Gray Silver was an American farmer, legislator, and spokesman for farm groups.
Background
Gray Silver was born on Feburary 17, 1871 at White Hall, Virginia. His ancestors were Scottish Presbyterians, and the father had served as a colonel in the Confederate army. While Silver was still an infant, the family moved to Silver Hill, near Gerardstown, West Virginia.
Education
He attended public school, but, being the only son among five children, he became the active head of the family on the death of his father in 1885.
Career
For several years he engaged in livestock marketing. In 1896 he organized the Berkeley County (West Virginia) Fruit Growers, the first of his many ventures in cooperative enterprises, and later he helped to establish the community packing center at Inwood. In 1900 he settled in Martinsburg, West Virginia.
Silver's farming activities extended beyond the Shenandoah Valley to Illinois and Arkansas. His special interests were fruit growing, Shorthorn cattle, and Shropshire sheep. In his home community he was an active member and official of its main banking, cooperative, and marketing organizations. He was a member of the West Virginia Senate from 1907 to 1915 and served as lieutenant-governor for the term 1911-13.
He was the author of the legislation designed to provide the state with good roads. As a member of the legislative commission which investigated the state institutions, he helped provide a modern fiscal system for West Virginia. He also served on the State Tax Commission during 1926-27. Nationally Silver achieved wide recognition for his work in behalf of the American Farm Bureau Federation.
He attended its organization meeting in 1919 as a delegate from West Virginia, and shortly became the legislative representative for the organization at Washington.
With the power of a million and a half economically depressed farmers behind him, he organized the non-partisan farm bloc which dominated the legislative activities of the four sessions of the Sixty-seventh Congress. As a result of his efforts and those of a number of senators who worked with him, numerous laws beneficial to agriculture were passed. Silver was the official representative of the Federation at the Republican and Democratic national conventions in 1920 and 1924.
He was a member of the delegation of the American Farm Bureau Federation which visited Europe to study economic conditions in 1924.
In that same year he organized the United States Grain Marketing Corporation. Later he held official positions in the Eastern Grain Growers' Cooperative Corporation, the National Fruit and Vegetable Growers' Exchange, the United Fruit Growers of America, and the Federated Growers' Credit Association. In 1911 he served on the commission appointed by President William H. Taft to assemble data on the wool industry with a view to revising the tariff.
He was a member of the fact-finding commission on distribution cost of the National Unemployment Conference in 1921 and of the Federal Unemployment Commission in 1930. As a lifelong Democrat he attended many of the conventions of his party.
Achievements
Personality
As a political strategist he was unusually sagacious and extremely adroit. His success in dealing with people individually as well as collectively is attributable both to geniality and to his rare insight into human nature.
Connections
On December 5, 1908, he married Kate Bishop of the same city; they had five children, Mary Gray, Gray, Anne Beall, Francis, and Catherine du Bois.