Furnifold McLendel Simmons was a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives from March 4, 1887 to March 4, 1889 and U. S. senator from the state of North Carolina between March 4, 1901 and March 4, 1931.
Background
Furnifold McLendel Simmons was born on January 20, 1854 near Polloksville, Jones County, North Carolina, the second son and second of five children of Furnifold Green and Mary (McLendel) Jerman Simmons. His father, a descendant of Palatine Germans who had come to New Bern, North Carolina, in 1710, owned a farm; he had been a Whig before the Civil War and had strongly opposed secession, though he supported the Confederacy.
Education
Young Simmons spent two years at Wake Forest College (1868 - 70) and in 1871 entered Trinity College (later Duke University), graduating in 1873. He later served his alma mater as a trustee from 1892 until his death.
Career
In 1875 Simmons was admitted. Simmons practised law successfully in New Bern and Raleigh until 1901, but politics became his major interest. After twice running unsuccessfully for the state legislature, he was elected to Congress in 1886. Two years later he was defeated by a Negro Republican, Henry P. Cheatham, and in 1890 the North Carolina Farmers' Alliance, bringing its influence to bear on the Democrats, forced Simmons out of the congressional race.
In 1892, however, the conservatives regained control of the party, and Simmons as state chairman directed a successful campaign, laying the basis for his future domination of the party by developing well-disciplined county organizations.
His service as collector of internal revenue for North Carolina's eastern district (1893 - 97) helped him to solidify his power. Meanwhile the success of the conservative faction at the height of agrarian discontent had driven many Alliance men into a Republican-Populist fusion movement, which swept the state elections of 1894 and 1896, carrying the governorship in the latter year and placing some Negroes in local offices.
Taking the chairmanship of the Democratic state committee once again in 1898, Simmons launched a fiery "white supremacy" campaign designed to recapture the radical white vote. Working closely with Josephus Daniels and Charles B. Aycock, he sent speakers throughout the state to arouse the "men of Anglo-Saxon blood, " as he later wrote, "against the disgrace of Negro domination. "
Though Simmons promised legislative favors to business men and to Baptists and Methodists, the racial issue dominated the canvass. "Red Shirt" gangs sprang up in emulation of the South Carolina movement of Ben Tillman, and Negro voters were widely intimidated. The Democrats swept the elections. Contrary to campaign pledges, Simmons proceeded to prepare a constitutional amendment disfranchising North Carolina's Negroes, and after some modification by the legislature, it was approved by the voters in 1900.
In that year the legislature sent Simmons to the United States Senate to replace the Populist incumbent, Marion Butler. Thereafter Simmons's endorsement was an important factor in North Carolina elections, though the "Simmons machine" was not so closely directed by Simmons himself as it was represented to be. He remained as chairman of the Democratic state committee until 1907. His principal contribution to state legislation during these years was the prohibition laws which he helped to draft in 1903 and 1905, banning liquor traffic everywhere in the state except in large towns.
Only in 1908 did anyone succeed in defeating his candidate for governor, and in the 1912 primary the same man, William W. Kitchin, seriously threatened Simmons's own Senate seat. Kitchin argued that Simmons voted more like a Republican than a Democrat, citing especially his votes for protection of the lumber interests in the Payne-Aldrich Tariff of 1909.
Simmons replied that he favored a "competitive tariff, " that votes in which he deserted the Democrats were designed to protect state interests, and that if reelected he would have committee seniority, which Kitchin would lack. Though progressive Democrats sought at the time to deprive him of this seniority, Simmons became chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee in 1913 and as such helped to guide the Underwood-Simmons Tariff and the Wilson administration's controversial war-revenue bills through the Senate.
In the later struggle over the Versailles Treaty, Simmons recognized the impossibility of obtaining approval of the League of Nations without reservations and vainly attempted to find an acceptable compromise. He fought the Republican position on the Fordney-McCumber Tariff, stood for "adjusted compensation" for veterans, and led a Senate coalition in opposition to the tax proposals of Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon.
Throughout his senatorial career he favored immigration restriction, federal grants for roads, and especially such internal improvements as the Inland Waterway. In the election of 1928 Simmons supported the anti-Smith Democratic organization in North Carolina.
He opposed Smith, he said, "because of his stand on prohibition and the tariff and because of his Tammany Hall and Wall Street affiliations, " not because of his Roman Catholicism. Opposition to the "Simmons machine" had been gradually building up in North Carolina, and local Smith supporters, deciding to oust Simmons from the Senate, united on Josiah W. Bailey, a former supporter of Simmons, to run against him in the next primary (1930).
Refusing actively to campaign, Simmons remained in Washington to organize opposition to the Hawley-Smoot Tariff and was defeated. Poor health and financial stringency, from which he had suffered since the 1920's, continued to plague him in his years of retirement on his New Bern farm. He died of congestive heart failure near New Bern and was buried there in Cedar Grove Cemetery.
Achievements
Personality
Far from imposing in appearance, Simmons nevertheless possessed considerable personal magnetism.
Connections
In 1875 he married Eliza Humphrey. She died in 1883, leaving him with three children, Mamie, Eliza, and James. In 1886 he married Belle Gibbs, by whom he had two daughters, Ella and Isabelle.