Washington, March 5—A few words about the North Carolina delegation in congress collectively and individually. Every member of the delegation is now back at his home in the State. They will not return here for perhaps nine months, and there is no immediate danger of speaking very frankly about them.
“You have a great state. It surpasses almost every other state in attracting the attention of the country,” said a very distinguished member of the House from another state.
“But do you find that we have a delegation in congress worthy of a State that is forging to the very front rank of States in the Union?” he asked.
“Well in logic and mathematics, you have the ablest man in the Senate in F.M. Simmons. His tax and tariff speeches are read and studied by the students of these subjects as the speeches of no other man in Congress are. But the trouble with Simmons is that his personality does not match up with his mind. He is a dry little man with a halting harsh, indistinct voice in the Senate but he is a man that his enemies watch, from whom less able men of like views steal. I know that. I have myself stolen from his speeches, and the best tariff dope I ever got was drawn from him in conversation. “But what the people of the State would like to know is how to the men in the House measure up?”
The delegation as a whole is regarded as rather above average of State delegations. You must remember two things: the delegation belong to the minority party and half the members of the delegation are serving their first terms. When Kitchin was at his best, he and Pou brought the delegation up to rank with any delegation in the House. Kitchin at the head of the ways and means and Pou as head of the rules committee during the great war gave North Carolina a power in the House such as the State has never possessed. And with Simmons at the head of the finance committee in the Senate, North Carolina men did more to shape the financial policy of the war in congress than any other State did. It was Simmons, Kitchen, and Pou who engineered through Congress the financial war policies of Woodrow Wilson.
“Among the new members in the House delegation, I may mention two or possibly three men who, I feel sure will forge to the front in the 68th congress. Two in particular are Zeb Weaver and W.C. Hammer. Weaver is a much stronger and abler man than he appears to be. He has ideas and courage. He has the power of lucid and convincing statement in a high degree, and he is one of the ablest lawyers in the boy.
“Hammer has a great deal of genuine natural ability. He can seize a big question of complex situation as quick as a cat can a mouse. I have seen him come into the house when some new question was up. After hearing half a dozen lines of a speech he knew how to vote. And he can defend every vote he has cast. His future is in his own hands. That can be said of comparatively few men.
“Robert L. Doughton is a very useful man. The people of this republic should be grateful to him for every mile of good road that has been built by federal taxation within the last two years. Hallett S. Ward is mentally the most independent man in the delegation. He was at first misunderstood, but no man in the delegation is now wearing better.
“The newest of your new members, C.L. Abernethy, has plunged in before he got his clothes off. We have looked every day to find him droned and some of us would not have cared if he had, but he has not and the fact has had the effect of waking up some of your other members. Mr. Abernethy may not make a great member, but he can stand a chilly plunge better than most of us. He will either be useful or a great nuisance, and I am now inclined to believe that he will be the former.”
From the front page of The Courier, Asheboro, N.C., published Thursday, March 8, 1923. We aren’t given the name of the House member expressing these opinions about North Carolina’s representatives or the name of the reporter who wrote the article.
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