Oscar Underwood

Oscar Underwood
Senate Minority Leader
In office 1920–1923
Preceded by	Office Created
Succeeded by	Joseph T. Robinson
House Majority Leader
In office 1911–1915
Preceded by	Sereno E. Payne
Succeeded by	Claude Kitchin
House Minority Whip
In office 1899–1901
Preceded by	Office Created
Succeeded by	James T. Lloyd
United States Senator from Alabama
In office March 4, 1915 – March 3, 1927
Preceded by	Francis S. White
Succeeded by	Hugo Black
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Alabama's 9th district
In office March 4, 1897 – March 3, 1915
Preceded by	Truman Heminway Aldrich
Succeeded by	George Huddleston
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Alabama's 9th district
In office March 4, 1895 – June 9, 1896
Preceded by	Louis W. Turpin
Succeeded by	Truman Heminway Aldrich
Personal details
Born	Oscar Wilder Underwood May 6, 1862 Louisville, Kentucky
Died	January 25, 1929 (aged 66) near Accotink, Virginia
Political party	Democratic
Education	University of Virginia
Alma mater	University of Virginia
Profession	Attorney, politician

Oscar Wilder Underwood (May 6, 1862 – January 25, 1929) was an American politician from Alabama and candidate for President of the United States.

Early life

Underwood was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on May 6, 1862. He was the grandson of Joseph R. Underwood, a Kentucky Senator circa 1850. He attended the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. After studying law, he was admitted to the bar in 1884 and practiced law in Birmingham, Alabama.

Political career

Underwood was elected from Alabama as a Democrat to the United States House of Representatives in 1894. He resigned in the middle of his term, leaving office on June 9, 1896, after his election was successfully challenged by Truman H. Aldrich.^[1]

Underwood then served nine terms in the same position from 1897 to 1915. He served as the first Democratic House Minority Whip from about 1900 to 1901.^[2] He was then House Majority Leader from 1911 to 1915. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1912 and had some strength at the national convention among southern delegates but he could not compete with Champ Clark and Woodrow Wilson. At the convention that year in Baltimore, Wilson's managers offered Underwood the vice-presidential nomination, which he declined.^[3] Following the election, he supported the progressive reforms of Wilson's first term,^[4] using his position as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee to manage legislation and maintain party discipline. In return, Wilson granted him considerable control over patronage and appointed Albert S. Burleson Postmaster-General at Underwood's recommendation.^[5] The Revenue Act of 1913 is also known as the Underwood Tariff Act or Underwood-Simmons Act in recognition of Underwood's role in writing and managing the bill as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. He stood with a small minority of House members in opposition to the President when he voted, as the Democrats had promised in their last campaign, to maintain an exemption from Panama Canal tolls for American ships traveling between American ports, despite British protests that the policy violated the Hay–Pauncefote Treaty.^[6]

Underwood served as president of the University of Virginia Alumni Association in 1913 and 1914.^[7]

He was twice elected to the United States Senate, in 1914 and 1920, and served there from March 4, 1915 to March 3, 1927. He was Senate minority leader from 1920 to 1923.

He opposed federal Prohibition as "an attempt to rob the states of their jurisdiction over police matters" and advocated local control of liquor regulation because "the improved conditions which we may naturally expect to find in the lives of the men and women who practice Temperance are not found to predominate in the state where Prohibition laws have been on the statute books for years as compared to those states where liquor is sold under a license system or where Temperance laws are controlled by the sentiment of the local communities."^[8]

Underwood led the anti-Ku Klux Klan forces at the 1924 Democratic National Convention. He was a longtime opponent of the Klan. In 1924, when the Klan organized a parade in Birmingham during that year's Democratic National Convention, Underwood called it an effort "to intimidate me, the Alabama delegation and the democratic party....It will not succeed....I maintain that the organization is a national menace....It is either the Ku Klux Klan or the United States of America. Both cannot survive. Between the two, I choose my country."^[9] By 1924 Underwood was one of very few anti-Klan officeholders left in the South.^[10] He blamed the Klan's opposition to his candidacy for his loss in the Georgia presidential primary to former Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo.^[11] He then determined to embarrass McAdoo by putting the party on record against the Klan.^[12] Even before the Convention considered its platform, the speech nominating Underwood called for the condemnation of the Klan and produced a lengthy floor demonstration.^[13] The attempt to modify the platform to condemn the Klan by name produced rousing demonstrations and speeches, many, including that of William Jennings Bryan, interrupted by the anti-Klan crowds that filled the galleries. The Convention's final vote, though contested, defeated the minority proposal naming the Klan by a vote of 542 3/20 to 541 3/20. The fight proved a polarizing battle that made each of the Convention's two major candidates unacceptable to large segments of the party, without enhancing Underwood's chances in the least.^[14]

