Rayburn Is Dead; Served 17 Years As House Speaker

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0106.html
Future American politician who served as Speak of the U.S. House of Representatives, Sam Rayburn was born on January 6, 1882, in Kingston, Tennessee.
"Sam Rayburn was an American politician best known for his roles as Speaker of the House, Majority Leader to Congress and Chairman of the National Democratic Convention.
Synopsis
Sam Rayburn was an American politician born on January 6, 1882, in Kingston, Tennessee. After graduating from East Texas Normal College (now Texas A&M University-Commerce) and studying law at University of Texas at Austin, he was elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1906 and served from 1907-1913. Afterwards, his career took off and he became both the Speaker of the House and Democratic Representative to the United States House of Representatives, serving from 1913 until his death in 1961. Rayburn held several high profile positions throughout his career, including Majority Leader to Congress (1937) and Chairman of the National Democratic Convention (1940s-'50s). Rayburn served a total of 48 years in Washington D.C. and died on November 16, 1961.'
Image: Born in 1882 Sam Rayburn

Rayburn Is Dead; Served 17 Years As House Speaker
By UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
Bonham, Tex., Nov. 16 -- House Speaker Sam Rayburn died of cancer in his sleep today. He was 79 years old.
President Kennedy led the nation, Republicans and Democrats alike, in mourning Mr. Rayburn as a great American. Mr. Kennedy and former President Harry S. Truman will lead mourners at the funeral Saturday in Bonham.

Mr. Rayburn, who served longer as Representative and Speaker than any other man in history, will lie in state tomorrow at the Sam Rayburn Library for twenty-four hours while officials gather for the funeral.

He was Speaker for seventeen years.

Insisted on Working

It was disclosed that Mr. Rayburn had known since Sept. 27 that he had cancer. He began to fail in health last spring, lost weight and appetite. In June and July he had two moments of unconsciousness in the Speaker's chair. But he insisted on working for the Kennedy New Frontier program.

The disease spread through his body and into the brain, causing failure of the respiratory system and a calm, painless end at 7:20 A.M., Eastern standard time.

The funeral will be held at 2:30 P.M. President Kennedy will interrupt a Western speaking tour and fly to Bonham to attend. Vice President Johnson flew to Bonham by plane and helicopter. He went to the Rayburn home, west of the city limits.

Burial will be in the family plot at Willow Wild Cemetery after services in Bonham's First Baptist Church. Mr. Rayburn will be buried next to his sister Lucinda, who died of cancer in 1956. She was closest to him of all his ten brothers and sisters.

As soon as Mr. Rayburn learned that he had cancer and that there was no hope, he asked that no flowers be sent to his death. Send money, instead, he said, to the Rayburn Foundation, which maintains the Rayburn Library. This holds all the mementos of his career.

He had thought the pains he suffered in his back were from lumbago. Tests at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas Oct. 5 disclosed that the cancer was widespread and inoperable. Mr. Rayburn was taken to Risser Hospital, a fifteen-bed clinic.

The end was swift and calm. There was no pain. He seemed to drift into death.

The final medical bulletin from Dr. Joe Risser, his physician said:

"At 6:20 A.M., Central Standard Time, Mr. Sam passed away. He died quietly. His respiration stopped. His heart continued beating for four minutes. There was no evidence of pain lines in his face.

"He seemed as one in sleep. The cause of death was a paralysis of the breathing muscles in the central respiratory system. The respiratory center of the brain ceased to function."

"A very easy death," Dr. Risser said.

The White House was told before the news was publicly announced. President Kennedy issued a message of condolence, calling Mr. Rayburn a "devoted servant and an unflinching friend" of all Americans.

The White House flag was lowered to half staff.

Fulfilled Boyhood Ambition

As a boy, working in the fields of his father's forty-acre cotton farm in North Texas, Sam Rayburn made up his mind to enter politics when he grew up and eventually to become Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Then, perhaps even more than now, the Speakership was widely regarded as second only to the Presidency among the country's elective offices.

Mr. Rayburn achieved his goal on Sept. 16, 1940, when the House elected him to succeed William B. Bankhead of Alabama, who had died the previous day. From then until his death, he served as Speaker in every Congress except the Republican-controlled Eightieth (1947 to 1949) and the Eighty-third (1953 to 1955). He was minority leader of the House in those four years.

