Benton Franklin Jensen was an American congressman. He served thirteen consecutive terms as a U. S. Representative from Iowa's 7th congressional district in the southwestern corner of the state. While on the floor of the U. S. House on March 1, 1954, he was one of five Congressmen wounded by gunfire from a Puerto Rican Nationalists firing from a visitors' gallery.
Background
Jensen was born on December 16, 1892, in Marion, Iowa, the son of Martin Jensen, a drainage-tile ditchdigger, and Gertrude Anna Andersen, both emigrants from Denmark. In March 1900 the family moved to a 200-acre farm in Audubon County, Iowa, near the center of the largest rural settlement of Danes in the United States.
Education
Jensen attended a one-room school and assisted with the farm work in Audubon County, Iowa. As his father's health deteriorated, responsibility for operating the farm fell to Jensen and his brother Oskar. The work proved too heavy, and when Jensen was fifteen, his father sold the farm and bought a small acreage on the outskirts of the nearby town of Exira, Iowa. After completing the ninth grade, Jensen dropped out of school and worked as a ditchdigger, a store clerk, a farmhand, and a button cutter.
Career
In March 1914 Jensen went to work as a yardman and bookkeeper for the Green Bay Lumber Company in Exira. Two years later he was promoted, and traveled from town to town in the Midwest to fill in for managers who were ill or on vacation.
During World War I Jensen was a second lieutenant in the army and served most of his tour at Camp Pike, Arkansas. Following his discharge in December 1918 he returned to Exira and the retail lumber business. Appointed manager of the local Green Bay yard in 1919, he held that position for the next nineteen years. He helped organize the local post of the American Legion and later served as county and district commander.
In 1938 Jensen entered the Republican primary for Iowa's Seventh District congressional seat. He finished second in an inconclusive six-man race but won the nomination at the party convention on the thirty-seventh ballot. The popular Democratic incumbent, Otha Wearin, had abandoned the office to make an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic senatorial nomination. Jensen won the general election, the first of thirteen consecutive victories in his congressional career. To some, Jensen seemed out of place in Congress.
Although Jensen supported federal programs beneficial to his district--soil conservation and flood control, the farm program (particularly the soil bank), the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), and the establishment of the DeSoto Bend National Wildlife Refuge and Recreation Area along the Missouri River - his legislative philosophy was fiscally conservative. A self-proclaimed watchdog of the treasury, he attacked what he called the "socialistic pattern of excessive government spending. " In 1942 he secured a seat on the powerful Appropriations Committee and eventually became its ranking Republican.
He served as chairman of the Interior and Government Corporations subcommittees during the Republican-controlled Eightieth Congress (1947-1949) and later as the ranking minority member of four subcommittees - Interior; Deficiencies; Atomic Energy; and Public Works. Beginning in 1950, Jensen sought, with varying degrees of success, to reduce the number of federal employees by attaching to appropriations bills the so-called Jensen amendment to prohibit the filling of three out of every four routine vacancies until overall federal employment had been cut by 10 percent.
A frequent foe of public power, Jensen often criticized the Tennessee Valley Authority and projects such as Hell's Canyon Dam. Although he initially supported the Marshall Plan, his opposition to federal spending eventually turned him against most foreign-aid programs. Nor was he easily swayed by arguments for greatly increased military appropriations. On March 1, 1954, Jensen was one of five members of the House of Representatives wounded by four Puerto Rican extremists who opened fire upon the chamber from a visitors' gallery. Struck in the shoulder, he was not seriously injured. One of many conservative victims of the 1964 Democratic landslide, Jensen was defeated by John R. Hansen. Although he continued to maintain an apartment in Washington, D. C. , he spent his summers in Exira, where he opened a small museum. Jensen died in Washington, D. C. on February 5, 1970, and was interred in Exira Cemetery.
Achievements
Personality
Jensen was not a great orator (he had a deep, nasal voice and read his speeches in a monotone) and seemed most comfortable in direct contact with the farmers and small-town residents of his Iowa district. He particularly enjoyed discussing political issues with school-children. "The kids spread the word at home. You can make a lot of political hay that way, " he told a reporter.
Connections
On December 13, 1917, Jensen married Charlotte E. Hadden. They had one child.