrats, then fought with the bureaucrats. Its Democrats sniped at Franklin Roosevelt and he at Congress; they cursed him when he failed to help them at election time. Only a few of its members saw war at first hand (notably Minnesota's Melvin Maas, Texas' Lyndon Johnson); but all held a veto power over the progress...
Point. Historians may well marvel at the tasks thrust on the 77th Congress; in no other country were the overwhelming chores of global war thrown on such a heterogeneous group of men & women. Some future Reveille in Washington will record the solemn manner in which Franklin Roosevelt asked for a declaration of war, the triumphant grin on Poll-Taxer Theodore Bilbo's face, the specter of Prohibition unearthed by Josh Lee, the invective poured out by Montana's Burton Wheeler, the ringing periods of Visitor Winston Churchill's oration in the House Chamber, the turbulent, sweaty, exhausting...
...casual visitor in the House gallery could have guessed that a critical moment of the 77th Congress was at hand. Speaker Rayburn merely drawled: "The question is on agreeing to the motion of the gentleman from Missouri." There was no debate. As casually as if it were considering a new post office, the House voted 205-128 not to agree with the gentleman...