Memorial services held in the House of representatives and Senate of the United States, together with remarks presented in eulogy, Byron Patton Harrison, late a senator from Mississippi
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Byron Patton Harrison was an American politician. He was a Mississippi representative who served as a Democrat in the United States House of Representatives from 1911 to 1919 and in the United States Senate from 1919 until his death.
Background
Byron Patton Harrison was born on August 29, 1881 at Crystal Springs, Copiah County, in southwest Mississippi. He was the first of four children of Robert and Myrna Anna (Patton) Harrison. Through his father he was descended from the Virginia Harrisons and was distantly related to Presidents William Henry and Benjamin Harrison. Robert Harrison died before his eldest child had reached his seventh birthday, and the boy early had to help supplement the family income by hawking newspapers and driving a two-mule carryall.
Education
After attending public school, Harrison enrolled in Mississippi State College for a brief period and in 1899-1900 attended Louisiana State University, where he gained recognition as a pitcher on the baseball team; for a time after leaving college, he played semiprofessional baseball in Mississippi. Later he taught school in Leakesville, Greene County, during which time he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1902.
Career
Harrison's political career began in 1906, when he was elected to the first of two terms as district attorney of the newly created second judicial district of Mississippi. Two years later he moved to Gulfport, where he was chosen a delegate to the Democratic National Convention; and in 1910, now familiarly known as "Pat, " he was elected to Congress from Mississippi's 6th district. He remained in the House for four terms and proved a loyal supporter of President Wilson.
For more than a decade the Democratic party in Mississippi was split between factions headed by Senators John Sharp Williams and James K. Vardaman. In 1918, with Vardaman's influence waning, Harrison, backed by Williams, made a direct challenge for Vardaman's Senate seat in the Democratic primary. Vardaman had opposed Wilson in both domestic and foreign measures and was branded by the President as one of "the little group of willful men" who had filibustered against the Armed Neutrality Bill. At the climax of the primary campaign, Wilson issued a public appeal to Mississippi voters to defeat Vardaman, an appeal generally credited as the decisive factor in Harrison's narrow victory.
He was selected temporary chairman of the party's national convention of 1924, where he delivered the keynote address. In 1930, as in 1924, he was reelected without opposition.
On the death of Senator Key Pittman and with the President's blessing, Harrison was elected president pro tempore of the Senate in January 1941. During that same year he was largely responsible for preventing a filibuster designed to block the Lend-Lease bill for military aid to Great Britain.
He had accumulated a fortune of about a half-million dollars in the 1920s through real estate speculation around Gulfport, but lost it in the depression of the 1930s.
In the winter of 1940-1941 it was apparent to his colleagues that Harrison's health was failing. In April he entered an Arkansas hospital suffering from fatigue. His illness took a new turn in mid-June when he underwent an emergency operation for an intestinal obstruction at Washington's Emergency Hospital, and he died six days later. After Methodist services in Gulfport, Mississippi, attended by Vice-President Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. , and a host of colleagues, he was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Gulfport.
Achievements
Byron Patton Harrison was a prominent politician and representative of Mississippi. Although he lacked the dynamic and intellectual qualities of a truly great political leader, Harrison was a skillful parliamentarian and a persuasive pleader. He was one of the most popular men ever to serve in public life in Mississippi.
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Politics
As a freshman Senator, Harrison advocated America's entry into the League of Nations and, afterward, into the World Court. He gained national prominence during the Republican ascendancy of the 1920s by his skillful badgering of the executive branch for its failures and blunders, and soon won a place of leadership in Democratic councils.
He courageously campaigned for Alfred E. Smith in the presidential campaign when many Southern politicians feared to do so, and after the humiliating Democratic defeat, Harrison was one of the leaders who undertook the job of rebuilding the shattered party.
Although himself a conservative Southerner, he was an early supporter of the candidacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the Democratic victory of 1932 the party won control of both houses of Congress, and Harrison, who had been the ranking Democrat on the powerful Finance Committee, moved to the chairmanship. In this post Harrison demonstrated skill at pushing early New Deal legislation through Congress.
When Vice-President John Nance Garner and majority leader Joseph T. Robinson had a piece of legislation they wanted to be sure would reach the floor, they routed it through the Finance Committee, whose membership had been largely selected by Harrison himself. Thus the National Industrial Recovery Act, the bill to legalize the sale of light wines and beer, and parts of the original Agricultural Adjustment Act were virtually "horse-traded" through the Senate by Harrison.
Because he was on good terms with all factions of his own party as well as with the Republicans, he had little trouble persuading his colleagues to follow his lead. Despite his private reservations, for example, he maneuvered the administration's undistributed corporate profits tax through a reluctant Senate in 1936. But Harrison's economic views remained closer to those of his friend and supporter Bernard Baruch than to those of Roosevelt; and in 1938, when the administration agreed to a slight reduction of the tax, Harrison echoed Baruch's demand for complete repeal, settling finally for rates much lower than the President had suggested. The tax was repealed the following year.
By this time Harrison's formerly close relations with Roosevelt had become strained.
After the death of Senator Robinson in July 1937, when Harrison and Senator Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky actively sought the post of majority leader, Roosevelt gave his support to the more liberal Barkley, thus assuring the Kentuckian's one-vote victory in the Democratic caucus. Harrison did not openly break with the New Deal, but he was now free to follow his conscience in opposing many administration programs he would have had to endorse as Senate Democratic leader.
Besides his stand on the profits tax, he was a leader of the filibuster which blocked an antilynching bill in 1938. He nonetheless refused to sign a bipartisan manifesto denouncing New Deal spending and interference with private enterprise in December 1937; he worked tirelessly for the reciprocal trade agreements program; and he supported Roosevelt's plan to reorganize the executive department in 1939.
Personality
A tall and loose-jointed figure, bald and beaknosed, Harrison was careless of dress but had an amiable disposition and courtly manner. In debate, his sallies were marked by good humor and witticisms that stung but left no scars, and he was widely popular both in and out of Congress.
As much as he could, he avoided the social life of the capital.
Interests
Politicians
Alfred E. Smith, Franklin D. Roosevelt
Connections
Harrison married Mary Edwina McInnis of Leakesville on January 19, 1905. They had five children; two of them, Maurie and Lockwood, died in infancy.
