John Hollis Bankhead II was a U. S. senator from the state of Alabama.
Background
He was born on July 8, 1872 at the Bankhead plantation in Lamar County, Alabama, the third of five children and eldest of three sons of John Hollis Bankhead and Tallulah James (Brockman) Bankhead. His father, whose political career took him to the state legislature and the House of Representatives and Senate, also founded, in 1886, the Bankhead Coal Company in Jasper, from which he derived sufficient wealth to give his family economic advantages denied most Alabamians of the time.
Education
Young John, after attending local public schools, entered the University of Alabama in 1887 and received the B. A. degree in 1891. Although a devout Methodist, he attended night classes at Georgetown University Law School, a Roman Catholic institution, from which he received the LL. B.
Career
After graduation, Bankhead returned to Jasper to enter law practice with Ezra W. Coleman, a business associate of his father. The firm enjoyed a lucrative practice, handling the affairs of the family coal company and representing the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, the Alabama Power Company, and other large corporations.
Bankhead wanted to follow his father and later his brother into politics, but felt the public might resent three Bankheads holding political office. Thus, although he served one term in the lower house of the state legislature (1903 - 1905), during which he wrote the new suffrage law of 1903 aimed at disenfranchising Negroes, he devoted his talents chiefly to the law and the family business, forming a law partnership with his brother William in 1904. Bankhead did, however, serve as his family's campaign manager, and in 1915 he drew up and lobbied through the legislature a gerrymandered congressional district that ensured a safe seat for his brother.
Despite his family's political conservatism and business connections, John Bankhead recognized the popularity of more radical leaders, and pragmatically urged his father to modify some of his positions to ensure political survival. In 1926, six years after his father's death, Bankhead sought the United States Senate seat being vacated by Oscar W. Underwood, but lost in a bitter four-way primary to Hugo L. Black, a Birmingham attorney. Convinced that his long association with large corporations had harmed him, Bankhead determined to devote his attention to farming interests, especially cotton farmers, the state's largest single bloc of voters. He tried again in 1930, when Senator J. Thomas Heflin was declared ineligible to run for reelection as a Democrat because of his support of Herbert Hoover in 1928. Bankhead defeated a weaker opponent in the Democratic primary, and went on to defeat Heflin (running as a "Jeffersonian Democrat") in the general election. He was to continue in the Senate until his death.
When Truman became president in 1945, Bankhead opposed his domestic program. In the midst of the battle to prevent the continuation of price controls, Bankhead collapsed in May 1946. A victim of heart disease and chronic bronchial illness, he died the next month at the Bethesda (Md. ) Naval Hospital. He was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Jasper, Alabama.
Achievements
Religion
He was a convinced Methodist.
Politics
As senator, Bankhead was an influential advocate of agricultural interests, particularly those of the cotton grower. Overcoming his basic conservatism, he supported the presidential candidacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt and embraced the early New Deal program with enthusiasm. His stand, which he based on party loyalty and economic necessity, assured him a voice in agricultural policy. He thus became one of the most powerful men in the farm bloc, much closer, for example, to Roosevelt and to Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace than Chairman Ellison D. Smith of the Senate Agriculture Committee. A leading advocate of federally enforced production controls, Bankhead played an important role in the passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. He was influential the same year in getting the administration to extend to farmers willing to cut back production a loan of ten cents a pound on cotton, which would then be stored to await higher prices. This principle was institutionalized for all basic commodities the following year with the establishment of the Commodity Credit Corporation. Convinced that acreage reduction alone was incapable of raising prices, Bankhead pushed through the Cotton Control Act (1934), which established marketing quotas for large farmers. This act was repealed in 1936 after the Supreme Court declared the AAA unconstitutional. But as one of the leaders of the Senate farm bloc, Bankhead worked closely with the Roosevelt administration for other measures favorable to agriculture, including the second Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 and federal crop insurance. Unlike most of his Southern colleagues, Bankhead sought to benefit the tenant farmer and sharecropper as well as the large commercial producer. The subsistence homestead amendment he succeeded in adding to the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 became the basis for the Resettlement Administration, established in 1935, which was designed to aid poor farmers and help resettle the urban destitute on farm lands. The Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act of 1937 reorganized the Resettlement Administration into the Farm Security Administration, empowered to lend money to tenants wishing to purchase their own land, rehabilitate small farms, and aid migrant workers.
During World War II, Bankhead accepted the president's military and diplomatic leadership. Although he refused to join more conservative colleagues in trying to dismantle many New Deal structures, he bitterly attacked the administration's wartime efforts to hold down farm prices. Convinced that farmers were not sharing equitably in the new prosperity, Bankhead and his colleagues in the farm bloc, closely allied with the Farm Bureau Federation and National Grange, pushed a number of bills through Congress that would have seriously modified existing policy, but were unable to obtain the necessary votes to override Roosevelt's vetoes.
Connections
On December 26, 1894, Bankhead married Musa Harkins, a childhood friend, in Fayette, Alabama. They had three children.