End of Strife

It was evening in the Methodist Building, directly across Maryland Avenue from the Supreme Court, directly across the plaza from the Capitol. His colored chauffer, going off duty, knocked at the door of Senator Joseph Taylor Robinson's apartment. Mrs. Robinson was home in Little Rock and the Senator was sitting alone. Would the Senator like him to stay around, he inquired. No, no, the Senator was quite all right. He didn't need anybody to stay with him.

Majority Leader Joe Robinson had taken it easy that day. He felt a little better. A week before when he opened the great debate on enlarging the Supreme Court he had had a touch of the heart trouble which sometimes bothered him. "No more questions today," he cried. "Goodby!" and stalked from the floor looking pale. Few of his colleagues had known what to make of it. Only yesterday he had had another touch. Sitting in his front row seat on the aisle, he had swung around to listen to Senator Joe O'Mahoney of Wyoming, speaking against the Court Bill. Mr. O'Mahoney was complaining about the rule (no more than two speeches per Senator) which had been clamped down to limit debate. With good nature he pointed an accusing finger down into Joe Robinson's face.

"Doesn't the Senator realize," expostulated Mr. Robinson, "that there is nothing unreasonable in that rule? . . ."

"I will say to the Senator from Arkansas," retorted Mr. O'Mahoney, "that I do not realize anything of the kind. . . . This session assembled in January 1937. Here we are in the middle of July 1937, and this reasonable rule to which the Senator from Arkansas refers has never yet been invoked. Here, for the first time, it is raised."

Joe Robinson grew red and angry. A few moments later his heart began to flutter and pain ran through his chest. He went out on the terrace to sit in a rocker until he felt better. He decided to take a day of rest. He held a conference with Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky and other lieutenants who were leading his Court fight, then returned home although he could not well be spared from the fight.

Month ago when he took the President's commission to find a Court compromise and push it through (TIME, June 14 et seq.) it had not looked difficult. Instead of six new justices at one fell swoop, he had chosen a plan for four new justices, one a year, and had had no difficulty in finding some 54 of the 96 Senators who seemed willing to vote for this modified plan. But during the week of debate, men on whom he had counted had been slipping away. The opposition had been arguing that if it was wrong to pack the Court with six justices, to pack it with one was no better. He needed 49 for a clear majority, but now there were baiely 50 left and he wasn't sure of all those.

Joe Robinson himself had thought the original bill went too far, but he did not see faults in the new proposal. He was a good political soldier. Even if the general's strategy was not quite the best, once the action was started, there was no use finding fault with it. His job was to lick the enemy and he intended to.

Unfortunately the action was not going well. Yesterday when Senator O'Mahoney finished an able speech, there was applause and Senators crowded around to congratulate him. Today while Joe Robinson was resting, old Senator Josiah Bailey, a notoriously ineffective speaker, had also attacked the Court bill. Something had gotten into old Josiah. He flailed the air as awkwardly as usual, yet he produced a cogent, tightly reasoned argument that held his listeners. Some said it was a speech worthy of the great constitutionalist, Borah, at his best. Correspondent Turner Catledge in the New York Times had called it one of the outstanding Senate orations in recent years. Bailey's points had brought cheers from the chamber.

Nor was that all. The same day in the House no less a person than the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Representative Hatton W. Sumners of Dallas, had stepped completely off the reservation. Ever since the morning of February 5 when the President called in his legislative lieutenants--about an hour before it was sprung on an unprepared Congress--to tell them about his Court bill, Joe Robinson had known how Hatton Sumners stood. They rode back from the White House side by side and Mr. Sumners declared, "Here's where I cash in my chips." Today he had finally done so. Having announced that he was going to speak on "the State of the Nation," Mr. Sumners found instead of the usual handful of members no less than 300 in the chamber to listen. He told them flatly that his Committee would not report out the Supreme Court bill even if the Senate passed it. The House enthusiastically applauded his points, rose applauding as he finished.

Joe Robinson who spent most of the day at home did not know about all that, did not know that many political observers after the Sumners speech had decided that the Court bill was licked. He had not given up. He put on his eyeglasses, pulled down a bound volume of the Congressional Record, and lay down on his bed to look up some quotations. Sometime during the hot evening his heart began to flutter again. He got up from the bed. . . .

The following morning at 8 o'clock the Robinson's colored maid, Mary Jasper, came into the apartment as usual. She found Joe Robinson, in pajamas, lying on the floor, dead, his glasses and the Congressional Record beside him.

Honors of "War. Such was the end of a man who had given his whole life to being a good Democratic politician. Born at Lonoke, Ark., the son of a country doctor, he entered politics at the age of 22 and served in the Arkansas Legislature the same year he was admitted to the bar. At 30 he went to Congress, at 40 returned to Arkansas as Governor, and two weeks after becoming Governor was elected to the Senate which he never again left. At 50 he became leader of the Senate's Democratic minority and when he was 60 this minority became a majority and his heaviest burden fell upon his shoulders.

