Word: pittman
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Senate's champion of silver was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, of U. S. aristocracy. His mother, Catherine Key Pittman, was of the Marshalls of Virginia, and descendant of Francis Scott Key; his father, William Buckner Pittman, had as ancestors the Pittmans of North Carolina, the Buckners of Kentucky. It was a magazine cover that made a frontiersman out of wealthy, idle, spoiled young Key Pittman-perhaps the last old frontiersman to sit in the U. S. Senate. One day in 1892 (he was 20) he was leaning on his cue in a Tuscaloosa, Ala. poolroom...
...Young Pittman made inquiries at Seattle. Dude Lewis was well known. The slim Southerner was straightway taken in to a law office that was as luxuriously civilized as Seattle was rough and pioneer; greeted by a redhaired, red-bearded man of extreme elegance-James Hamilton Lewis, then only a dude lawyer, but soon to be a Congressman from Washington, later a Senator from Illinois...
...Pittman lost interest in elk. He sank his whole inheritance in boomtown lots in Seattle. He listened eagerly to tales of a gold strike in the Klondike. He headed north. In the Klondike he was soon chopping wood for a living. Chasing whispers of gold in Alaska, Pittman mushed over the snow wastelands to Nome, to find that the tough guys were running affairs. But vigilantes took over, and Key Pittman got his first real job: he became Nome's first prosecuting attorney. By 1901 he had absorbed just enough law to give him a belief he always cherished...
...married Mimosa Gates, a prospector's sister, soon headed south for California. In California came the whisper again: Gold in Nevada! Key Pittman arrived in Tonopah, Nev. by stagecoach, a journey colder and more hazardous than any Klondike trip. That was 1902. "Winter of Death," when men dug as many holes for graves as for gold. Pittman missed both, settled down as Tonopah's legal light. By 1910 he was restless again. Congress didn't seem to understand mining-especially silver mining. He went to the Senate in 1912, was re-elected...
...Pittman had gone far: the spoiled Vicksburg boy was president pro tempore of the Senate, chairman of its top committee, Foreign Relations, a major voice in U. S. foreign policy. Still a believer in directness, he spoke his mind with no feeling for statesmanlike discretion. When he felt exuberant sometimes he was downright careless with words. He once called Hitler "a coward." He endorsed sanctions against Italy: "Why shoot a man when you can starve him to death?" On a quiet Thursday morning in December 1938, he typed out a brief statement of U. S. foreign policy...