The People of the Record

Born in Vermont with a clubfoot and raised in poverty by his mother, Stevens graduated from Dartmouth, moved to Pennsylvania and became a prominent lawyer in Gettysburg and later Lancaster. In the Pennsylvania legislature he helped save the state’s new system of free public schools from repeal in 1835. He served two terms in Congress as an antislavery Whig and returned in 1859 as a Republican.

During the Civil War Stevens chaired the Ways and Means Committee, steering war finance through the House, and pressed Lincoln to make emancipation and the enlistment of Black soldiers war aims. After the war he led the Radical Republicans on the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, helped shape the Fourteenth Amendment and the Reconstruction Acts, proposed distributing confiscated plantation land to freedpeople, and served as one of the House managers who prosecuted the 1868 impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. He chose burial in an integrated Lancaster cemetery so that his grave would reflect the equality he had advocated.

A Boston lawyer and reformer, Sumner argued in Roberts v. City of Boston (1849) that segregated public schools violated the principle of equality under Massachusetts law — a case he lost, but whose arguments anticipated later challenges to school segregation. Elected to the Senate in 1851 by a coalition of Free Soilers and Democrats in the Massachusetts legislature, he joined the new Republican Party as it formed. On May 22, 1856, two days after his “Crime Against Kansas” speech denouncing proslavery violence and attacking South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler, Representative Preston Brooks, a relative of Butler’s, beat Sumner unconscious with a cane at his Senate desk. Sumner was absent from the Senate for most of the next three years, and his empty seat became a symbol of Southern violence to many Northerners.

Returning in 1859, Sumner chaired the Foreign Relations Committee through the Civil War, urged Lincoln toward emancipation and the enlistment of Black troops, and helped pass the Thirteenth Amendment in the Senate. During Reconstruction he insisted on voting rights and equal treatment for freedpeople. He broke with President Grant over the proposed annexation of Santo Domingo, lost his committee chairmanship in 1871 and supported the Liberal Republican candidate, Horace Greeley, in 1872. His last cause, a bill guaranteeing equal access to public accommodations, became law as the Civil Rights Act of 1875, a year after his death.

Born into slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Douglass taught himself to read and escaped to freedom in 1838. His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) made him internationally known, and he became a leading abolitionist orator and editor, founding The North Star in Rochester, New York, in 1847. He also championed women’s rights and took part in the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.

Douglass never held elective office, but from the Civil War onward he was closely identified with the Republican Party. He pressed Lincoln to make emancipation a war aim and to enlist Black soldiers — two of his sons served in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry — and met with Lincoln at the White House to protest the unequal pay and treatment of Black troops. After the war he campaigned for Republican candidates and accepted federal appointments from Presidents Hayes, Garfield and Benjamin Harrison, while publicly criticizing the party when it retreated from protecting Black citizens’ rights.

Born free in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Revels studied at seminaries in Indiana and Ohio and at Knox College in Illinois and was ordained a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. During the Civil War he helped recruit two Black regiments in Maryland and served as chaplain to a Black regiment in Mississippi. He settled in Natchez after the war, was elected an alderman and then a state senator, and in January 1870 the Mississippi legislature elected him to the U.S. Senate as a Republican.

Senate Democrats argued that Revels could not meet the Constitution’s nine-year citizenship requirement because the Dred Scott decision had denied citizenship to Black Americans before the Fourteenth Amendment. The Senate rejected the argument and seated him on February 25, 1870, by a vote of 48 to 8. In his year in office he defended Black legislators who had been expelled from the Georgia legislature, successfully appealed to federal officials on behalf of Black mechanics from Baltimore who faced discriminatory hiring at a navy yard, and supported amnesty for former Confederates. He then became the first president of Alcorn University, the nation’s first land-grant college for Black students.

Born into slavery in Georgetown, South Carolina, Rainey gained his freedom when his father, a barber, bought the family’s liberty in the early 1840s. Forced by the Confederate army to build defenses for Charleston during the Civil War, he escaped with his wife to Bermuda in 1862. Returning after the war, he helped write South Carolina’s 1868 constitution and was elected to the state senate.