After a Senator's death, the Senate usually appoints a day when his friends may eulogize him. But when the Senate met at noon and his colleague, Mrs. Caraway, presented a resolution for a committee to supervise his funeral, 15 Senators rose one after another to pay spontaneous tribute to Joe Robinson. At the White House President Roosevelt, still in bed when the news was brought to him, rose on his elbow and dictated: "In the face of a dispensation so swift in its coming and so tragic in the loss it brings to the Nation, we bow in sorrow. A pillar of strength is gone, a soldier has fallen with face to the battle."

This mourning was real for Joe Robinson. Although he was not a good fellow in the backslapping line, although he had no facile charm or unusual mental gifts, although he was a downright man and snorted at his opponents, his fighting courage was deeply respected, his grim rectitude unquestioned. He was above demagoguery. Tom Heflin in his time and Huey Long in his, both inspired Joe Robinson's contempt and he voiced it so frankly that he made them his particular enemies. He had two virtues prized above all others by professional politicians: his word was good and his loyalty unswerving. In 1928 he was made the Democratic nominee for Vice President to play a Southern conservative obligato to Al Smith's metropolitan liberalism, but four years later, fate having denied him the Vice Presidency, he became the loyal follower of Franklin Roosevelt. And Robinson who was more conservative than Smith became the defender of Roosevelt who was too liberal for Smith. In fact his loyalty to the President--often tried by swift Rooseveltian shifts of front that left him out on a limb--won Joe Robinson the pity and respect of the men who fought him hardest on the Senate floor. As a soldier he had the admiration of the entire Senate, even of those who thought he was a soldier worthy of a better leader.

They buried him with the honors of war. A dozen blocks from the Capitol is the establishment of one of Senator Robinson's old friends, Undertaker Martin Wellington Hysong. Two weeks ago the Senator was there for dinner. Last week his body was brought to the undertaking rooms two floors below where he had dined. He was dressed in his frock coat and encased in a copper casket stippled over with silver which was stood in the same gloomy corner where the caskets of Senator Walsh and Senator Fletcher stood not long ago. The next morning 15 Senators led by Assistant Leader Barkley appeared at Hysong's. By orders of Mrs. Robinson nobody was to see the body, so they settled themselves in the room across the corridor, where food and drink were brought them and they remained until the establishment closed at 10 p. m., visiting with one another and with some 500 notables (including Marvin Mclntyre representing the President), who called and signed the book.

Next morning Widow Ewilda Gertrude Miller Robinson arrived and gazed her last on Joe Robinson whom she had married 40 years before when she was a backwoods belle and he a 24-year-old lawyer beginning to make good in Lonoke. Behind the casket stood a bank of palms ordered by Bernard Baruch, over it a blanket of orchids, gardenias, gladioli and delphinium, also from Mr. Baruch who had ordered $500 worth of flowers.

At noon Joe Robinson's casket stood on the floor of the Senate only a few feet from his empty desk. The President and his Cabinet occupied a group of chairs at the left of the Senate aisle. On the right sat the widow, family and friends including Mr. Baruch and Harvey Couch, the Arkansas utility tycoon. Senators, Representatives, Justice Pierce Butler representing the Supreme Court, Army, Navy & Marine officers, diplomats jammed the chamber. A soprano sang Lead, Kindly Light, the Reverend ZeBarney Phillips, chaplain of the Senate, read the funeral service. The Reverend James Shera Montgomery, chaplain of the House, pronounced the blessing.

At nightfall the body of Joe Robinson rode back to Arkansas whence he had come, on a special train bearing 38 Senators and a large delegation from the House. The train also carried all 4,000 floral offerings, including wreaths from the Democratic National Committee and the Jefferson Islands Club, from Mrs. James Roosevelt, mother of the President, from President Manuel Quezon of the Philippines, from Japanese Ambassador Hirosi Saito.

On Sunday morning in Little Rock, Joe Robinson was carried for the last time to his home, thence at midmorning to Arkansas' Capitol to lie in state, thence to the First Methodist Church where his funeral sermon was solemnly pronounced. Thunderheads were gathering as his casket was carried from the church. At Roselawn Cemetery his body was committed to the earth in the midst of an electric storm with lightning crashing and 2,000 mourners standing drenched in the rain.

Sorrow & Politics. For a week Joe Robinson had prevented the Senate from adjourning, had closed each meeting with a recess so as not to break the "legislative day," the fiction under which Senators were denied the privilege of speaking more than twice. Mrs. Caraway after announcing the death of her colleague, said, "I move the Senate do now adjourn" and a solemn chorus of "ayes" approved her motion. Thus ended Senator Robinson's drive for the Court Bill's enactment.

