The Kate Brown Story
As a Senate employee “in charge of the ladies’ retiring room,” Kate Brown worked hard. Senators noticed her “lady-like character,” and described her as “intelligent” and “refined.” She was not a rebel or a troublemaker, but on a chilly afternoon in 1868 Kate Brown rebelled. Her story is a nearly forgotten chapter of Senate history.
On February 8, 1868, Brown pulled out her ticket and prepared to board a train, to return to Washington from Alexandria, Virginia. As she stepped aboard, she was accosted by the rail line’s private police officer, who angrily told her she must enter the other car. “This car will do,” Brown replied quietly. At that point, as she later told a Senate investigating committee, “the policeman ran up and told me I could not ride in that car ... he said that car was for ladies.” Of course, Kate Brown was a lady, but she was also African American. Read the full Senate Story.
Senate Investigates the "Teapot Dome" Scandal
On April 15, 1922, Wyoming Democratic Senator John Kendrick introduced a resolution that set in motion one of the most significant investigations in Senate history. On the previous day, the Wall Street Journal had reported an unprecedented secret arrangement in which the secretary of the Interior, without competitive bidding, had leased the U.S. naval petroleum reserve at Wyoming's Teapot Dome to a private oil company. Wisconsin Republican Senator Robert La Follette arranged for the Senate Committee on Public Lands to investigate the matter. His suspicions deepened after someone ransacked his quarters in the Senate Office Building.
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Senator Censured in Lobbyist Case
When former Senator Hiram Bingham died in 1956, one obituary writer observed that the Connecticut Republican "had crammed [many] careers into his lifetime, any one of which might have sufficed for most men." Over the course of his 80 years, Bingham had been a scholar, explorer, aviator, businessman, and politician. Born in 1875, he earned degrees from Yale, Berkeley, and Harvard. With a doctorate in South American history, he traveled that continent extensively. In 1911, he became the first explorer to uncover the fabulous Incan ruins of Machu Picchu. Bingham taught at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and wrote more than a dozen books related to South American geography and history. In the early 1920s, he entered Connecticut politics and won races for lieutenant governor, governor, and U.S. senator.
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"Merchants of Death"
On a hot Tuesday morning following Labor Day in 1934, several hundred people crowded into the Caucus Room of the Senate Office Building to witness the opening of an investigation that journalists were already calling “historic.” Although World War I had been over for 16 years, the inquiry promised to reopen an intense debate about whether the nation should ever have gotten involved in that costly conflict.
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Hugo Black Lobby Investigation
Hugo Lafayette Black, one of the nation's great senators and Supreme Court justices, was born in 1886 in rural central Alabama. When he was only six years old, little Hugo decided that listening to lawyers argue cases in a local courthouse was more fun than playing school-yard games. He loved politics and declared himself a Democrat almost before he could pronounce the word. Upon graduation from the University of Alabama Law School, Black became a police court judge and then a noted labor lawyer.
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Kefauver Crime Committee Launched
In April 1950, the body of a Kansas City gambling kingpin was found in a Democratic clubhouse, slumped beneath a large portrait of President Harry S. Truman. His assassination intensified national concerns about the post-World War II growth of powerful crime syndicates and the resulting gang warfare in the nation's larger cities.
On May 3, 1950, the Senate established a five-member Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce. Sensitive to the desire of several standing committees to conduct the investigation, Senate party leaders selected the special committee's members from the committees on Interstate Commerce and the Judiciary, including each panel's senior Republican. As chairman, the Democratic majority designated an ambitious freshman—Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver. Read the full Senate Story.
"Have You No Sense of Decency?"
Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy rocketed to public attention in 1950 with his allegations that hundreds of Communists had infiltrated the State Department and other federal agencies. These charges struck a particularly responsive note at a time of deepening national anxiety about the spread of world communism.
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Church Committee Created
In 1973, CIA Director James Schlesinger told Senate Armed Services Chairman John Stennis that he wished to brief him on a major upcoming operation. “No, no my boy,” responded Senator Stennis. “Don’t tell me. Just go ahead and do it, but I don’t want to know.” Similarly, when Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J.W. Fulbright was told of the CIA subversion of the Allende government in Chile, he responded, “I don’t approve of intervention in other people’s elections, but it has been a long-continued practice.”
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