Background
Brent was born on December 24, 1874 in Newport, Kentucky, United States, the son of Philip Brent Spence, a commission merchant, Confederate army colonel, and postmaster, and Virginia Berry.
Brent was born on December 24, 1874 in Newport, Kentucky, United States, the son of Philip Brent Spence, a commission merchant, Confederate army colonel, and postmaster, and Virginia Berry.
He attended the University of Cincinnati, where he received an LL. B. in 1895, and he was admitted to the Kentucky bar in that year.
From 1916 to 1924 Spence served as city solicitor of Newport, representing the city in suits against utility companies. In 1926 he was defeated for the Democratic nomination for the House of Representatives. He received that nomination in 1928 but lost in the Hoover landslide. He was elected to the Seventy-second Congress in 1930 from the Sixth Kentucky District and was reelected as an at-large representative in the next election.
In 1934 he was elected from the Fifth District, which was more divided between urban and rural interests than any other in the state, and he was returned to the thirteen succeeding Congresses, serving until January 3, 1963. His closest contest was during the Republican sweep in 1946, when he won by 1, 200 votes. At his retirement, at the age of eighty-eight, he was the chairman of the Committee on Banking and Currency, a powerful position that he had achieved through seniority in 1943 and retained except in the Republican-led Eightieth and Eighty-third Congresses.
Spence was an advocate of almost all New Deal and Fair Deal measures, including public housing, full payment of the bonus to veterans of World War I, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Philippine independence, the Social Security Act, and price controls. He also supported the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, organizations that were of special interest to him.
Spence had served as a delegate to the multinational conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944 and was largely responsible, along with Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York, for the Bretton Woods Agreements Act (1945) providing for American participation in the two bodies. Spence made no claim to banking expertise, having merely been vice-president of a local Kentucky bank. He maintained that he simply applied common sense to the arcane and specialized issues before his committee.
Other major legislation in which he played a key role included the Housing Act (1949), the Export Control Act (1949), the Defense Production Act (1950), the Defense Housing and Community Facilities and Services Act (1951), the Bank Holding Company Act (1956), the Savings and Loan Holding Company Act (1959), and the Area Redevelopment Act (1961).
Spence died in Fort Thomas, Kentucky.
He insisted that the gold standard was the only way to keep the dollar strong.
He married Ida Billerman on September 6, 1919; they had no children.