Background
Guy Cordon was born on April 24, 1890 in Cuero, Texas, United States. He was the son of Jacob Cordon, a merchant, and Caroline Terry.
Guy Cordon was born on April 24, 1890 in Cuero, Texas, United States. He was the son of Jacob Cordon, a merchant, and Caroline Terry.
Cordon attended elementary and secondary schools in Roseburg, Oregon.
From 1909 he served as deputy assessor of Douglas County, of which Roseburg is the county seat.
Cordon launched his political career in 1916, winning election as county assessor.
Two years later, during World War I, he took a leave of absence and enlisted as a private in the field artillery. On his return from military service, Cordon became active in the American Legion, a dominant force in Oregon politics for the next three decades, and served a term as the legion's state commander.
Teaching himself law, Cordon was admitted to the Oregon bar in 1920 and opened a law practice in Roseburg. He was elected district attorney of Douglas County in 1923 and served until 1935, when he resumed private practice of law. His clients included the Interstate Association of Public Land Councils, with members from eleven western states, and the Association of Oregon Counties.
Beginning in the 1920's, he was a close friend and confidant of Senator Charles L. McNary and worked closely with the Oregon congressional delegation on issues dealing with public lands.
McNary died early in 1944, and on March 4, Snell appointed Cordon to succeed him in the Senate.
Cordon fought back a powerful challenge from the former governor, Charles A. Sprague, to win the Republican nomination for the remainder of McNary's term. In the general election, Cordon easily defeated Democrat Willis Mahoney. Within the Senate, Cordon's long association with McNary gave him an advantage over other freshmen legislators. He hired the late minority leader's staff to work for him and received choice committee assignments, including membership on the powerful Appropriations Committee and on the Committee for Interior and Insular Affairs. Lacking a flamboyant style and disdainful of the news media, Cordon never achieved public prominence.
In 1946, Senator Robert A. Taft named Cordon to the Republican Policy Committee, which dictated the legislative agenda for Republican opposition to the Truman administration.
In 1948, as chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Territories and Insular Affairs, he conducted hearings in Hawaii and issued a report that recommended statehood and debunked claims by statehood opponents of Communist infiltration and racial unrest in the Pacific islands.
In 1947, Cordon was chairman of a Senate committee that investigated the mine explosion on March 25 that killed 111 miners in Centralia, Illinois.
As the senior member of a group of western Republican politicians that advised Eisenhower on water and mineral resource issues and public lands, Cordon received prominent mention as a likely choice for secretary of the interior.
During the Eighty-third Congress, Cordon was Eisenhower's senior adviser on resource issues, shaping the so-called "partnership" policy that was designed to reduce the federal government's supervision of resources and to increase the participation of private industry.
In 1953, Cordon was the floor manager of the administration's tidelands oil bill that recognized state rather than federal control of off-shore oil deposits.
Cordon had planned not to seek reelection in 1954 but was persuaded by Eisenhower to change his mind. His Democratic challenger, Richard L. Neuberger, forced Cordon on the defensive by making the campaign a referendum on the Eisenhower administration's resource policies. Despite a late campaign appearance by Eisenhower, Cordon lost by 2, 500 votes, which cost Republicans their control of the Senate. For the next thirteen years, Cordon practiced law in Washington, D. C. , where he died.
Cordon directed a protracted legal effort that prompted Congress in 1937 to enact legislation granting seventeen western Oregon counties the largest share of federal timber receipts ever made to local governments, as much as 50 percent of the receipts from the sustained-yield management of the Oregon and California Railroad timberlands. Cordon advised Governor Earl Snell of Oregon on tax and revenue measures.
But in the Senate he quickly stepped out from McNary's shadow and became the Republican party's leading authority on public lands and the development of natural resources.
The Newsweek columnist Raymond Moley, a conservative, wrote that few senators could match Cordon's ability "to discern the hidden enemy in innocent-looking bills. " A fiscal and social conservative, Cordon supported reductions in federal income taxes and across-the-board cuts in federal spending. He voted for the Taft-Hartley (Labor-Management Relations) Act but opposed amendments to curb industry-wide bargaining and to outlaw the union shop and the closed shop. He opposed the extension of wartime price controls and rent controls and the increase of federal aid to the elderly and to the poor. He voted against legislation to eliminate segregation among military draftees in 1950. He cast his vote against President Harry Truman's nominations of Henry A. Wallace as secretary of commerce in 1945 and David Lilienthal as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1947. In foreign policy, Cordon frequently voted with the isolationist bloc and opposed United States membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and foreign military aid. But he supported the United Nations Charter, the Bretton Woods Agreement, and the Marshall Plan. Cordon was an early proponent of Hawaiian statehood.
Cordon sponsored statehood legislation that was blocked in committee in three successive congresses.
He said that state and federal regulators had been negligent and also placed partial blame on the mine's management and the mine workers' union.
Cordon supported Taft's 1952 presidential candidacy but switched his loyalties to Dwight D. Eisenhower after the Republican National Convention.
After Eisenhower's election, however, Cordon made it known that he had no interest in joining the cabinet, stating that he would be more valuable to the new administration in the Senate. Cordon recommended Oregon's governor, Douglas McKay, a long-time political ally, for the post.
Cordon was what many consider to be the last dependably rock-solid conservative to represent the people of Oregon.
On September 30, 1914, he married Ana Lucille Allen; they had three children.