Everything about John C Stennis totally explained
John Cornelius Stennis (
August 3,
1901 –
April 23,
1995) was a
U.S. Senator from the state of
Mississippi. He was a
Democrat who served in the Senate for over 41 years, becoming its
most senior member by his retirement.
Early life
Born in
Kemper County, Mississippi, Stennis received a
bachelor's degree from
Mississippi State University in
Starkville (then Mississippi A&M) in
1923. In
1928, Stennis obtained a law degree from the
University of Virginia at
Charlottesville, where he was a member of
Phi Beta Kappa and
Alpha Chi Rho. While in
law school, he won a seat in the
Mississippi House of Representatives, in which he served until
1932. Stennis was a prosecutor from
1932 to
1937 and a circuit
judge from
1937 to
1947, both for Mississippi's Sixteenth Judicial District.
U.S. Senator
Upon the death of Senator
Theodore Bilbo in 1947, Stennis won the
special election to fill the vacancy, winning the seat from a field of five candidates (including two sitting
Congressmen:
John E. Rankin and
William M. Colmer). He remained in the Senate until 1989. From 1947 to 1978, he served alongside fellow Mississippi senator and Democrat
James Eastland; notwithstanding his long service Stennis would serve 35 years as Mississippi's
junior Senator. He and Eastland were at the time the longest serving Senate duo in American history, later broken by the
South Carolina duo of
Strom Thurmond and
Fritz Hollings.
Stennis wrote the first Senate ethics code, and was the first chairman of the
Senate Ethics Committee.
In 1973, Stennis was almost fatally wounded by two gunshots after being mugged outside his Washington home. In October 1973, during the
Watergate scandal, the
Nixon administration proposed the
Stennis compromise, wherein the hard-of-hearing Stennis would listen to the contested
Oval Office tapes and report on their contents, but this plan went nowhere.
Stennis lost his left leg to
cancer in 1984.
He was unanimously selected
President pro tempore of the Senate during the
100th Congress (1987–1989). During his Senate career he chaired, at various times, the
Select Committee on Standards and Conduct, the
Armed Services committee, and the
Appropriations committee. Because of his work with the Armed Services committee (1969–1980) he became known as the "Father of America's Modern
Navy", and he was subsequently honored by having a
supercarrier named after him. He is one of only two members of Congress to be so honored.
Civil rights record
Throughout Stennis' long career, his record on
civil rights was a mixed one. As a prosecutor, he sought the conviction and execution of three black men whose
murder confessions had been extracted by
torture. The convictions were overturned by the
U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case of
Brown v. Mississippi (1936) that banned the use of evidence obtained by torture. The transcript of the trial indicates Stennis was fully aware of the methods of interrogation, including
flogging, used to gain confessions.
In the
1950s and
1960s he vigorously opposed such legislation as the
Voting Rights Act, as did most Southern senators. He also signed the
Southern Manifesto of 1956 and openly supported
Barry Goldwater's presidential bid in 1964, as did most of the state's prominent Democrats.
However, by the
1980s he regularly supported legislation to extend the civil rights of women and minorities, though he opposed the
Martin Luther King holiday. He also campaigned (along with
Governor Bill Allain) for
Mike Espy in
1986 during Espy's successful bid to become the first black Congressman from the state since the end of
Reconstruction.
Earlier in his career, Stennis had been the first Democrat to publicly criticize
Joseph McCarthy on the Senate floor during the
Red Scare, while Eastland supported McCarthy to the end. On balance, he was far more supportive of civil rights than Eastland, who was well known for his open
segregationism. In some ways, Stennis' record on civil rights is similar to those of Goldwater,
Robert Byrd,
Sam Ervin and
J. William Fulbright — all of whom opposed many federal civil rights bills not out of racism, but because they felt the bills gave the federal government too much power over the states. Still, Stennis shied away from supporting civil rights legislation when there was no political risk in doing so.
Retirement
Declining to run for re-election in 1988, Stennis retired from the Senate in 1989 at the height of his popularity. He never lost an election in 60 years as an elected official. He took a teaching post at his alma mater, which he held until his death in
Jackson at the age of 93.
In his last election in 1982, Stennis easily defeated
Republican Haley Barbour in a largely Democratic year. In 2003, however, Barbour was elected as Mississippi's second Republican governor since
Reconstruction.
At the time of Stennis' retirement, his continuous tenure of 41 years and 2 months in the Senate was second only to that of
Carl Hayden. (It has since been surpassed by
Robert Byrd,
Strom Thurmond,
Ted Kennedy, and
Daniel Inouye, leaving Stennis sixth).
John Stennis is buried at Pinecrest Cemetery in Kemper County. He and his wife, the former Coy Hines, had two children, John Hampton and Margaret Jane.
Naming honors
Quote
"I want to plow a straight furrow right down to the end of the row."
Further Information
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