On Jan. 30, 1951, he broke the record f Henry Clay for length of service as Speaker. At intervals between 1811 and 1825, Clay held the office for eight years, four months and eleven days. By June 12, 1961, Mr. Rayburn had doubled Clay's record.

He also set new marks for tenure as a member of the House. In 1958 he exceeded the record for continuous membership--more than forty-five years--that had been held by the late Adolph J. Sabath of Illinois. The next year he overtook former Speaker Joseph G. Cannon's record of forty-six years of non-continuous membership in the House.

To most of his House colleagues Mr. Rayburn was known as "Mr. Speaker." Very few of them called him "Sam." Sometimes he was called "Mr. Sam."

Became Familiar Figure

He presided over the Democratic National Conventions of 1948, 1952 and 1956 as permanent chairman. In that role his often scowling countenance and big gavel, which he wielded with firm authority, became a familiar sight to television viewers. He turned down the post in 1960 to serve as floor manager in the bid for the Presidential nomination made by his fellow Texan, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson.

Not log ago the bald, blocky Texan, puffing a cigarette in one of his relaxed moods, summed up his career in a sentence.

"I am one man in public life who is satisfied, who has achieved every ambition of his youth," he said.

Mr. Rayburn will go down in history as one of the strong Speakers but also as a parliamentary leader who relied mainly on persuasion and almost never on raw power to achieve his aims. A man of taciturn dignity and no talent or envy for polished oratory, he occasionally was able to swing a close vote in the House by one of his infrequent and characteristically brief speeches.

More often, however, he made his influence felt by private contact with members, personally and through a dozen or so Democratic lieutenants, including several senior committee chairmen and several younger members with whom he consulted and worked closely.

His main weapons for enforcing party discipline did not derive from the fixed power of Speakership, much of which had been stripped away in the 1910 revolt against the "czarism" of Speaker Cannon. They came rather from the inherent authority of the Speaker, as his party's principal House leader, to influence committee assignment and otherwise to advance or retard the legislative and political careers of party members.

He used these weapons sparingly and subtly--too much so to please some of the more liberal members of the Democratic party. Too often, in their estimation, the legislative product reflected unnecessary compromises and accommodation with a coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats, a powerful force with which Mr. Rayburn had to contend throughout his tenure as Speaker.

But many impartial students of government held that the Rayburn technique was far more productive than an authoritarian, uncompromising or militantly partisan approach would have been. Mr. Rayburn himself put the matter this way:

"You cannot lead people by trying to drive them. Persuasion and reason are the only ways to lead them. In that way the Speaker has influence and power in the House.

In carrying out his philosophy of leadership, Mr. Rayburn drew on vast reserves of personal friendships and loyalties among colleagues in both parties. Other helpful assets included a reputation for unswerving veracity, massive integrity and consistent fairness, a personality devoid of pretension and a relaxed sometimes earthy, sense of humor.

Throughout his public career, Mr. Rayburn held in testy contempt all efforts to classify his political philosophy as conservative, liberal, moderate or by any other such term.

"I always say without prefix, without suffix and without apology that I am a Democrat," he explained in an interview.

As a Democrat, he prided himself on his ability to follow as well as to lead. He followed the leadership of President Woodrow Wilson in his early years in Congress. He followed that of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt in the New Deal, Harry S. Truman in the Fair Deal and John F. Kennedy on the New Frontier.

He often said that "you can't be a leader and ask other people to follow you unless you know how to follow, too."

And his standard advice to first-term members of Congress was: "If you want to get along--go along."

He adhered to that precept from the start of his own first term in the house, on March 4, 1913, and soon came to be regarded as one of the newly inaugurated President Wilson's bright young men.

Spurred New Deal Laws

As chairman of the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee from 1931 to 1937, Mr. Rayburn was the House sponsor and manager of New Deal regulatory measures that evoked some of the most bitter controversy of the period. These included the Securities Act of 1933, to prevent fraud in the sale of stocks and bonds; the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, with its "death sentence" clause for the utility trusts. He also sponsored a bill that established the Rural Electrification Administration.

Over the years of loyal support for Democratic principles, Mr. Rayburn occasionally excused himself from the rule of party regularity when Democratic policies conflicted with what he conceived to be his responsibility as a representative from the Fourth Congressional District of Texas.

He opposed President Truman, for example, in supporting legislation to relieve natural-gas producers of strict Federal price regulation. He felt that the economy of his state was largely contingent upon the financial well-being of the gas and oil-producing industry. Mr. Truman vetoed the bill.

