Rayburn Ropes a Steer

Speaker Sam Rayburn's speech in Sulphur Springs, Tex. was billed as a unity rally. But everybody knew that the rally was Sam Rayburn's way of hitting back at the New Deal-hating Dallas Morning News. The News has been tooth-&-claw against the 40-hour week, ignoring the fact that U.S. workers in seven key defense industries work on an average of 48.2 hours. One day the News attacked Sam Rayburn: "Let the Speaker of the House each day place on the wall behind his chair, where Old Glory's furls are draped, a fresh list of dead heroes of America killed in battle and never fully supported by our country's efforts. And let the President of the United States face at his desk that roll of the dead. . . ." In another editorial the News quoted a letter, addressed to President Roosevelt, from an indignant Texas grandmother, Mrs. J. M. Isbelle: "My 22-year-old grandson . . . has been in camp 18 months or more, and never a gun yet. Shall they fight with bare fists?"

Somebody had given Mrs. Isbelle and the News a bum steer. Armed with letters from the War Department, Sam Rayburn entrained for Texas. At Sulphur Springs, to 2,500 cheering, stomping Administration backers, he gave his answer.

He read the War Department record of Mrs. Isbelle's grandson, Private Lewis Stall, as a rifle crack, an Army marksman. Then Sam Rayburn rolled out some red-hot secret figures on the U.S. war effort-figures so secret that newsmen, who had known them for weeks, had not dared to tell them. But the Speaker of the House is not subject to censorship. Said Sam Rayburn: "More than 3,300 planes are pouring out of our factories monthly . . . tank production is ahead of schedule, with one company alone turning out an entire trainload daily. . . ." He said that the U.S. now has six times as many soldiers on the world's battlefronts as General Pershing had in 1918 after ten months of war,* that enough Garand rifles are on hand to equip every man who needs one.

Speaker Rayburn's spilling of military secrets made Washington grumble. But his words were glad tidings to many a U.S. mother.

*If Speaker Rayburn's figures were correct, the U.S. would now have an Army of 1,056,000 men scattered over the earth, ready for battle. The Speaker did not specify what he meant by a "battlefront."

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