The Convention was marked by a deadlock between the supporters of the Irish Catholic New York Governor Al Smith and McAdoo, while the Convention's rules required a two-thirds vote to secure the nomination. Several delegations declined to support either of the leading candidates and persisted in voting for their state's "favorite son" instead. Like the other favorite son candidates, Underwood resisted efforts to remove the convention's two-thirds rule.^[15] As the Convention labored through 103 ballots, Alabama, as the first state alphabetically, cast its votes first. The delegation's leader, Governor William W. Brandon, reported the state's unanimous vote tally each time without variation: "Alabama casts 24 votes for Oscar W. Underwood." Underwood became a symbol of the Convention's deadlock.^[16] His vote totals were meager, fewer than 50, until the deadlock broke and on the 101st ballot he won 229.5, but his anti-prohibition, anti-Klan stances made him a most unlikely compromise candidate and the Convention turned to John W. Davis of West Virginia, whose work as a Wall Street lawyer proved less of a political hurdle for the delegates.^[17]

Underwood did not run for reelection to the Senate in 1926 because he faced daunting opposition from the Klan and a formidable candidate in Hugo Black.^[18]

He supported New York Governor Al Smith for President in 1928.^[19]

Later life

In retirement he wrote an analysis of the transformation of American government in the 20th century, Drifting Sands of Party Politics, which appeared in 1928. He decried federal legislation aimed at regulating morality, government by commissions, and excessive American engagement in foreign affairs.^[20]

He died on January 25, 1929, and was buried in Birmingham's Elmwood Cemetery.^[21]

Underwood's former home in Washington, D.C., the Oscar W. Underwood House, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976.

Notes

1. Thomas McAdory Owen and Marie Bankhead Owen, History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography, vol. 1 (Chicago: S.J. Clarke, 1921), 358, available online, accessed February 7, 2011
2. See notes at Party whips of the United States House of Representatives for details on the ambiguity.
3. John Milton Cooper, Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (NY, 2009), 150-1, 157-8
4. Cooper, 213
5. Scott C. James, Presidents, Parties, and the State: A Party System Perspective on Democratic Regulatory Choice, 1884-1936 (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 142, available online, accessed February 7, 2011
6. Cooper, 249-50
7. John Shelton Patton, Sallie J. Doswell, and Lewis Dabney Crenshaw, eds., Jefferson's University: Glimpses of the Past and Present of the University of Virginia (1915), 81, available online, accessed February 7, 2011
8. Lamar Taney Beman, ed., Selected Articles on Prohibition of the Liquor Traffic (NY: H.W. Wilson, 1915), 120, 127-8, available online, accessed February 7, 2011
9. Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, ed., From Civil War to Civil Rights–Alabama, 1860-1960 (University of Alabama Press, 1987), 316n, available online, accessed February 7, 2011
10. Murray, 23
11. Murray 53-4
12. Murray, 90
13. Murray, 123-4
14. Murray, 151, 153ff.
15. Murray, 113
16. Murray, 194
17. Murray, 204-5
18. George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 (A History of the South vol. 10) (Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 194, available online, accessed February 7, 2011
19. New York Times: "Underwood Lauds Smith," December 10, 1927, accessed February 7, 2011
20. New York Times: "Who Rules the United States?", June 3, 1928, accessed February 7, 2011
21. Findagrave: Oscar Wilder Underwood, accessed August 3, 2011

Sources

• United States Congress. "Oscar Underwood (id: U000013)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
• James S. Fleming, "Oscar W. Underwood: The First Modern House Leader, 1911—1915," in Raymond W Smock and Susan W Hammond, eds. Masters of the House: Congressional Leadership Over Two Centuries (1998), 91–118
• James S. Fleming, "Re-establishing Leadership in the House of Representatives: The Case of Oscar W. Underwood," in Joel H. Silbey, The United States Congress in a Nation Transformed, 1896-1963, vol. 1 (Carlson, 1991), 235-52
• Evans C. Johnson. Oscar W. Underwood: A Political Biography (Louisiana State University Press, 1980).
• Robert K. Murray, The 103rd Ballot: Democrats and the Disaster in Madison Square Garden (NY: Harper & Row, 1976)

External links

Oscar Underwood at Find a Grave