Within his native state of Nevada, McCarran constructed a machine designed to dominate the state’s political and economic life. This domination, which extended to both political parties, was built on personal favors for constituents, shrewd use of patronage, rewards for friends, and inevitable punishment for those suspected of being enemies. Ironically, the Senator employed the same tactics that others had once used against him to stymie his own early political efforts.
This work discusses the Senator’s background, his rise to power, and his methods of establishing political domination. Personal correspondence, excerpts from speeches, newspaper editorials, and interviews all help bring to life a colorful account of a controversial, driven man who held the levers of political control in Nevada during the early twentieth century.
Paul Powell emerged from the hill country of southern Illinois to serve in state government from 1935 until his death in 1970. His political tenure included three terms as Speaker of the Illinois House, four terms as minority leader, and two terms as secretary of state. The sponsor of hundreds of bills, he worked tirelessly for his constituents in southern Illinois. He also worked tirelessly to promote his own interests.
In this first political biography of Powell, Robert E. Hartley follows the money. He tells how this man of humble origins and meager means amassed a world-class political and financial base. Part of that story is the disclosure of a personal fortune that boggled minds, including the unbelievable yarn of the $800,000 cash found in the hotel room following Powell's death.
Powell never earned a state salary of more than $30,000 per year, yet in the last year of his life, his federal income tax return showed an income of more than $200,000. At his death his estate totaled $3.2 million, and, when settled in 1978, was worth $4.6 million, including nearly $1 million in racetrack stock.
Following Powell's story, Hartley takes us deep into the Illinois political world of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, a time when politicians were on an "honor system" regarding their financial holdings. This was before disclosure of political contributions, before computer records, and before public meetings laws.
With Paul Simon: The Political Journey of an Illinois Original, author Robert E. Hartley presents the first thorough, objective volume on the journalistic and political career of one of Illinois’s most respected public figures. Hartley’s detailed account offers a fully rounded portrait of a man whose ideals and tenacity not only spurred reform on both state and national levels during his celebrated forty-year career but also established the lasting legacy of a political legend.
Simon first became a public figure at the age of nineteen, when he assumed the post of editor and publisher of a weekly newspaper in Troy, Illinois. From there, he used his paper to launch a fierce crusade against the crime and corruption plaguing Madison County. This battle sparked his entry into politics, helping to land him a seat in the state legislature in 1954. While serving, he campaigned tirelessly according to his principles, earning him the mass voter approval that would usher him into the seat of lieutenant governor in 1968—the first person elected to that position who did not share party affiliation with the governor.
As lieutenant governor, Simon initiated many changes to the position, remaking it to better serve the citizens of the state of Illinois. The cornerstone of his reform plan was an ombudsman program designed to allow the people of the state to voice problems they had with government and state agencies. The program, extremely popular with the public and the press, solved problems and helped to make Simon a household name throughout Illinois. Although he faced challenges along the way, including racial upheaval in Cairo and the student and police riots on the Carbondale campus of Southern Illinois University, Simon’s outspoken honesty and strong support of his constituents earned him the utmost esteem and popularity.
While his 1972 bid for governor of Illinois ultimately failed, this did not deter Simon from his dedication to social progress. In 1974 he began his remarkable twenty-two-year career in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, where he earned the admiration of the country for his political integrity. Despite the praise and support Simon had earned during his time in Washington, he was unable to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and returned to the Senate, winning a second term in 1990. Simon committed time and energy to the myriad issues of interest to him, especially in the field of education, with one of his biggest successes coming with the passage of the National Literacy Act, which he sponsored. He continued to foster his ties to journalism throughout his lengthy political career, authoring numerous books, articles, and columns, all of which he used to relentlessly promote open government and social programs.
This vivid account of the public life of Paul Simon reveals a man whose personal honor and dedication were unshakeable throughout nearly half a century in the political arena. Robert E. Hartley provides a candid perspective on Simon’s accomplishments and victories, as well as his mistakes and losses, revealing new insights into the life of this dynamic and widely respected public figure.
Modern legislators are increasingly motivated to serve their constituents in personal ways. Representatives act like ultimate ombudsmen: they keep in close touch with their constituents and try to cultivate a relationship with them based on service and accessibility. The Personal Vote describes the behavior of representatives in the United States and Great Britain and the response of their constituents as well. It shows how congressmen and members of Parliament earn personalized support and how this attenuates their ties to national leaders and parties.
The larger significance of this empirical work arises from its implications for the structure of legislative institutions and the nature of legislative action. Personalized electoral support correlates with decentralized governing institutions and special-interest policy making. Such systems tend to inconsistency and stalemate. The United States illustrates a mature case of this development, and Britain is showing the first movements in this direction with the decline of an established two-party system, the rise of a centrist third party, greater volatility in the vote, growing backbench independence and increasing backbench pressure for committees and staff.
This book is essential for specialists in American national government, British politics, and comparative legislatures and comparative parties.
