Overton Brooks

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Thomas Overton Brooks (December 21, 1897 -- September 16, 1961) was a Democratic U.S. representative from the Shreveport-based Fourth Congressional District of northwest Louisiana, having served for a quarter century beginning in 1937. Brooks was a nephew of U.S. Senator John Holmes Overton and chaired the House Science and Astronautics Committee at the time of his death.

Brooks succeeded John Nicholas Sandlin, Sr., a fellow Democrat from Minden, the seat of Webster Parish. Rather than seek reelection to the House, Sandlin ran unsuccessfully in the 1936 Democratic primary against Allen J. Ellender for an open seat in the U.S. Senate.

Brooks was born in Baton Rouge to Claude M. Brooks and the former Penelope Overton. He graduated from public schools. Brooks served overseas during World War I as an enlisted man in the Sixth Field Artillery, First Division, Regular Army, 1918-1919.

After the war, he obtained a law degree in 1923 from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He was thereafter admitted to the bar and began his practice in Shreveport, the seat of Caddo Parish.

He married the former Mollie Meriwether of Shreveport on June 1, 1932. She was the daughter of Minor Meriwether and the former Anne Finley McNutt. They had one child, Laura Anne.

Brooks served on the U.S. House Committee on Armed Services from 1947 to 1958, and he then became the first chairman of the newly-formed House Space Committee (later Science and Astronautics), reportedly because his seniority entitled him to a more important post on Armed Services than he was considered capable of handling. He was reappointed in 1961. Although little can be credited to his chairmanship, he was noted for urging the development of a civil, rather than military, space program, and on May 4, 1961, his committee sent a memo to then Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson on this subject. (President John F. Kennedy's famous speech which prompted the Apollo program came just a few weeks later.) From his Armed Services Committee berth, Brooks became a champion of veterans' causes. The veterans' medical center in Shreveport bears his name.

He was also president of the National River and Harbor Congress and was an early advocate of making the Red River navigable from Shreveport to Alexandria, a cause continued by his popular Democratic successor, Joseph David "Joe D." Waggonner, Jr., of Plain Dealing in Bossier Parish.

Brooks was reelected to Congress twelve times. He signed the Southern Manifesto, a failed congressional attempt to block desegregation of public schools. In 1956, he defeated (68-32 percent) the Republican nominee Littleberry Calhoun Allen, Jr., who later turned Democratic and was elected as Shreveport's public utilities commissioner (1962-1970) and as mayor (1970-1978). Brooks declared himself a lifelong Democrat in that campaign and urged voters to support Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois for president over the Louisiana choice that year, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Allen had called himself an "Eisenhower Republican".

In Brooks' last election in 1960, he overwhelmed his Republican challenger, Fred Charles McClanahan (born 1918) of Shreveport, by a 74-26 percent margin. In December 1961, Joe Waggonner defeated a strong Republican challenge waged by Charlton Havard Lyons, Sr. (1894-1973), a Shreveport oilman, in the special election held to fill the remainder of Brooks' term.

Brooks was a member of the Masonic lodge, the Shriners, the Elks, American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Kiwanis Club. He died of aheart attack in Bethesda Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. He is interred in Forest Park Cemetery in Shreveport. He was Episcopalian.

[edit] References

http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=B000884

Shreveport Times, September 17, 1961

Ken Hechler, The Endless Space Frontier. A History of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 1959-1978 (Univelt, 1982) ISBN 0-87703-157-6 (hardback), ISBN 0-87703-158-4 (paperback)

"Overton Brooks," A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, Vol. 1 (1988)

Preceded by John N. Sandlin

Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Louisiana's 4th congressional district 1937–1961

Succeeded by Joe Waggonner