Elected to fill a House vacancy in 1870, Rainey took his seat that December as the first Black member of the House and was reelected four times. He spoke for the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, fought for the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and for public education, and on April 29, 1874, became the first African American to preside over the House from the Speaker’s chair. He lost his seat in the 1878 elections as white Democrats regained control of South Carolina, and he died in Georgetown in 1887.

A New York lawyer, Hughes won fame in 1905 and 1906 as counsel to legislative investigations of the gas utilities and the life insurance industry, and was elected governor of New York as a Republican reformer. President Taft appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1910. In 1916 he resigned to accept the Republican presidential nomination, uniting a party that had split four years earlier, and lost narrowly to Woodrow Wilson, 277 electoral votes to 254.

As secretary of state under Harding and Coolidge, Hughes convened the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922, which produced the first major arms limitation treaties among the great powers. Appointed chief justice by Herbert Hoover in 1930, he led the Court through the constitutional battles over the New Deal and helped defeat Franklin Roosevelt’s 1937 plan to enlarge the Court by showing Congress that the justices were fully abreast of their work.

Raised on a ranch near Missoula in the Montana Territory, Rankin became a social worker and then an organizer for woman suffrage, helping Montana women win the vote in 1914. Two years later, before the Nineteenth Amendment, Montana voters elected her to the U.S. House as a Republican — the first woman elected to Congress. “I may be the first woman member of Congress,” she said in 1917. “But I won’t be the last.”

Days after taking her seat in April 1917, Rankin was one of fifty House members who voted against declaring war on Germany, saying, “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war.” In January 1918 she opened House debate on the woman suffrage amendment. After losing a Senate bid she spent two decades working for peace organizations, returned to the House in 1941, and on December 8, 1941, cast the only vote in Congress against declaring war on Japan. In 1968 she led a march on Washington against the Vietnam War.

A Grand Rapids newspaper editor appointed to the Senate in 1928, Vandenberg was one of the leading noninterventionists of the 1930s, supporting neutrality legislation and opposing American entanglement in Europe’s conflicts. The attack on Pearl Harbor changed his outlook. In a Senate speech on January 10, 1945, he announced that he no longer believed any nation could protect itself through isolation, and he proposed a treaty among the major Allies to keep Germany and Japan permanently disarmed.

Vandenberg served as a delegate to the 1945 San Francisco conference that drafted the United Nations Charter. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee after Republicans won the Senate in 1946, he worked with the Truman administration to win approval of aid to Greece and Turkey, the Marshall Plan and — through the Vandenberg Resolution of June 1948 — the framework for the North Atlantic Treaty. His insistence that partisan politics should stop at the water’s edge made him a model of bipartisan statesmanship.

The elder son of President William Howard Taft, Robert Taft graduated first in his class at Harvard Law School, practiced law in Cincinnati and served in the Ohio legislature. Elected to the Senate in 1938, he became the leading congressional critic of the New Deal’s expansion of federal power and spending and, before Pearl Harbor, a prominent opponent of American intervention in World War II.

After Republicans won Congress in 1946, Taft led the drafting of the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 — the Taft–Hartley Act — which restricted union practices such as the closed shop and secondary boycotts and was passed over President Truman’s veto. He also backed federal aid for public housing and education, voted against the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949, and sought the presidential nomination three times, losing to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. Elected Senate majority leader in 1953, he worked closely with the new president until his death from cancer that July.

A World War I artillery officer from Pekin, Illinois, Dirksen served sixteen years in the House and won a Senate seat in 1950. Known for his rumbling baritone and florid oratory, he became Republican whip in 1957 and minority leader in 1959, holding the post until his death. He worked closely with Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson on foreign policy and supported the 1963 Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

In 1964 Dirksen negotiated changes to the civil rights bill that brought enough Republican senators along to end the Southern filibuster, and on June 10 he spoke for the first successful cloture vote ever taken on a civil rights bill, calling civil rights an idea whose time had come. He played similar roles in passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the fair housing provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

Smith won a special election in 1940 to succeed her late husband, Representative Clyde Smith, and became an expert on military affairs, sponsoring the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act of 1948, which gave women permanent status in the armed forces. That year she was elected to the Senate, becoming the first woman to serve in both chambers.

