Frank Porter Graham
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| Frank Porter Graham | |
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| In office 1949 – 1951 Serving with Clyde Roark Hoey |
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| Preceded by | Joseph Melville Broughton |
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| Succeeded by | Willis Smith |
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| Born | October 14, 1886 Fayetteville, North Carolina |
| Died | February 16, 1972 Chapel Hill, North Carolina |
| Nationality | American |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Relations | Archibald Wright "Moonlight" Graham |
| Alma mater | University of North Carolina Columbia University |
| Profession | Politician, Educator |
| Religion | Presbyterian |
Frank Porter Graham (October 14, 1886 - February 16, 1972) was a president of the University of North Carolina and, for a brief period, United States Senator.
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[edit] Early life
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Born in Fayetteville, North Carolina in 1886, Graham graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hil in 1909. He thereafter studied law and received his license in 1913. He received a graduate degree in 1916 from Columbia University. While he was studying law, Graham was a high school teacher in Raleigh, North Carolina. He later embarked on a career as a history professor at the University of North Carolina from 1915 until 1930. He interrupted his teaching profession to enlist in 1917 for service in World War I. He was discharged as a first lieutenant in 1919.
[edit] President of The University of North Carolina
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In 1930, Graham was named president of the University of North Carolina. He served until 1949 and was the first president of the Consolidated University of North Carolina.
[edit] United States Senator
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In 1948, North Carolina entered a more progressive era of politics. Former state agriculture commissioner W. Kerr Scott extinguished the control of a group including former Governor O. Max Gardner, all of whom hailed from the small city of Shelby. Scott, a pro-Truman Democrat who had supported the New Deal, defeated that group's candidate for governor, the state treasurer Charles M. Johnson, in the party primary.
On taking office in January 1949, Scott brought in his own perceived liberal reformers. Two months after Scott's inauguration, incumbent Junior United States Senator J. Melville Broughton, a former state governor, died in office. Broughton's death provided Scott with a prime opportunity to make a mark in Washington, D.C.
After three weeks of intense speculation throughout March 1949 as to whom the governor might choose for the Senate, attention focused on individuals ranging from the senator's widow, who expressed no interest; Scott's former campaign manager, Capus Miller Waynick; another Scott supporter, Major Lennox Polk McLendon, a lawyer from Greensboro, North Carolina; former Senator Umstead; and the governor himself. It was Graham who caught Scott's attention and won the appointment.
At the time of his appointment, Graham had never sought nor served in any political office, an unusual phenomenon at the time for North Carolina senators. Also atypical was that the particular Senate seat Graham occupied was in a period of considerable turnover. Beginning with the death of Senator Josiah W. Bailey in 1946, and concluding with the election of B. Everett Jordan in 1958, no fewer than eight men served in the seat in a dozen years.
Graham faced two opponents in the 1950 Democratic primary, including former Senator Robert R. Reynolds and former Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives Willis Smith. Reynolds received only 10 percent of the vote, but Smith garnered 41 percent. Graham polled 49 percent, one percentage point below the threshold of receiving the nomination outright. He therefore went into a runoff with Smith. Years later, North Carolina abolished runoff primaries if the leading candidate had at least 40 percent of the vote. Had that procedure been in effect in 1950, Graham would have become the Democratic senatorial nominee in the first primary.
In the runoff, Smith ran as an anti-Truman Democrat. Smith's anti-Negro speeches denounced Graham's racial moderate stances. The campaign was considered the most racist for a senate race in North Carolina since the beginning of popular vote for senators. At the time of the election, few African Americans were voting in North Carolina because of Jim Crow laws designed to disenfranchise them. Those blacks who were registered usually were Republicans who cast ballots only in routine general elections. Graham was hence unable to appeal to many black voters. In the virtually all-white Democratic primaries, Smith's campaign tactics worked, and he prevailed by a narrow 52-48 percent. Graham's supporters mounted a write-in candidacy for the November general election, but he received only one-half of one percent, and Smith won in a landslide against a desultory GOP opponent.
[edit] Post-Senate
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After his short Senate stint, Graham entered the field of world politics and diplomacy. He served as a mediator at the United Nations as a representative to India and Pakistan in the Kashmir dispute, serving in in this capacity from 1951 through 1967. He retired from U.N. service in 1967 at the age of 81.
Graham died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina aged 85. He is interred at theOld Chapel Hill Cemetery. Some nine months after Graham's death, his former Senate seat went to an aide to the late Willis Smith, Jesse Helms, who also became the first popularly elected Republican U.S. senator from North Carolina.
The student union building at the university is named in Graham's honor, as is the Frank Porter Graham Elementary School in Chapel Hill, and the Frank Porter Graham Building on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Graham, along with Eleanor Roosevelt and Hubert Humphrey and other anticommunist liberals of the era, was affiliated with the liberal interest group, the Americans for Democratic Action.
The baseball career of Graham's brother, Archibald Wright "Moonlight" Graham, was popularized in the W. P. Kinsella novel Shoeless Joe and the 1989 film it inspired, Field of Dreams.
[edit] References
Frank Porter Graham. Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. U.S. Senate Historical Office. Retrieved on 2008-03-26.
Kestenbaum, Lawrence (2005). Frank Porter Graham. The Political Graveyard. Retrieved on 2008-03-26.
Pleasants, Julian M.; Augustus M. Burns III (1990). Frank Porter Graham and the 1950 Senate Race in North Carolina. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 9780807819333.
[edit] External links
- Inventory of the Frank Porter Graham Papers, 1908-1972, in the Southern Historical Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill
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