With an eye to the economic interests of Texas, Mr. Rayburn also saw to it that a heavy majority of members of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee opposed repeal or reduction of tax allowances for the depletion of oil and gas reserves.

For Liberal Trade Policies

At the same time, however, he consistently promoted liberal foreign trade programs in his selections for membership on the same committee. Despite strong protectionist pressure from Texas oil and gas interests. Democratic committee assignment almost invariably went to trusted advocates of a foreign economic policy favoring low tariffs and minimum restrictions on the international exchange of goods.

While Mr. Rayburn always disavowed any political aspirations beyond the House Speakership, a few of his closest intimates suspected that he sometimes entertained hopes of becoming President. One of them pointed out recently that his boyhood goal had been set after he had studied the career of James K. Polk of Tennessee, the only House Speaker in history to move along to the Presidency.

In 1940, shortly before Mr. Rayburn was first elected Speaker, the suspicions were substantiated by his obvious availability for the Democratic Vice-Presidential nomination. But at the Democratic convention, President Roosevelt telephoned him and said:

"Sam, I want you to do me a great favor. I want you to make the seconding speech for Henry Wallace [as Vice President]."

Mr. Rayburn loyally carried out the assignment.

Mr. Rayburn became Democratic majority leader in the House in January, 1937. In that post, and subsequently as Speaker, he carried the major responsibility for House approval of the Roosevelt Administration's legislative program.

Opposed by Isolationists

There was a crucial test of his leadership on Aug. 12, 1941, fewer than four months before Pearl Harbor, when isolationists came within one vote of blocking extension of the military draft. Speaker Rayburn was instrumental in mustering the 203-202 majority for passage of the extension bill and was suspected of wielding a quick gavel to bar any motion to reconsider the vote.

During the Truman Administration, Mr. Rayburn helped to win Congressional approval of the Marshall Plan and other foreign-policy and defense legislation sought by the President before and during the Korean conflict.

The Housing Act of 1949 and the far-reaching expansion and liberalization of the Social Security system in 1950 were among the major Fair Deal laws for which he worked. He also stood by President Truman in opposing the Taft-Hartley labor law of 1947, which the Republican- controlled Eightieth Congress enacted over Mr. Truman's veto.

With Democrats in control of Congress for the last six of Dwight D. Eisenhower's eight years as President, Speaker Rayburn shared the Congressional leadership with his close friend and protege from Texas, Mr. Johnson, who was majority leader of the Senate.

On most domestic issues and nearly all foreign questions, the Rayburn-Johnson policy was marked by conciliation and compromise and occasionally by partisan challenge to the Republican President. The result was the enactment of the substance of much of the Eisenhower Administration's legislative program.

Opposed White House

Throughout the Roosevelt and Truman years Mr. Rayburn had consistently opposed the White House on a few big issues. One was the proposed passage of legislation to enforce the civil rights of Negroes.

President Eisenhower's recommendations, however, were less offensive to his old South background. Partly at Senator Johnson's inducement, he cooperated in the 1957 enactment of the first major civil rights bill since the Reconstruction era. A second civil rights bill, likewise based on President Eisenhower's recommendations, was enacted in 1960, again with Speaker Rayburn's cooperation. Both measures were designed mainly to protect the voting rights of Negroes in the South.

The session of 1960 , a Presidential election year, found Senator Johnson seeking the Democratic nomination with Speaker Rayburn's active backing A by-product was the attempted passage of a five-part package of social legislation that was opposed strongly by the Eisenhower Administration and conservatives in Congress.

The idea was to sharpen the issues and give the national Democratic ticket a record on which to run in November. It entailed a radical departure from the established Johnson -Rayburn policy of compromise and conciliation, and it pleased those Democrats who had long been agitating for a more militantly liberal and partisan congressional leadership.

As July and the national political conventions approached, only one of the five bills had got though Congress. It called for Federal loans and grants for redevelopment of the country's chronically depressed areas. President Eisenhower vetoed that measure, and Congress failed to override him.

The other bills, calling for a higher minimum wage with broader coverage, health care for the aged under Social Security, Federal aid for school construction and expanded housing programs had been stalled by conservative forces.

Then Senator Johnson and Speaker Rayburn surprisingly decided to take the step of recessing Congress over the conventions instead of adjourning it for the year.