On June 1, 1950, less than four months after Senator Joseph McCarthy began his anticommunist crusade, Smith rose in the Senate to deliver what she called a “Declaration of Conscience,” joined by six other Republican senators, condemning the “selfish political exploitation of fear, bigotry, ignorance and intolerance.” She later chaired the Senate Republican Conference and in 1964 became the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for president at a major party convention. She served until 1973 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1989.

Born in the Arizona Territory in 1909, Goldwater ran his family’s Phoenix department store, flew as a ferry and transport pilot in World War II and entered politics on the Phoenix city council. Elected to the Senate in 1952, he became a champion of limited government, low taxes, states’ authority and a strong anticommunist defense. His 1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative, written with L. Brent Bozell, sold widely and made him the leader of a growing conservative insurgency within the Republican Party.

Goldwater won the 1964 Republican nomination over Governor Nelson Rockefeller and lost to President Lyndon Johnson in a landslide, carrying only Arizona and five Deep South states. He had voted for the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 but opposed the 1964 act, arguing that its public accommodations and employment provisions exceeded the federal government’s constitutional authority — a vote critics said aligned the party with segregationists. Returning to the Senate in 1969, he told President Nixon in August 1974 that he had lost the support needed to survive an impeachment trial, and he later co-authored the Goldwater–Nichols Act of 1986, which reorganized the military’s command structure.

A Washington, D.C., native and Howard University graduate, Brooke served as an Army infantry officer in a segregated unit during World War II and earned a law degree at Boston University. In 1962 he was elected attorney general of Massachusetts — the first African American elected attorney general of any state, and the only Republican to win statewide office in Massachusetts that year — and built a reputation for prosecuting official corruption.

Elected to the Senate in 1966, Brooke became the first Black senator since Reconstruction. He served on President Johnson’s commission on urban unrest, joined Democrat Walter Mondale in adding fair housing protections to the Civil Rights Act of 1968, and in 1973 became the first Republican senator to call publicly for President Nixon’s resignation. A moderate who often broke with his party’s leadership, he lost reelection in 1978 and later received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.

Raised in Russell, Kansas, during the Depression, Dole was a platoon leader in the Army’s 10th Mountain Division when he was severely wounded in his right shoulder and back in Italy in April 1945. He spent more than three years recovering and never regained full use of his right arm. He finished college and law school, served as a county attorney, and was elected to the House in 1960 and the Senate in 1968.

Dole chaired the Republican National Committee, was Gerald Ford’s running mate in 1976 and led Senate Republicans from 1985 to 1996. A deal-maker known for his sharp wit, he worked across party lines — with Democrat George McGovern on food assistance programs, and on the 1982 extension of the Voting Rights Act, the 1983 rescue of Social Security, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and the Americans with Disabilities Act. He resigned from the Senate in 1996 to run for president and lost to Bill Clinton. In retirement he led the campaign to build the National World War II Memorial.

A St. Louis native who worked in a munitions plant during World War II to help pay for college, Schlafly earned a master’s degree in government from Radcliffe and became active in Illinois Republican politics and the anticommunist movement. She ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1952 and 1970 and never held elective office. Her self-published 1964 book A Choice Not an Echo, which argued that a small circle of Eastern party leaders had long denied Republican voters a genuine choice of nominee, sold widely and helped rally support for Barry Goldwater’s nomination.

After Congress sent the Equal Rights Amendment to the states in 1972, Schlafly founded STOP ERA, arguing that the amendment would expose women to the military draft, threaten protections such as wives’ and widows’ Social Security benefits and weaken the family. Her volunteer network helped stall ratification three states short of the thirty-eight required when the deadline set by Congress expired in 1982. Through the Eagle Forum, which she led until her death in 2016, she influenced Republican platforms on abortion and family policy for decades; admirers saw a defender of traditional values, while feminist opponents saw an adversary of women’s equality.

