First Session of the Seventy-second Congress, December 7, 1931, to July 16, 19321

While hundreds of “hunger-marchers” milled about outside, the first session of the Seventy-second Congress convened on the first Monday of last December. The mob outside lent a tone that was recurrent in a Congress given over to the consideration of national need and budget-balancing. Often lacking either in leadership or in the will to follow, Congress went its muddled way working against great odds and confronted with tasks of great complexity. The delicacy of the party balance as much as the spur of emergency pointed to the desirability of forgetting partisanship in the presence of national distress. Whether this pious attitude rendered less frequent actions dictated by political expediency remains open to question. In fact, special interests were particularly clamorous during this session.