A hectic, politics-ridden post-convention session failed to revive any of the bills. The debacle was especially embarrassing to the Democratic party because Mr. Kennedy, its Presidential nominee, and Mr. Johnson, his running mate, were personally involved in key Senate roles.

Speaker Rayburn, with President Kennedy's support, consequently set out early in 1961 to gain control of the House Rule Committee by enlarging its roster to fifteen. The effort entailed what probably was the most critical test of the Texan's leadership in all his years as Speaker. His continued prestige and power were at stake, and, to a great extent, so was the bulk of the new President's legislative program.

In the ensuing struggle, severe demands were made on party loyalty, and heavy political pressures were exerted by Rayburn lieutenants and the White House to bring about a 217-to-212 House vote for the enlargement plan.

Two regular Democrats and one Republican were added to the Rules Committee, presumably giving the Rayburn-Kennedy forces control by an 8-to-7 margin. The committee was cooperative as liberal housing, depressed-area redevelopment and minimum-wage legislation was sped through Congress fairly early in the session.

A hitch developed, however, when President Kennedy's broad program of Federal aid to education came before the Rules Committee. One of the panel's veteran Democratic regulars, Representative James J. Delaney of Queens, joined the conservatives to bring about an 8-to-7 vote against the legislation. Mr. Delaney, a Roman Catholic representing a Congressional district composed mainly of Catholics, complained that the legislation discriminated against parochial schools.

While much legislation to extend and enlarge accepted liberal programs was passed, Speaker Rayburn and President Kennedy could not overcome conservative forces in the House to win approval of many broad new concepts designed to meet the great social, economic and foreign- policy challenges of the Nineteen Sixties.

The hard fights of this year apparently sapped Mr. Rayburn's strength. With a painful back ailment that had deprived him of much sleep, the Speaker left Washington for rest at his Bonham Tex., home weeks before adjournment of the session. He looked wan, then and tired, for the first time in the memory of his oldest friends. He had never before left the scene of legislation battle before the fighting had ended.

Mr. Rayburn's formal name, which he never used, was Samuel Taliaferro Rayburn. He was born in Eastern Tennessee near Kingston, in Roane County, of Scottish-Irish descent.

His father was William Marion Rayburn, a farmer and Confederate cavalryman. His mother was the former Martha Waller of Virginia. Sam was the eight of their eleven children.

When he was 5, the family moved to Fannin Country in North Texas where the father bought a forty-acre cotton farm. The boy worked in the cotton rows from the time the family settled there and attended a one-room school at near-by Flag Springs.

Mr. Rayburn recalled years later having ridden ten miles on horseback to hear Representative Joseph Weldon Bailey deliver a three-hour oration. Mr. Bailey aspired to the Speakership but never won it. Mr. Rayburn said he believed the speech reinforced his own boyhood decision to seek the office.

When he was 18, with $25 in his pocket, he went to the town of Commerce and attended E. L. Mayo's Normal School, now East Texas State College. He worked his way through by ringing the college bell, sweeping out classrooms, making fires and doing other odd jobs. He took a year out to teach school at Bonham and to finance his final term at Mayo's, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree.

After two more years as a country school teacher, Mr. Rayburn was elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1906. It was the first of a string of twenty-eight campaigns without a defeat. Three were for the Texas legislature and twenty-five for Congress. At the age of 29, he was elected Speaker of the Texas House and held the post for the last two years of his six-year tenure.

Elected to Congress at 30

While a member of the Legislature, he studied law a the University of Texas and was admitted to the bar. He was 30 when first elected to Congress in 1912.

In 1927, Mr. Rayburn married Matze Jones of Valley View, Tex. They separated almost immediately and the marriage was dissolved a year later.

Mr. Rayburn subsequently lived a bachelor's life but, contrary to some reports, it was not a lonely one. A moderate drinker, he enjoyed parties and accepted many invitations, particularly if the event was to be a small dinner where politics would be the main conversational topic.

It was an almost daily ritual for him to "visit with" a few close friends, as he put it, in a hideaway that he maintained on the ground floor of the Capitol.

Harry S. Truman, as a Senator and later as Vice President, was a fairly regular participant in these late-afternoon sessions of relaxed conversation, scotch, bourbon and branch water. He was called away from one of them by an urgent telephone message from a Presidential aide. He hurried to the White House and was informed that Mr. Roosevelt had died and he was to be sworn in immediately as President.

Mr. Rayburn maintained a two-room apartment near Dupont Circle in northwest Washington. He sometimes cooked suppers of chili and hot tamales for a few guests.