Born into a large Catholic family in New York City and raised largely in Connecticut, Buckley served in the Army during World War II and graduated from Yale, whose faculty he criticized in his first book, God and Man at Yale (1951). In 1955 he founded National Review, which became the leading journal of the conservative movement, bringing together traditionalists, free-market libertarians and anticommunists in a synthesis later known as fusionism and associated with his colleague Frank Meyer.

Buckley was never a Republican officeholder. He ran for mayor of New York in 1965 on the Conservative Party line, served as a public delegate to the United Nations General Assembly in 1973, and for thirty-three years hosted Firing Line, a public-affairs debate program. National Review championed Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and worked to separate conservatism from the John Birch Society and other fringe movements. In its early years the magazine also opposed federal civil rights legislation, a stance Buckley later said had been wrong. President George H. W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991.

Kemp played quarterback in the American Football League, leading the Buffalo Bills to league championships in 1964 and 1965, and helped found the AFL players’ union. Elected to Congress from the Buffalo area in 1970, he became the leading House advocate of supply-side economics. The Kemp–Roth bill, written with Senator William Roth of Delaware, proposed deep across-the-board income-tax cuts and became the basis of Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax legislation.

Kemp argued that lower tax rates and economic growth, rather than redistribution, would expand opportunity, and he urged Republicans to compete for the votes of Black and urban Americans. After a 1988 presidential bid, he served as George H. W. Bush’s secretary of housing and urban development, promoting enterprise zones and homeownership for public-housing residents. In 1996 he was Bob Dole’s running mate. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2009.

The son and grandson of four-star admirals, McCain graduated from the Naval Academy and became a naval aviator. On October 26, 1967, he was shot down over Hanoi and held as a prisoner of war for more than five years, enduring torture and refusing early release unless the men captured before him were freed. He came home in March 1973.

Elected to the House from Arizona in 1982 and to the Senate in 1986, McCain became known as a maverick. He co-sponsored the McCain–Feingold campaign finance law of 2002, worked with Senator John Kerry toward normalizing relations with Vietnam, and led efforts to bar the torture of detainees. He chaired the Armed Services Committee, backed the 2007 troop surge in Iraq and won the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, losing to Barack Obama. In 2017 he cast a decisive vote against a bill to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act. He died in 2018 and lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda.

Born in Pennsylvania and raised partly on military bases, Gingrich earned a doctorate in history at Tulane and taught at West Georgia College before winning a House seat in 1978 on his third try. He organized younger conservatives in the Conservative Opportunity Society, used televised House proceedings to confront the long-entrenched Democratic majority, and filed the ethics complaint that led to Speaker Jim Wright’s resignation in 1989. That year House Republicans elected him minority whip.

In 1994 Gingrich rallied Republican candidates behind the Contract with America, and the party won control of the House for the first time in forty years. As Speaker he passed most of the contract’s measures through the House, clashed with President Clinton in the government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996, and then negotiated welfare reform and the 1997 balanced budget agreement. In 1997 the House reprimanded him for ethics violations. After disappointing Republican results in the 1998 midterm elections he gave up the speakership and left Congress. He later became a prolific author and commentator and sought the 2012 presidential nomination.

Rice grew up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and a teacher. A trained pianist, she turned to international relations, earned a doctorate from the University of Denver and joined Stanford’s faculty as a specialist on the Soviet Union. She served on President George H. W. Bush’s National Security Council staff during the end of the Cold War and German reunification, and was Stanford’s provost from 1993 to 1999.

Rice was President George W. Bush’s national security advisor from 2001 to 2005, through the September 11 attacks and the decision to invade Iraq, and secretary of state from 2005 to 2009, when she promoted what she called transformational diplomacy and pursued negotiations over North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear programs. She returned to Stanford and in 2020 became director of the Hoover Institution, the first woman to hold the post.