John C. Stennis
|
|
|
United States Senator
from Mississippi
|
In office
November 17, 1947 – January 3, 1989
|
Preceded by
|
Theodore Bilbo
|
Succeeded by
|
Trent Lott
|
President pro tempore of the United States Senate
|
In office
January 3, 1987 – January 3, 1989
|
Deputy
|
George J. Mitchell
|
Preceded by
|
Strom Thurmond
|
Succeeded by
|
Robert Byrd
|
Chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services
|
In office
January 3, 1969 – January 3, 1981
|
Preceded by
|
Richard Russell
|
Succeeded by
|
John Tower
|
Personal details
|
Born
|
John Cornelius Stennis
(1901-08-03)August 3, 1901
Kemper County, Mississippi, U.S.
|
Died
|
April 23, 1995(1995-04-23) (aged 93)
Jackson, Mississippi, U.S.
|
Political party
|
Democratic
|
Spouse(s)
|
Coy Hines
|
Children
|
John Hampton Stennis
Margaret Jane Stennis Womble
|
Alma mater
|
Mississippi A&M University
University of Virginia
|
Profession
|
Politician, Lawyer
|
Religion
|
Presbyterian
|
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 for his last eight years. He retired from the Senate in 1989.
Contents
-
Family 1
-
Early life 2
-
U.S. Senator 3
-
Civil rights record 3.1
-
Opposition to Bork 3.2
-
Retirement 4
-
Naming honors 5
-
Notes 6
-
References 7
-
External links 8
Family
Stennis was the son of Hampton Howell Stennis and Margaret Cornelia Adams. His great-grandfather John Stenhouse emigrated to Greenville, South Carolina from Scotland just before the American Revolution. According to family tradition, the local residents would habitually mispronounce his name, forcing him to legally change it to Stennis.[1]
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.[2] 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 Fraternity.[3] 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.
Stennis married Coy Hines, and together, they had two children, John Hampton and Margaret Jane. His son, John Hampton Stennis (1935–2013),[4] an attorney in Jackson, Mississippi, ran unsuccessfully in 1978 for the United States House of Representatives, defeated by the Republican Jon C. Hinson, then the aide to U.S. Representative Thad Cochran.
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 won the seat in his own right in 1952, and was reelected five times. From 1947 to 1978, he served alongside James Eastland; thus Stennis spent 31 years as Mississippi's junior Senator, even though he had more seniority than most of his other colleagues. 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. He later developed a good relationship with Eastland's successor, Republican Thad Cochran.
Stennis wrote the first Senate ethics code, and was the first chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee. In August 1965, Senator Stennis, who was known as "Mr. Integrity", protested the Johnson administration's emergency supplemental appropriation request for the Vietnam war and the lack of information about the future costs of the conflict.[5]
In January 1973, Stennis was almost fatally wounded by two gunshots after being mugged outside his Washington home by two teenagers.[6] In October of that year, 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. Time magazine ran a picture of John Stennis that read: "Technical Assistance Needed." The picture had his hand cupped around his ear.
Stennis lost his left leg to cancer in 1984[7] and subsequently used a wheelchair.
Stennis was named Carl Vinson.
Civil rights record
Originally, Stennis was an ardent supporter of racial segregation, like most Southern Democrats at the time. In the 1950s and 1960s he vigorously opposed the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1968 and he signed the Southern Manifesto of 1956, supporting filibuster tactics to block or delay passage in all cases.
Earlier, as a prosecutor, he sought the conviction and execution of three sharecroppers whose murder confessions had been extracted by torture, including flogging.[8] 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 indicated Stennis was fully aware that the suspects had been tortured.
Later in his political career, Stennis supported one piece of civil rights legislation - the 1982 extension of the Voting Rights Act, which passed in the Senate by an 85-8 vote.[9][10] A year later, he voted against establishing Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a federal holiday.[11] Stennis 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.
