Word: 84th
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...fated to be the first winning presidential candidate since Woodrow Wilson (1916) unable to sweep his party into control of the House of Representatives. But while Ike and the Republicans did not seem likely to dent the solid majority of 230 seats which the Democratic Party had in the 84th Congress, they did succeed in changing the voting patterns that have dominated U.S. congressional elections for a century. In 1956 the Republican Party was picking up Congressmen in the cities, losing them in the country...
...That Stuck. The Democratic 84th, glowed House Democratic Leader John McCormack, was "one of the most constructive Congresses in history." Re publican Leader Joe Martin was less ex travagant, but conceded: "It has been a hard-working Congress. It has enacted many meritorious measures, but it has failed to come to grips with many others." Whenever the 84th got too blatantly political, it was slapped ba-k. The Presi dent made his veto stick on the Southern-Democratic-sponsored natural gas bill, al though he was "in accord with its basic objectives," because he got a strong whiff of "arrogant...
...Remember. On foreign aid, the 84th was unconvinced and unconvincing: last week it authorized the spending of $4 billion, some $900 million less than the Administration had originally thought necessary. On domestic legislation, the Congress was sometimes more generous than the Administration thought wise: it expanded the 21-year-old Social Security program, added disability benefits at the age of 50, forced on the Defense Department more money ($900 million) than it wanted for the Air Force. The two bills for which the 84th will be longest remembered: the $33 billion highway construction program, biggest public works project...
...amiable, easygoing 84th Congress enacted more than 800 public laws-many of them minor, but in their sum total making a record that both Democrats and Republicans would find useful during the coming campaign...
Thus was civil rights blocked off for the duration of the 84th Congress and postponed, in effect, for the 85th. "I merely say," Georgia's Dick Russell summed up the prospects for civil rights in the 85th, "that when such nefarious schemes as these are presented in the future-and we hear that they will be-there will be members of the Senate who will resort to every weapon at their command to prevent such proposals being imposed on the people...