State

February 17, 1934 THE STATE Page Nine LEGISLATIVE PERSONALITIES No. 19 John Sprunt Hill By Wade II. Lucae ★ No man or woman, I venture to say, got more pleasure out of serving in the 1933 State Senate than did John Sprunt Hill, of Durham, a man who never seemed afraid to speak the things that were on his mind. While not charging other members of the 1933 Senate with being lazy, I also venture the assertion that no member of the 1933 General Assembly worked any harder, or probably as much, ns the Senator from Durham. I also ven¬ ture another assertion and that is no one talked more than the Senator from Durham. Long regarded as one of the wealthy men of the state, Senator Hill had never sought political office until 1932, the year after he had been left off the State Highway Commission by former Gov¬ ernor 0. Max Gardner, after he had served a rather stormy ten years on the commission. And so, Senator Hill at 33 entered the Senate arena in January, 1933, ap¬ parently determined to put across if possible some of the legislation in which he had been interested for years. Pos¬ sibly he had heard that a newcomer to the Senate was for a time supposed to be seen and not heard, hut if he had, lie paid absolutely no attention to any such legislative tradition, and from the very start he was in the thick of every senate battle. He disturbed and upset the status quo of the Senate and one of the first things he did was to jam through a resolution that revealed 46 comities and 128 mu¬ nicipalities of the state were in default in January, 1933. The Joint Committee on Reorganiza¬ tion of the State Government, a com¬ mittee that set out during the 1933 session to save, so it was said, the state §2,000,000 a year by putting the state's departments on a more modern and eco¬ nomical basis, found no friend in Sen¬ ator Hill, who, with his banker-like mind, not only ridiculed any such sug¬ gestion of an annual savings of two million dollars, but produced figures purporting to show that adoption of the reorganization plan would eventually result in a loss. lie saw in this reorganization scheme a flarcback to the famous Brookings In¬ stitute report that Governor Gardner SENATOR JOHN SPRUNT HILL - ★ - fired at the 1931 General Assembly. He accused members of the reorganiza¬ tion committee of being addicts to the Brookings report and then in an effort to prove that lie knew his Brookings he passed around copies of the cele¬ brated report, one of the issues of the 1932 gubernatorial campaign, cross-in¬ dexed with marked copies of the com¬ mittee’s recommendations. He had about as much love for the Brookings report as Richard Tillman Foun¬ tain had. Senator Hill kept up a constant fire on the reorganization committee and night and day he worked as no other Senator probably labored to defeat the administration bill to merge the State’s Prison with the Highway Commission. In this he failed, as he did in other attempts, but defeat caused him to fight the harder. It was said of him that he never missed a committee meeting considering legislation that interested him and in order to keep in closer touch with the manifold doings on Capitol Hill he em¬ ployed two secretaries, Stanley Wohl and F. L. Morris, to help him. Not only did he hire and pay for these two secretaries out of his own pocket, but he also set up a legislative workshop in the Sir Walter Hotel, where next to ★ his bedroom In- had a room filled with books, reports, documents, copies of bills, legislation from other states, charts, maps, newspapers, and I might say apples, too. It was said of him that nightly he would hold a conference in his work¬ shop with his secretaries the while the three munched apples and discussed tin- legislative program for the next day. Hours meant nothing to him and I re¬ call a night I visited him to find out his views on certaiu legislation if pos¬ sible aud found him engaged in study¬ ing a mass of figures his secretaries had arranged for him. On the floor one day he declared he would not oppose any proposal unless he had in his pocket a plan he thought was a better one. And many of the proposed plans of legislation he did not like. For instance it was said lie hud drawn up no less than five sales tax measures modelled after plans in effect in other states with estimates of yield for every county in the state; a local government finance hill; a lengthy beer bill; a 36-page utility bill he succeeded in getting passed; an eight mouths school bill ; two measures relating to ag¬ riculture, and lesser bills, all of which he would threaten to introduce unless amendments satisfactory to him were adopted. Senators reached the point early in the session of wondering just what kind of a bill Senator Hill would offer for any of those they might introduce them¬ selves. Time and again they found their desks covered with charts they know the Senator from Durham hail placed there. A banker aud farmer, Senator Hill never left Raleigh during the banking crisis in late February and March of last year, and with much at stake, it was said of him that lie never even called Durham once, so supreme was his confidence in the three banks he was interested in there. In fact he publicly stated at a state¬ wide meeting of bankers, called to urge Governor Ehringhaus to declare a mora¬ torium on restrictions, thuf he would “pay out every penny” of his own money and property, that of his wife, son and daughters before he would ever restrict the withdrawals of a single depositor in any of his banks.