Long before movie stars Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger became governors of California, a popular radio personality with no previous political experience—who wasn't even registered to vote—swept into the governor's office of Texas. W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel was a 1930s businessman who discovered the power of radio to sell flour. His musical shows with the Light Crust Doughboys (which launched the career of Bob Wills) and his radio homilies extolling family and Christian values found a vast, enthusiastic audience in Depression-era Texas. When Pappy decided to run for governor in 1938 as a way to sell more flour—a fact he proudly proclaimed throughout the campaign—the people of Texas voted for him in record numbers. And despite the ineptitude for politics he displayed once in office, Texans returned him to the governorship in 1940 and then elected him to the U.S. Senate in 1941 in a special election in which he defeated Lyndon Johnson, as well as to a full term as senator in 1942.
While the hit film O Brother, Where Art Thou? celebrated a fictional "Please Pass the Biscuits, Pappy" O'Daniel, this book captures the essence of the real man through photographs taken by employees of the Texas Department of Public Safety, most of which are previously unpublished. Reminiscent of the work of WPA photographers such as Russell Lee and Dorothea Lange, these photos record the last unscripted era of politics when a charismatic candidate could still address a crowd from an unpainted front porch or a mobile bandstand in the back of a truck. They strikingly confirm that Pappy O'Daniel's ability to connect with people was as great in person as on the radio.
To set the photos in context, Bill Crawford has written an entertaining text that discusses the political landscape in Texas and the United States in the 1930s, as well as the rise of radio as mass medium for advertising and entertainment. He also provides extensive captions for each picture. John Anderson, Photo Archivist of the Texas State Archives, discusses the work of Joel Tisdale and the other DPS photographers who left this extraordinary record of the greatest vote-getter in Texas history, who became one of America's first celebrities to cross the line from entertainment to political office.
In this study of Miles Poindexter, Insurgent Republican turned conservative, Howard W. Allen reaches beyond the traditional bounds of biography to present a history of the United States Congress during the Progressive era and the early years after World War I.
A congressman (1909–13)and a senator (1913–23), Miles Poindexter of Washington State was an outspoken, progressive reformer before World War I. He struggled to protect “the people” from “special interests,” particularly defending the interest of his section against eastern “colonialism.” A man with a penchant for absolute positions, Poindexter became caught up in the emotionalism of the Insurgent Republican revolt. At one time or another he championed Socialists, the IWW, the striking textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts—all unlikely causes for a middle-class lawyer from Spokane.
Regarding foreign policy, Poindexter was an uncompromising nationalist who, with Theodore Roosevelt, declared himself a member of the Progressive party in 1912.
After 1917 Poindexter actively tried to suppress opponents of the war. Following the war his targets were “Bolshevists” and other radicals. He also developed intense hostility toward Socialists, the IWW, and organized labor, fearing radicalism and labor. Reversing his former position, he allied himself with the eastern businessmen and regular Republicans in the Senate. Campaigning for the presidency in 1920, he appealed without success to the most conservative members of the party. He was defeated b a progressive Democrat in his 1922 bid for reelection to the Senate.
Allen examines the traditional sources—archival collections, newspaper files, and congressional reports. When he combines this material with a quantitative analysis of roll-call votes throughout Senator Poindexter’s years in Congress, he creates a remarkably useful method never before attempted in political biography.
If knowledge is power, then John Hird has opened the doors for anyone interested in public policymaking and policy analysis on the state level. A beginning question might be: does politics put gasoline or sugar in the tank? More specifically, in a highly partisan political environment, is nonpartisan expertise useful to policymaking? Do policy analysts play a meaningful role in decision making? Does policy expertise promote democratic decision making? Does it vest power in an unelected and unaccountable elite, or does it become co-opted by political actors and circumstances? Is it used to make substantive changes or just for window-dressing?
In a unique comparative focus on state policy, Power, Knowledge, and Politics dissects the nature of the policy institutions that policymakers establish and analyzes the connection between policy research and how it is actually used in decision making. Hird probes the effects of politics and political institutions—parties, state political culture and dynamics, legislative and gubernatorial staffing, partisan think tanks, interest groups—on the nature and conduct of nonpartisan policy analysis. Through a comparative examination of institutions and testing theories of the use of policy analysis, Hird draws conclusions that are more useful than those derived from single cases.
Hird examines nonpartisan policy research organizations established by and operating in U.S. state legislatures—one of the most intense of political environments—to determine whether and how nonpartisan policy research can survive in that harsh climate. By first detailing how nonpartisan policy analysis organizations came to be and what they do, and then determining what state legislators want from them, he presents a rigorous statistical analysis of those agencies in all 50 states and from a survey of 800 state legislators. This thoroughly comprehensive look at policymaking at the state level concludes that nonpartisan policy analysis institutions can play an important role—as long as they remain scrupulously nonpartisan.
Profiles in Power offers concise biographies of fourteen twentieth-century Texans who wielded significant political power and influence in Washington, D.C. First published in 1993 by Harlan Davidson, it has been revised and updated with new chapters on John Nance Garner and Henry Gonzalez and expanded chapters on Lyndon Johnson, Barbara Jordan, Ralph Yarborough, Jim Wright, and John Tower. Demonstrating the validity of a biographical approach to history, the book as a whole covers all the major political issues of the twentieth century, as well as the pivotal role of Texans in defining the national agenda.
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