Clifford Ragsdale Hope was born on June 9, 1893 in Birmingham, Iowa, United States. He was the son of Harry M. Hope, a storekeeper and farmer, and Armitta Ragsdale. In 1901 the family moved to Ripley, Okland, and, in 1906, to a ranch northwest of Garden City, Kansas.
Hope graduated from Garden City High School in 1913. After attending Nebraska Wesleyan University for one year, he transferred to Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas, where he studied law; there Hope also became an outstanding debater. In 1917 he received his Bachelor of Law degree.
Immediately after graduation Hope entered officers' training school at Fort Riley, Kansas. Commissioned a second lieutenant, he served in a tank demonstration unit with the Thirty-fifth and Eighty-fifth Infantry Divisions in the United States and France. Following his discharge in April 1919, Hope returned to Garden City to practice law with William Easton Hutchison.
Hope was elected to the Kansas House of Representatives from Finney County in 1920 and was reelected in 1922 and 1924. During his second term, he served as speaker pro tem of the House. He was elected speaker in 1925 as a result of his strong opposition to legalizing the Ku Klux Klan in Kansas. In 1926 Hope successfully ran for Congress as a Republican in the huge Seventh District of western Kansas. Although he was always opposed in the congressional general elections, he was never in danger of being defeated, for his margin of victory ranged between 9 percent and 41 percent of the vote. When Hope became a member of the United States House of Representatives in 1927, he successfully sought appointment to the Committee on Agriculture because he represented America's largest wheatgrowing congressional district. He served thirty consecutive years on this committee, becoming its ranking Republican member in January 1934 and its chairman during the Eightieth and Eighty-third Congresses. During the Great Depression, prices for farm products slipped disastrously as a result of overproduction and a decline in demand. To restore balance between production and consumption, Hope endorsed a program of economic planning and control through the voluntary cooperation of farmers under government supervision. In 1932 Hope and Senator Peter Norbeck sponsored the Voluntary Domestic Allotment Plot, which became the basis for the Agricultural Act of 1933. Hope was among those responsible for its successor, the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1935, which continued farm subsidies.
He served as agricultural consultant to the 1936 Republican presidential nominee, Alf Landon, developing a farm program aimed at a better balance of production and consumption. The press often mentioned Hope as the prospective secretary of agriculture, should a Republican be elected president. From 1937 to 1945 Hope's interest in, if not his influence on, farm legislation remained remarkably high. In 1946 he coauthored the Research and Marketing Act, which encouraged a scientific approach to the production, utilization, and distribution of food.
While chairman of the House Agriculture Committee in 1947-1948, Hope sought to coordinate farm policy with developments elsewhere in the economy. He wanted to initiate a long-range system of commodity price floors in order to cushion declines in farm prices and incomes during recessions.
In 1948 he coauthored the compromise Hope-Aiken pricesupport law, serving as a champion of high fixed price supports for farmers and less federal control over agricultural production. As chairman of the House Agriculture Committee in 1953-1954, Hope initiated the Farm Credit Act of 1953, which increased the farmers' control of the federal farm credit system. He was also a coauthor of the Hope-Aiken Watershed Act of 1953, which enabled landowners to use federal aid to conserve water and topsoil. In 1954 Hope secured the passage of the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act.
In 1956 Hope decided against running for another term in Congress. Still vigorous, he returned to Garden City. He died on June 9, 1893.
Hope was one of the most notable representatives of Kansas. Throughout his congressional career, Hope embraced agrarian values. He called the family farm "one of our fundamental social institutions. " He extolled the value of local self-government, free enterprise, fiscal responsibility, and the farmers' collective opinion. He worked for legislation that would stabilize agriculture prices at a fair exchange level and would enable farmers to assume responsibility for planning and executing their operations. He also moderated Congress's efforts to slash the Agriculture Department's budget for school lunches, soil conservation, and aid to tenant farmers. Hope was instrumental in securing the passage of the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act, which fostered the overseas sale of surplus farm commodities and provided for the charitable distribution of surpluses to distressed areas in the United States and abroad. He also founded a company, Great Plains Wheat, to increase markets abroad for American hard winter wheat, and he helped develop watersheds in western Kansas. In addition, Hope was instrumental in building a junior college in Garden City.
In 1916 Hope was the president of the Republican Club. In 1968 he was elected president of the Kansas State Historical Society.
The amiable Hope welcomed the close personal contacts and frank discussions with his constituents, and he strove to represent their interests faithfully.
Hope married Pauline Sanders on January 8, 1921; they had three children.
