Word: barkley
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Everybody knew what "liberty" he meant. Senator Connally and colleagues were on their way to tell rebellious Alben Barkley that he was no longer beholden to President Roosevelt for his Senate leadership; that now he was free to be his own and the Senate...
...could have knocked a Kentucky colonel over with a mint leaf. Kentuckians well remember Alben Barkley's admission of fealty: "If being loyal to the greatest President is hanging on his coattails, I'm proud to hang...
Kentuckians know Alben William Barkley, 66, as the poor tobacco farmer's son who rose to represent them in Washington longer (31 years) than any other man. He was born in a log cabin deep in the backwoods of western Kentucky, where "one-sucker" tobacco (black, heavy-leaf) is the crop. To earn his way into Georgia's tiny Emory College, he rode through the hills on a black horse, peddling kitchen utensils from the saddlebag; at the University of Virginia Law School he janitored and waited table. His first law job was in the office of Paducah...
...Glorified Messenger Boy." He graduated to the Senate in 1926, was re-elected in the Roosevelt landslide of 1932. The next year, when Democrats reorganized the Senate, Alben Barkley became assistant to powerful, stocky Majority Leader Joseph T. Robinson. In 1937, at the peak of the bitter, party-splitting fight over the President's Supreme Court-packing bill, Joe Robinson died. Senate Democrats got ready to elect Mississippi's popular Pat Harrison to the leadership. But Franklin Roosevelt wanted a majority leader of his own choosing. In days of the hottest kind of politicking, when New Dealers were...
...President then issued his famed, first "Dear Alben" letter, unmistakably naming his choice. There were 75 Democrats in the Senate then. Caucusing, they threw their ballots into Carter Glass's battered old Panama. The first 74 to be counted were evenly divided; the 75th was for Alben Barkley. When the result was announced, he bit off the stem of his briar pipe...