He usually had breakfast sent to the apartment from near-by French restaurant but insisted on American-style fare--orange juice, bacon, shirred eggs and honey. Nearly always he lunched at the House restaurant at the Capitol and often was host to small groups in the Speaker's dining room there.

Walked for Exercise

In earlier years Mr. Rayburn made a practice of walking the two miles or so from his apartment to the Capitol. Later he usually rode in a chauffeur-driven limousine supplied by Congress. But he made a special effort to find some time during the day to stroll around the Capitol grounds. He was a believer in the health benefits of outdoor walking, and he enjoyed it, too.

He loved to fish and spent many week-ends at near-by fishing retreats of friends and was regarded as an excellent fly and bait caster. According to associates, he was also a fine golfer before giving up the same some years ago.

Mr. Rayburn did not affiliate with any religious denomination until late in life and never did attend church services regularly. He had often said that he would like to belong to the Primitive Baptist Church, of which his father was a member. This is a small, Fundamentalist sect without ties to larger Baptist organizations. In the fall of 1956, Mr. Rayburn joined the Primitive Baptist Church at Tioga, Tex. At the age of 74, he was "immersed," or baptized, by the church's lay minister there.

The Speaker always maintained the closest ties with his many nieces, nephews, brothers and sisters. Whenever a brother or sister came to Washington, he would insist on turning over his bedroom to the guest and sleeping on a temporary bed in the living room.

Despite a back ailment, he slept on the temporary bed for several months this year while his brother and sister-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Dick Rayburn of Ector, Tex., occupied the bedroom. Their son, Tom Rayburn, was in a Washington hospital for an intestinal operation. They wanted to move to a hotel, but Speaker Rayburn put his foot down.

One of his aides finally became concerned over the Speaker's loss of sleep and weight and urged him to permit the Dick Rayburns to take another apartment. Mr. Rayburn let loose a strong of expletives before making a final ruling that cut off further debate.

"I'm not going to have them staying anywhere else. They're my family!"

Besides his brother, there are two other members of Mr. Rayburn's immediate family. His two sisters were at his bedside when he died. They are Mrs. W. A. Thomas of Dallas and Mrs. S. E. Bartley of Bonham. Dick Rayburn was unable to reach the hospital.

When Congress adjourned., Mr. Rayburn would lose no time getting back to Bonham, where he lived with a sister in a spacious white house that to him was "prettier than Mount Vernon."

The Speaker maintained a 250-acre farm and a 900-acre ranch. He was proud of his fine herd of polled Hereford cattle and was known to predict unerringly which ones would be prize winners at livestock shows. On the white-pillared portico of his house, fourteen rocking chairs always stood ready to receive constituents and friends who desired to "visit with" the Congressman.

The Sam Rayburn Library in Bonham, a $500,000 marble structure, was one of the Speaker's greatest satisfactions. He started a fund for its construction in 1949 by donating a $10,000 prize he had received for distinguished service to the country. It contains his files and mementos as part of a collection of American historical and biographical data. Mr. Truman dedicated it in 1957 as a research center for students of Democratic government.

As a boy and for much of his life, Mr. Rayburn was a prodigious reader of American history and biography. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee were perhaps his favorite figures of American history. Presidents Truman and Roosevelt, among contemporaries, were also high on his list.

Mr. Rayburn and General Eisenhower were old acquaintances but never close friends.

Mr. Rayburn's pride in the House of Representatives and the Capitol was almost proprietary. Any reference to the House as "the lower chamber" invariably brought an angry rejoinder. He insisted that the House, in fact as well as in law, was co-equal with the Senate. He actually thought it was superior.

"I'd rather be Speaker of the House than any ten Senators," he would say.

One of the few matters in which he was accused of being arbitrary was his ruling against the use of television cameras in the House chamber, except for ceremonial sessions, or in the committee rooms. He believed that the effect would be to lower the dignity of the House.

Critics of the controversial rebuilding of the east front of the Capitol, recently completed, accused the Speaker of being arbitrary and stubborn in going ahead with the project over their objections. He serenely ignored them until one suggested, in print, that "Mr. Sam must think he own the Capitol."

The Speaker was furious and made his feeling known to a reporter. Many months later, however, he was admiring the completed project and called the same reporter's attention to some gleaming marble on the House wing that had been sand-blasted from a dull gray to its original luster.
"How do you like my Capitol now?" he asked."
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