Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,207
By This is the grave of Clinton Anderson.
Born in 1895 in Centerville, South Dakota, which is the center of precisely nothing (including South Dakota, it’s outside of Sioux Falls), Anderson grew up reasonably well off. He went to Dakota Wesleyan University for a couple of years and then transferred to the University of Michigan. But before he graduated, his father had an accident and he had to return to help the family. He got a job with a newspaper in Mitchell, where I assume he was the Corn Palace beat 24-7. He also started to get sick, maybe from all that hot Corn Palace coverage. He tried to the join the military when the U.S. joined World War I, but was rejected. See, the doctors discovered tuberculosis. That explained the sickness. He was only given six months to live, so this was real bad. But he tried. He went to Albuquerque, New Mexico to dry out his lungs in a sanitarium.
Now, the early 20th century was the great age of TB sanitariums in the Southwest and this shaped a huge amount of post-statehood politics in both Arizona and New Mexico. If you actually survived your illness, you entered into a world where it was pretty easy for a young person with some money to make connections and rise in power. And the fact that Anderson was able to go to said sanitarium meant that the family had enough money to make that happen unless of him dying in some hovel.
That’s exactly Anderson’s story. He got better. He then took a job as a reporter with the Albuquerque Journal. Anderson’s beat was to go to Santa Fe and cover the legislature. New Mexico was dominated by Republicans. Anderson was very much not a Republican. He was disgusted with the corruption. In 1919, he became the head of the New Mexico Public Health Association. During the 20s, he opened an insurance business and made himself a lot of money, while becoming a big guy in the state Democratic Party. He was also a huge Rotary Club guy and in fact became the national president in 1932, which meant he knew a lot of people.
Meanwhile, he got more serious about politics. He became the chairman of the state Democratic Party in 1928 and state treasurer in 1933. He built his reputation in the state through the rest of the decade, serving in a number of different capacities within the New Deal, such as state director of the National Youth Administration and Western States Field Coordinator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. So he ran for Congress in 1940 and won. He got to know Harry Truman and the future president became a mentor in Washington. Anderson proved himself as a capable politician and administrator in Washington, doing a lot of work on food issues.
When Truman became president in 1945, he soon named Anderson to be his Secretary of Agriculture. He was a very active secretary. There were a lot of food issues, both domestically and with worldwide hunger issues after the war. Since Anderson was a well-known good administrator, he took to the job. He convinced Truman to bring Herbert Hoover back from exile and promote the former Republican president, bitter old man that he was, to work on his first love of hunger relief. They all worked together and did a ton to promote American farms in solving European hunger through 1948. This served Anderson very well–reaching out to a prominent Republican was not going to hurt his own political ambitions.
So Anderson ran for the Senate in 1948, with the urging of the retiring Carl Hatch. It was a tight race in a divided nation in a close year, but Anderson pulled it out. He soon became a leading figure in the Senate. He was an active senator, often for good, but with one gigantic caveat that needs discussion. He was a great environmentalist and was the most important senator in seeing the Wilderness Act of 1964 through. That bill passed by large margins in the end, but was quite controversial at first.
Anderson also became a huge figure in energy policy. It was Anderson who torpedoed Lewis Strauss’ nomination as Secretary of Commerce in 1959, in part over Strauss’ horrendous treatment of Robert Oppenheimer and in part because Anderson hated him personally. Anderson also was a huge supporter of the space program. He chaired the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences for a decade, beginning in 1963, and he steered massive resources toward NASA and everything else to do with space.
And then there’s Operation Plowshare……….. Operation Plowshare is one of the most batshit insane things in American history and no one in Washington was more committed to it that Clint Anderson. It might make sense on the face of it–we have this new nuclear technology, what if we used it for peaceful purposes. But in truth, the ideas were so insane that they almost make the claims of AI promoters look reasonable. Need to deepen your harbor? Nuke it. Need to open a mine? Nukes. Need to frack some rock for oil? Nuke it. This is all totally insane. Anderson was a fanatic on this issue. You can read his 1965 New York Times op-ed in favor of its continued funding in the wake of reasonable, rational people saying things like “uh, what about the radiation?”
There was literally no human problem radiation couldn’t solve if you were Clint Anderson. There once was a test of using a nuclear explosion for fracking. Oh, it works, I promise you. Except that all of the fuel unleashed was radioactive and that area of Colorado remains closed off to the public today. Huh, what a shock. All of this was connected to his promotion of the economic development of New Mexico through nuclear energy, since the state was of course central to its development through the Manhattan Project, the Alamogordo Missile Range, and the two national laboratories that followed.
Anderson’s health began to decline in the early 70s and so he chose not to run again in 1972. Imagine a U.S. senator resigning because he was old. Impossible to imagine in 2026! Anderson died of a stroke in 1975, at the age of 80.
Clinton Anderson is buried in Fairview Memorial Park, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
If you would like this series to visit other senators elected in 1948, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. J. Melville Broughton is in Raleigh, North Carolina and Guy Gillette is in Cherokee, Iowa. Previous posts are archived here and here.