Background

Clarence James Brown was born on July 14, 1893 in Blanchester, Ohio, the son of Owen Brown and Ellen Barerre McCoppin.

Education

Clarence graduated from Blanchester High School in 1912. From 1913 to 1915 he studied law at Washington and Lee University but never practiced law. In 1915 Brown was appointed to his first public office, state statistician and election supervisor in the office of the Ohio secretary of state.

Career

In 1917 Clarence Brown purchased his first newspaper. The Brown Publishing Company eventually grew to own a number of newspapers and commercial printing shops in southwestern Ohio. He was its president for the rest of his life. He was reelected in 1920. In 1926 Brown was elected to the first of three terms as Ohio secretary of state.

While in that post he removed from office the entire Cuyahoga and Mahoning County Boards of Elections--in 1928 and 1930, respectively--after investigations of election fraud in those counties. Brown entered the gubernatorial primary in 1932, but was narrowly defeated. Two years later he was nominated for governor, but was defeated by a small margin in the November election.

In 1936 he was a delegate to the Republican National Convention and headed Frank Knox's campaign for the presidential nomination. Brown was elected to the House of Representatives from the Seventh Ohio Congressional District in 1938. He was reelected every two years for the rest of his life.

After Pearl Harbor, however, he supported the war effort. By 1943 he endorsed postwar United States international collaboration. That year he became a member of the Republican steering committee.

In 1940, 1948, and 1952 Brown supported Senator Robert A. Taft's attempts to secure the Republican presidential nomination and was his floor manager at the 1940 Republican National Convention. Four years later he was floor manager for John W. Bricker at the Republican Convention. During the campaign he served on the executive committee of the Republican National Committee. On domestic issues Brown was decidedly conservative. He opposed the New Deal job creation programs.

In 1943 he voted for the liquidation of the Home Owners Loan Corporation and against increased funds for the Rural Electrification Administration program. The following year he called for an investigation intended to curb "the dissemination of New Deal and fourth-term political propaganda" to American forces abroad. In 1946 he supported the Case antistrike bill, and in 1947 he was a proponent of the Taft-Hartley bill.

Soon thereafter he sponsored a resolution that would officially declare the war to be ended in order to remove wartime controls. Brown called for decreased federal spending and blamed the federal deficit on the $420 million contributed to the World Bank, the World Stabilization Fund, and the loan to Great Britain.

Brown was appointed to the commissions. Brown served for many years on the House Rules Committee and was the ranking Republican member at the time of his death. The committee was often regarded during these years as a bottleneck for progressive legislation.

In 1961 and 1964 the Democratic House stripped the committee of much of its power. In 1964 Brown was forced out as Ohio's Republican national committeeman by the state Republican chairman, Ray Bliss.

He died at Bethesda, Maryland.

Achievements

• Clarence James Brown represented Ohio as a Republican in the United States House of Representatives from 1939 until his death in Bethesda, Maryland in 1965. Long representing conservative views, near the end of his life, he helped gain passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which provided enforcement of the right to vote for all citizens. As president of Brown Publishing Company from 1920, he created a huge media company that lasted for 90 years. In 1918, at age 25, Brown was elected as the 36th Lieutenant Governor of Ohio, the youngest man to gain that post.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Constitution of the State of Ohio Annotated as in Force and Effect July 1, 1930

    ( The Making of Modern Law: Foreign, Comparative and Inte...)

Politics

In 1918, as a Republican, Brown was elected lieutenant governor of Ohio, reportedly the youngest person to hold that position in Ohio history. While directing the Republican national campaign in 1946, he denounced the Democratic party as tending toward socialism and called the Congress of Industrial Organizations Political Action Committee a "conduit of communism. " He interpreted his reelection and the landslide Republican victory in the 1946 congressional elections as signaling the "beginning of the end of an era" of presidential power.

Views

Brown opposed all legislation that might involve the United States in the growing conflicts in Europe and Asia. He opposed the repeal of the arms embargo, conscription, and lend-lease. He also opposed that loan and aid to Greece and Turkey, arguing that if there was not to be tax relief in the United States, then there should be no European relief. He suggested that the United States could be a good neighbor without being a soft touch. With Senator Taft, Brown sponsored a bill that would streamline the executive branch by eliminating overlapping functions. Two Commissions on Organization of the Executive Branch of Government were created in 1947 and were chaired by Herbert Hoover.

A defender of civil rights, Brown voted with the Republican majority for the abolition of poll taxes and unsuccessfully sponsored an amendment that would have prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, creed, or color in the recruitment of nurses for the armed services.

While asserting his belief in labor's right to organize, bargain collectively, and strike, Brown was a consistent opponent of what he deemed to be labor's excesses.

He opposed the continuance of the draft in peacetime and civilian control of atomic energy. In 1947 Brown supported the proposed constitutional amendment that limited a president to two terms in office. In the postwar period Brown favored creation of a permanent House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Quotations: In 1940, during debate of the anti-lynching bill he stated:

"We hear much of the struggle throughout the world to maintain democracy. From the lips of those who oppose this measure comes. .. at other times. .. the loudest protestations of belief in democracy. Let me say, here and now, that if democracy is to continue to live throughout the world, and here in our beloved America, those of us who have the ability and power to do so must see to it that the full rights of the weak and defenseless are safeguarded against the violence and the intolerance of the strong and the mighty. "

Connections

On July 15, 1916, Clarence Brown married Ethel McKinney; they had three children. His son, Clarence J. "Bud" Brown Jr. , won the special election in 1965 to fill his father's seat in Congress.

Father:

Owen Brown

Mother:

Ellen Barerre McCoppin

Wife:

Ethel McKinney

Son:

Clarence J. "Bud" Brown Jr.

Friend:

Sam Rayburn

He was a personal friend of Democrat Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn of Texas.