A one-term Representative from South Carolina, Clara G.
McMillan faced the growing menace of war in Europe from
the perspective of being a recent widow and a mother of five
young sons.
Clara E. Gooding was the second daughter born to
William and Mary Gooding in Brunson, South Carolina,
on August 17, 1894. She graduated from the public schools
in her hometown and later attended the Confederate Home
College in Charleston and the Flora McDonald College in
Red Springs, North Carolina. She married Thomas Sanders
McMillan, a lawyer who served in the South Carolina house
of representatives from 1917 to 1924. During his last two
years, he served as speaker of the South Carolina house. In
1924 he won election to the U.S. House of Representatives,
where he served eight terms and eventually became a
high-ranking member of the Appropriations Committee.
Throughout her husband’s congressional service, Clara
McMillan remained in Charleston, South Carolina, raising
their five sons: Thomas Jr., James, William, Edward, and
Robert.1 From a distance, she nevertheless kept in “close
contact and cooperation” with Thomas’s legislative policies.2
When Thomas McMillan died on September 29,
1939, South Carolina Democratic Party leaders chose
Clara McMillan to run in the special election to fill her
husband’s coastal Carolina seat. Like most southern states,
South Carolina operated under a one-party system in the
early twentieth century, wherein winning the Democratic
nomination was tantamount to winning the general
election. Less from a sense of chivalry toward a widow than
the need to head off an intraparty fight among aspirants
for the seat, local political leaders chose McMillan to fill
out the remaining year of her husband’s term. Against two
weak opponents, Shep Hutto of Dorchester and James De
Fieville of Walterboro, she won election to the House with
79 percent of the vote on November 7, 1939, to represent a
sprawling district that covered Charleston and nine adjacent
low-country counties.3 Afterward, McMillan, who had
campaigned on her familiarity with her husband’s work,
said she “felt it would come out as it did” because “I told
the voters I would carry on his work.”4 A group of Berkeley
County voters filed a protest to invalidate the special
election because, they argued, the secrecy of the ballot
was not maintained.5 The South Carolina supreme court
overruled the protest in late December, and McMillan took
her seat in Congress at the opening of the third session of
the 76th Congress (1939–1941) on January 3, 1940.
In a session that lasted a full year, McMillan served on the
Committee on Patents; the Committee on Public Buildings
and Grounds; and the Committee on the Election of the
President, Vice President, and Representatives in Congress. In
addition to answering constituent requests, some minor work
engaged her interests. She introduced legislation to provide
for the designation of individual domiciles in income tax
returns and to allow local police officers to mail firearms for
repairs. But these were secondary considerations.
The threat of American involvement in the war in
Europe dominated the business of the final session of the
76th Congress. World War II had erupted in Europe on
September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland. In
advocating for military preparedness, McMillan, like many
of her colleagues, insisted that federal resources be devoted
to defensive measures. “Perhaps it is true that geographically
we are so situated that a serious invasion by any one of the
powers engaged in present world conflicts is virtually impossible,”
McMillan told colleagues in a floor speech. “But conditions
change rapidly … press, radio, and motion pictures bring
us every day new and more striking evidence of the futility
of invoking treaties, covenants, and moral sanctions against
a well-prepared aggressor. He [Hitler] understands only one
language and we must learn to speak that language well. I
believe firmly in military and naval preparedness.”6
Conditions in Europe outpaced the push for preparedness
in America. In the months following McMillan’s speech, the
situation for the Allies grew grim as German troops invaded
France and, within six weeks, occupied Paris and forced the
capitulation of the French army. Berlin’s “blitzkrieg” warfare
had swept resistance out of western Europe and isolated
Great Britain, America’s closest traditional ally.
These developments forced McMillan and her colleagues
to countenance not only how to create an effective deterrent
force but how to raise an army to fight a war that, daily, America
seemed less able to avoid. McMillan took to the House Floor
and, in an impassioned speech that drew much applause, spoke
in favor of the Burke–Wadsworth Selective Service Bill of 1940,
which established the nation’s first peacetime draft. The concept
of universal military training (“UMT,” as it was known at
the time) marked a radical departure for many Americans.
Looking to past traditions as well as modern totalitarian
governments abroad, many had believed that domestic
liberties could not coexist with a large standing army that
might be used to quash internal dissent. McMillan disagreed
for both political and personal reasons. She supported
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s foreign policy broadly
and realized that Charleston, the district’s largest city, would
have a major role to play as a center for naval operations.
But there were other reasons, too, which compelled her
support for UMT. “I have five sons. The oldest will come
immediately under the operation of the bill and be subject
to its provisions, as he is past 21 years,” McMillan told her
colleagues. “My second son is almost 19 years old and is
now taking military training in a school organized for that
purpose. If and when my sons are needed for the defense
of their country, I do not want them to go up against
experienced soldiers, untrained and unskilled.”7 Three days
later, the draft bill passed Congress and was signed into law.
Meanwhile, by the summer of 1940, South Carolina
Democratic leaders had found their favored strong horse,
Lucius Mendel Rivers, to replace McMillan. McMillan declined
renomination for a full term when local politicos threw their
support behind Rivers. Mendel Rivers, a young lawyer and
South Carolina state representative from 1933 to 1936, went
on to represent the district for nearly 30 years and eventually rose
to chair the Committee on Armed Services. In the process he
helped make Charleston the locus of one of the largest military
establishments on the East Coast. When McMillan left Congress
in 1941, she continued her government service with the National
Youth Administration, the Office of Government Reports in
the Office of War Information, and, from 1946 to 1957, as
information liaison officer in the Department of State. Clara
McMillan retired to Barnwell, South Carolina, where she died on
November 8, 1976.
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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