Sam Rayburn

Rayburn was one of nine children on a rented Tennessee farm before his family moved to forty acres of Texas cotton land in 1887, and the poverty of that childhood is what pushed him toward a classroom instead of a plow. He rang the school bell and swept the floors for three dollars a month to pay his way through East Texas Normal College, earned his teaching credential and a degree in 1903, and studied law at night at the University of Texas while already serving in the state legislature. At twenty-nine he was elected Speaker of the Texas House, the youngest man to hold the job, and set about codifying powers the office had never bothered to define.

Rayburn reached Washington in 1913 and stayed until 1961, co-authoring the Clayton Antitrust Act and the law that created the Federal Trade Commission before he had served a full decade. He became Speaker of the House in 1940 and held the gavel across three separate stretches totaling seventeen years, longer than anyone before or since, steering Lend-Lease and wartime draft extensions through by margins as thin as one vote, and hiding 1.6 billion dollars in Manhattan Project funding from a Congress he could not tell the truth. In 1961 he expanded the Rules Committee to open the door for civil rights legislation. His deputies handled the headlines; Rayburn ran the machine.

He built an unbreakable reputation for refusing anything that looked like a bribe, returning an anonymously delivered horse and a colleague's gift of a Cadillac, and once gave up a third of his own law-firm income rather than take railroad retainers while he sat in the legislature that regulated railroads. The same rigor never extended to his own household. He married Metze Jones in 1927 after nine years of courtship by letter, and the marriage dissolved within months; he almost never spoke of it again, and the divorce file itself was never located. He kept a room at a friend's house in his district and lived essentially alone in Washington for the rest of his life, married only to the institution.

Rayburn died of pancreatic cancer in Bonham, Texas, on November 16, 1961, and his funeral drew President Kennedy as an honorary pallbearer alongside Truman and Eisenhower. Congress awarded him a posthumous Gold Medal, and the House office building finished in 1965 still carries his name. His record for time spent as Speaker has not been matched by anyone since, Democrat or Republican, and it is still the number later Speakers, Nancy Pelosi among them, get measured against. The "Board of Education" room where he mixed bourbon with committee chairmen, and where Harry Truman happened to be sitting the night Roosevelt died, is preserved much as he left it.

Sam Rayburn's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Clayton Antitrust Act law
  Co-authored in his first House term 1914
• Federal Trade Commission Act law
  Created the FTC 1914
• Lend-Lease Act law
  Steered through the House as Speaker 1941
• House Rules Committee expansion law
  Broke a conservative bottleneck that had blocked civil rights bills 1961
• Rayburn House Office Building building
  Completed after his death, then the largest congressional office building 1965

• 1887 aged ~5 Family moves to a forty-acre cotton farm near Windom, Texas
• 1903 aged ~21 Earns his teaching credential and B.S. at East Texas Normal
• 1907 aged ~25 Elected to the Texas House of Representatives
• 1911 aged ~29 Becomes Speaker of the Texas House at twenty-nine
• March 4, 1913 aged 31 Takes his seat in the U.S. House
• 1927 aged ~45 Marries Metze Jones, a marriage that dissolves within months
• September 16, 1940 aged 58 Elected Speaker of the House for the first time
• 1961 aged ~79 Expands the Rules Committee to clear the way for civil rights bills
• November 16, 1961 aged 79 Dies of pancreatic cancer in Bonham, Texas

• Lyndon B. Johnson 1908–1973
  36th President who signed the Civil Rights Act and launched the Great Society programs. mentored
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. steered Lend-Lease through the House for
• Harry S. Truman 1884–1972
  33rd President who authorized the atomic bomb and implemented the Marshall Plan. was hosting him the night FDR died
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. presided over him as a young congressman
• Nancy Pelosi b. 1940
  First female Speaker of the House who shepherded major healthcare and economic legislation. set the tenure record still measured against by