Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,761

This is the grave of Jennings Randolph.

Born in 1902 in Salem, West Virginia, Randolph was named for William Jennings Bryan, hero of his parents. He came from a political family. Salem is just a small town, but both his father and grandfather were mayor of it, so there was expectation that the new boy would head in this direction too. And boy did he. He went to the local schools. There was a small college nearby called Salem College, which today exists as some pro-profit venture. Anyway, he went there even though it was run by Seventh-Day Adventists, and he graduated in 1922. He got a job on a newspaper in Clarksburg and worked his way up pretty quickly through the West Virginia newspaper world. In fact, by 1926, he was chair of the journalism department at Davis and Elkins College, where he stayed until 1932.

The newspapers were a way for Randolph to engage in his political ambitions and he wasn’t really waiting around to engage in them. He ran for Congress in 1930, only 28 years old, and lost that race. But he ran again in 1932 and won in that Democratic wave. He stayed in the House for six terms and at times chaired the Committee on the District of Columbia and the Committee on Civil Service. These certainly weren’t key committees, but they demonstrated that this still young congressman was on the rise. He was an active legislator and some of his goals were pretty noble. He was behind the Randolph-Sheppard Act, for example. That 1936 law gives preference in federal food service contracts for the blind. This was a pioneering act, one of the first laws that actually helped blind people in this country. It remains in effect today. I am sure the Supreme Court will get rid of it one of these days. He also cosponsored the Civil Aeronautics Act, which created the Civil Aeronautics Authority, which regulated air carrier fares. Thanks to Jimmy Carter’s great love of neoliberal deregulation for getting rid of that. It goes without saying that he was a big coal guy too and was behind the Synthetic Liquid Fuels Act, which created markets for liquified coal fuel. The Defense Department certainly liked this and it was passed in 1944.

But the House didn’t serve Randolph’s ambitions well enough. Then he lost his reelection bid for the House in the Republican wave of 1946. That did not make him happy. Now, he was fine. He was one of these senators in the Lyndon Johnson mode–make money wherever you can. So he already was teaching public speaking at Southeastern University in Washington as early as 1935 and he had no intention of giving that up. For that matter, he had no intention of spending anymore time in West Virginia than he needed. He was fully a creature of DC and he wasn’t going back except to campaign. He kept teaching at Southeastern all the way until 1953. He also became director of public relations for Capitol Airlines in 1947, after his loss, which was later purchased by United. He also became Dean of Business Administration at Southeastern in 1952.

So Randolph was doing just fine in the private sector. But still, that itch for politics didn’t go away. In 1958, he decided he’d throw his hat back in the ring and run for the Senate, after Matthew Neely died and there was a special election to fill the term. He won, then won a full term in the 1960 election, and then was elected three more times. Randolph wasn’t exactly a force in the Senate, but he certainly could move and shake with the best of them. He was pretty progressive. It’s hard to believe today that standing up for civil rights could work from a West Virginia politician; it sure wouldn’t today. But he took a big lead on this, voting for every civil rights act and for Thurgood Marshall to join the Supreme Court.

Randolph was best known for his work on the 26th Amendment, lowering the age to vote to 18. That has hardly had the transformative impact on American life than Randolph and others hoped, but he sponsored the amendment 11 times, going all the way back to 1942 when he was in Congress. His point then was that if a boy is old enough to die in a war, he’s old enough to vote. In 1970, the time was right. New amendments to the Voting Rights Act lowered the age to 18, but the Nixon administration didn’t like that, hating the hippies and all. But then the Supreme Court threw them out, and perhaps for technically correct reasons. So the Constitution was the only solution and the energy was there and Randolph saw his long-time goal through.

The other super interesting thing about Randolph was his peace politics. He wanted to established a Department of Peace in the Cabinet and introduced legislation in 1946 about this. Of course this went nowhere. But when he was a fairly powerful senator in the post-Vietnam War period, there was more momentum to get the government to push peace-based policies. So in the mid-70s, he was part of a bipartisan congressional group that included Mark Hatfield, Dan Glickman, and Spark Matsunaga to push for institutions in the federal government specifically dedicated to peace-based conflict resolution. In fact, Randolph’s last major act before retiring in 1985 was sponsoring the United States Institute of Peace Act, creating a federal institution to train government workers in peace-based conflict resolution that still exists today. I am sure Musk will have Trump get rid of it.

Now, Jennings Randolph came back into the public consciousness just a tiny bit in recent years and that’s thanks to Old Man Biden. See, Biden is so nostalgic for the good old days of the Senate, when men could hang out naked in the locker room regardless of party and just be collegial. He specifically cited being a young senator and seeing William Fulbright and Jennings Randolph hanging out nude and he just thought that was great. So we all got a quick mental vision of Jennings Randolph’s old man penis. Ah, good times there Joe. Good times.

Randolph died of cancer in 1998. He was 96 years old.

Jennings Randolph is buried in Seventh Day Baptist Church Cemetery, Salem, West Virginia.

If you would like this series to visit other senators elected in 1958, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Howard Cannon of Nevada is in Arlington and William Langer is in Castleton, North Dakota. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.