Dies Out

Three days before the filing deadline for Texas' primary elections, 42-year-old Martin Dies threw in the towel instead of his hat.

His explanations for quitting after 14 years in Congress: a throat ailment, a desire to return to private law practice, "a dread of becoming a professional politician." Jubilant liberals, laborites and left-wingers thought they knew other reasons. Had he run again, Dies was in for the toughest fight of his life. Thousands of new workers had poured into the oil refineries and shipyards of Beaumont, Port Arthur and Orange in Dies's war-booming Second District. The C.I.O. Political Action Committee, privately taking credit for the defeat of the No. 2 Dies Committeeman, Joe Starnes, in Alabama a fortnight ago, was getting its Second District workers' poll taxes paid up.

A Democratic county convention in Dies's home county had officially denounced its Congressman as a "demagogue" three days before he quit. Even more important, Dies for the first time had first-rank opposition, a man who would get the labor vote, but not be tied to it. Fiftyish, iron-grey Judge Jesse Martin Combs, a vigorous jurist, has never been defeated; he is a States' rights critic of Franklin Roosevelt's domestic program but an ardent supporter of the President's foreign policy.

All of these were good reasons for Dies to step down, but they did not make his throat ailment a phony alibi. Friends say he has a growth in his larynx that may require a Mayo Clinic operation.

Committee Without Dies? Without Dies, what would become of the Dies Committee? The last of its $652,500 appropriation and the fifth extension of its life expire in January. Though it has seven other members, its moving spirit has always been the strident demagogue from Texas. Last week New Jersey's chunky, ruddy J. Parnell Thomas, the ranking Republican Dies Committeeman arid no more ardent a defender of minority rights than Dies himself, proposed that the committee become a permanent House institution. But there was grave doubt that anybody but Demagogue Dies could persuade reluctant fellow Congressmen to keep on financing investigations into the "unAmerican activities" of Walter Winchell et al.

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