Opposition to Bork
Stennis opposed President Ronald Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court. On October 23, 1987, Stennis voted with six Republicans and all but two Democrats to defeat Bork's nomination by a vote of 58 to 42.
Retirement
In 1982, his last election, Stennis easily defeated Republican Haley Barbour in a largely Democratic year.
Declining to run for re-election in 1988, Stennis retired from the Senate in 1989, having never lost an election in 60 years as an elected official. He took a teaching post at Mississippi State University, his alma mater, which he held until his death in Jackson, Mississippi, at the age of 93.
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.
In an obituary, the New York Times called Stennis the "conscience of the entire institution."[12]
Naming honors
Notes
-
^ "The Stenhouse - Stennis Family" (PDF). Lauderdale County (MS) Department of Archives & History. Retrieved 21 October 2014.
-
^ Stennis Space Center, Stennis History, NASA.gov, accessed Oct 14, 2009
-
^ Alpha Chi Rho Distinguished Alumni, AlphaChiRho.org, accessed 29 June 2010
-
^ "Chicago | Chicago : News : Politics : Things To Do : Sports". Suntimes.com. Retrieved 2015-04-09.
-
^ Hormats, Robert (2007). The Price of Liberty: Paying for America's Wars. New York: Times Books Henry Holt and Company. p. 213. ISBN 9780805082531.
-
^ "Senator John Stennis Mugged and Shot in Front of Cleveland Park Home". Ghostsofdc.org. 2012-01-04. Retrieved 2015-04-09.
-
^ [4]
-
^ Cortner, Richard C. (1986). A Scottsboro Case in Mississippi: The Supreme Court and Brown v. Mississippi. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi.
-
^ 91st Congress (1970) (June 22, 1970). "H.R. 4249 (91st)". Legislation. GovTrack.us. Retrieved November 16, 2013.
-
^ "Senate Session - C-SPAN Video Library". C-spanvideo.org. Retrieved 2015-04-09.
-
^ "McCain “Was Wrong” Voting Against Martin Luther King Holiday; How Other Congressional Members Voted | Republican Ranting". Inkslwc.wordpress.com. 2008-04-07. Retrieved 2015-04-09.
-
^ "John Stennis, ex-U.S. senator, dies". Baltimore Sun. 24 April 1995. Retrieved 14 October 2014.
-
^ The late professor References
-
Stennis Center for Public Service. "Tribute to John C. Stennis". Retrieved June 16, 2005.
External links
-
A film clip "Longines Chronoscope with John C. Stennis" is available for free download at the Internet Archive
-
Stennis Center for Public Service
-
websiteJohn C. StennisUSS
-
John C. Stennis Space Center
-
NASA Biography
-
John C. Stennis Institute of Government
-
Biographical Sketch of John C. Stennis, via Mississippi State University
-
John C. Stennis at Find a Grave
|
|
Military Affairs Committee
(1816–1947)
|
|
|
|
Naval Affairs Committee
(1816–1947)
|
|
|
Armed Services Committee
(1947–Present)
|
|
|
|
|
18th Century
|
|
|
|
19th Century
|
|
|
20th Century
|
|
|
21st Century
|
|
|
(E) = Emeritus
|
|
This article was sourced from Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. World Heritage Encyclopedia content is assembled from numerous content providers, Open Access Publishing, and in compliance with The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR), Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., Public Library of Science, The Encyclopedia of Life, Open Book Publishers (OBP), PubMed, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, and USA.gov, which sources content from all federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial government publication portals (.gov, .mil, .edu). Funding for USA.gov and content contributors is made possible from the U.S. Congress, E-Government Act of 2002.
Crowd sourced content that is contributed to World Heritage Encyclopedia is peer reviewed and edited by our editorial staff to ensure quality scholarly research articles.
By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. World Heritage Encyclopedia™ is a registered trademark of the World Public Library Association, a non-profit organization.