Word: rhett
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Amendment to the Constitution, the Senate has seen the virtual extinction of gentlemen in the 19th-century sense of the word. Most of the Senate's gentlemen (and there are some distinguished ones) were made, not born. One of the last Senators to be born an esquire, Burnet Rhett Maybank, 55, died last week of a heart attack...
There have been Maybanks in South Carolina since 1670. Both Burnet and Rhett are maternal family names famous in ante-bellum days. One ancestor, William Rhett, served as Vice Admiral of the colony, cleared the Carolina coast of pirates and hanged Gentleman Freebooter Stede Bonnet at Charleston in 1719. Another ancestor was the Landgrave Thomas Smith, who took his title from the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which Philosopher John Locke wrote when he was secretary to the lords proprietors. Still another ancestor was fiery U.S. Senator R. Barnwell Rhett, "the father of secession," who refused, out of respect...
Besides the outspoken, who had already taken up positions in the debate, there was many a legislator still warily keeping his own counsel, or feeling for a secure hummock on middle ground. Said South Carolina's conservative Democrat Burnet Rhett Maybank: "I think MacArthur would have had us do too much with too little, though his theory is right." Also in the middle was Illinois' independent Democrat, Senator Paul Douglas, who would not bomb Chinese bases in China, but advocated a naval blockade of China as well as U.S. aid to Chinese guerrillas on the mainland and "helping...