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The Ways and Means Committee Room was never intended
for a plenary session of the House of Representatives.
And when we were forced to do that—you see, it wasn’t for a
frivolous reason that the House had to make that change.
But what had actually happened, the old House Chamber
had a skylight that on bright days made the chamber bright
and on dark days or at night it was a very dark chamber.
And, the lighting was grossly inadequate.
But worse than that, the superstructure, there was the center of
this roof in the old House Chamber they told me
was 18 inches off of alignment. And they had
put up a superstructure of I-beams. It looked like a construction underway.
And it had to suffice throughout World War II,
because they certainly could not undertake a major
restructuring of the chamber during the war.
So along comes the war’s over and
they’ve got designs for a new House Chamber.
What are you going to do with the 435 Members of the House?
Well, the only large chamber, and it isn’t large by comparison at all,
was the Ways and Means Committee Room in the Longworth House Office Building.
And, the plan was made to move over there and
hold the session both in 1949 and in 1950,
because in 1950 then they did the second level of the House Chamber,
the old House Chamber. All of the things that we have discussed
previously were absolutely true. Informality became really very
unsophisticated and casual. It lost its dignity.
I don’t know that the laws that were passed during that
period of time were any of the worse for it. I have
no specifics in mind. But I do know it wasn’t a very becoming situation.
We didn’t have the public looking down on us.
We didn’t have a very good way of reporting,
of accommodating the press media.
I’m sure in your life you’ve gone from the classroom to the class picnic,
and you know how different things are. You say things to the teacher
at the picnic that you wouldn’t begin to say to them in the classroom.
Well, that was pretty much the way it was there.
There was some informality.
That’s the nicest word I can use to describe it, but there were
things that were not very—were certainly no credit to the process.
It was a necessity I gather, and it certainly we survived it.
The Members returned to an absolutely gorgeous chamber.
It had deficiencies of light and sound, but it was a
beautiful chamber when we first went back. Color coordinated
and bright, and many of the things that we had not had before.
There were those of us who were pretty excited
about coming back to work in a situation like that.