If the bill had not been dead the night before, most Senators were sure it was now. Bumbling old Senator Copeland, who loves to parade his medical knowledge, declared in his eulogy of Senator Robinson: "Within a few days, Tuesday a week ago, indeed, I became concerned over what I saw through my medical eyes. Going to his side in the midst of the debate I urged him not to permit his zeal to invite his own destruction. . . . My fellow Senators, I am sorry sometimes that I ever studied medicine. Nearly 50 years have elapsed since I received that coveted diploma but the embarrassment of medical knowledge is that many times it discloses to the medical man in the face and bearing of a friend the warning his dissolution is near at hand. Mr. President, I say in all seriousness to my brethren that the menace is here in this Chamber today. . . ."

Senators feared that this sententious pronouncement was only too true. After hearing it Senator Shipstead went home to bed. Senator Norris had already left Washington for vacation, a very sick man. Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona was seriously ill. Senator King had just recovered from a long sick spell. The health of many another was none too good.

But more important, the heart had largely gone out of the supporters of the Court Bill with the death of their leader. Practical considerations moved other Democrats to feel that the death of Senator Robinson might be a political good fortune for the President, not only giving him the opportunity to appoint anyone he wished to the Supreme Court instead of Senator Robinson who had a virtual claim on the one existing vacancy, but also because dropping the Court fight might prevent a permanent split in the party. The speech of Hatton Sumners, which the House had so vigorously applauded, was full of such sentiments as:

"I am going to talk a little horse sense this afternoon. ... I am going to talk a little about the Supreme Court situation, and I shall try to do it in a very helpful way. ... I am for the President of the U. S. and I am for my country. I do not want to discuss the provisions of the pending bill. I want to direct your attention, however, to the havoc which this bill is now working in the solidarity of the Nation. . . . There is not enough left in this controversy to justify the hurt and the danger of what we are doing. ... As soon as we take the lash from above the heads of these judges over there, some more of them will retire. ... If these advisers who are counseling the President to force that bill into this House under pressure which they may be able to command, when we are trying to preserve strength and unity required to do the Nation's work, if they force that bill into this House for the sake of saving their faces or their hides, they ought not to have hide enough left to be worth bothering about."

Message to Alben. On the morning Joe Robinson was found dead Governor Clifford Townsend of Indiana paid a pre-arranged call at the White House. His remarks to the press in leaving were almost ignored in the excitement of bigger news, but they were not overlooked at the Capitol. Of Indiana's two Democratic Senators, one, Frederick Van Nuys has been a vigorous opponent of the President's Court Plan, the other, Sherman Minton, as vigorous a supporter. Governor Townsend told the press that he didn't "think the organization could nominate Van Nuys again." At the Capitol the Governor's words were taken to have but one meaning, that Franklin Roosevelt had determined to punish Mr. Van Nuys for daring to oppose him. Burning with anger, most of the Democratic Senators opposed to the bill promptly volunteered to go to Indiana and campaign for Mr. Van Nuys next year. Their anger soon rose to greater heights. Day before the Robinson funeral, the President wrote a letter to Senator Barkley who was spending the day at Hysong's funeral parlor.

"My dear Alben:-- ". . . Since the untimely death of our majority leader I had hoped, with you, that at least until his funeral services had been held, a decent respect for his memory would have deferred discussion of political and legislative matters.

"It is, therefore, with regret that I find that advantage is being taken of what, in all decency, should be a period of mourning.

"Because of this situation, however, I am compelled in the public interest, though against every inclination, to write to you. I do this because you are the acting majority leader in the Senate."

Then after rehearsing his objectives in Court reform and repeating his argument that a constitutional amendment would be too slow, he demanded a fight to the finish:

"May I, therefore, tell you very simply once more that the objectives of the President, and I believe of the great majority of our citizens, remain the same, and that I believe that it is the duty of the Congress, and especially of the members of the majority party in the Senate and the House of Representatives, to pass legislation at this session to carry out the objectives."

There is no good reason why the President of the U. S. should travel to far parts of the U. S. to bury his followers, but politicians are particular about funerals. Moreover, President Roosevelt had traveled far to bury Speakers Rainey and Byrns, Secretary of War Dern and his own personal Secretary Louis McHenry Howe. His decision a few hours after loyal Joe Robinson's death not to go to the funeral at Little Rock was not liked by a good many Congressmen. They said nothing publicly, but when he stepped out before the funeral with his "message to Alben," not only taking up politics immediately but accusing others of not observing a decent mourning period, a good deal of Congressional blood boiled. It was not cooled by what Senators took to be an oblique effort to boost Senator Barkley as Senator Robinson's successor (see col. 2). Instead of healing, the Democratic split widened sorely. The death of Robinson had become not only a grief, but a turning point in politics. Only for Robinson did it mean an end of strife.

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