Hattie Wyatt Caraway served for 14 years in the U.S. Senate
and established a number of “firsts,” including her 1932
feat of winning election to the upper chamber of Congress
in her own right. Drawing principally from the power of
the widow’s mandate and the personal relationships she
cultivated with a wide cross-section of her constituency,
“Silent Hattie” was a faithful, if staid, supporter of New
Deal reforms, which aided her largely agricultural state.
Hattie Ophelia Wyatt was born on February 1, 1878,
on a farm near Bakerville, Tennessee. Her parents William
Carroll Wyatt, a farmer and shopkeeper, and Lucy Mildred
Burch Wyatt raised four children. Hattie Wyatt briefly
attended Ebenezer College in Hustburg, Pennsylvania. At
age 14 she entered the Dickson (Tennessee) Normal College
and received a BA in 1896. She taught school for several
years in rural Arkansas, along with her Dickson fiancé,
Thaddeus Horatius Caraway. The couple married in 1902
and raised three sons, all future West Point cadets: Robert,
Paul, and Forrest.1 Thaddeus Caraway rose quickly through
the political ranks in Arkansas, serving as a prosecuting
attorney, winning election to four terms in the U.S. House
and two terms in the U.S. Senate. A fiery orator, he earned
the epithets “Fighting Thad” and “Caustic Caraway.”2
Throughout this period, Hattie Caraway’s public role
was limited. Behind the scenes, however, friends recalled
she played a critical part in her husband’s political career.
In 1920, during Thaddeus’s first run for the Senate, Hattie
Caraway worked in his campaign headquarters, spoke on
his behalf, and received much of the credit for his election.
She was her husband’s close political confidante, knew his
positions on all important issues affecting Arkansas, and
held Thaddeus’s “profound respect” as an adviser.3 While the
Caraways tended to avoid social functions in Washington,
Hattie often returned home to Arkansas to speak before
women’s political groups. Years later, in trying to cultivate
votes by appealing to voters’ sympathies for her plight as
a “poor, little widow,” Hattie Caraway played down her
experience as a congressional wife. “After equal suffrage in
1920,” she recalled, “I just added voting to cooking and
sewing and other household duties.”4
On November 6, 1931, Thaddeus Caraway died in
office, prompting immediate speculation that his widow
would be named to succeed him.5 A few days after his
funeral, Governor Harvey Parnell named Caraway’s widow
to fill the junior Senator’s seat. “I have appointed Mrs.
Caraway as United States Senator because I feel she is
entitled to the office held by her distinguished husband,
who was my friend,” Parnell explained. “The office belonged
to Senator Caraway, who went before the people and
received their endorsement for it and his widow is rightfully
entitled to the honor.”6 The Washington Post blasted Parnell’s
rationale. “Representation in Congress belongs to the
people of the State,” the Post editors wrote. “Mrs. Caraway
should have been given the appointment on her own merit
and not on the basis of sentimentality or family claim upon
the seat.”7 Hattie Caraway, however, offered Governor
Parnell a safe choice to sidestep choosing from a field of
Arkansas politicians who coveted the seat: W. F. Kirby,
state supreme court justice; Frank Pace, a lawyer; Hal L.
Norwood, state attorney general; and Heartsill Ragon, U.S.
Representative. Parnell, whose term as governor expired in
January 1933, also was considered a contender for the seat
in the 1932 elections.8
On December 8, 1931, Hattie Caraway claimed her
Senate seat. Her first observation upon entering the Senate
was: “The windows need washing!”9 But behind the façade
of the dutiful widow was a woman who had every intention
of not surrendering her seat to a chosen male successor.
Parnell’s endorsement for the Democratic nomination in
the one-party Arkansas system guaranteed Hattie Caraway’s
election to the remaining 14 months of her husband’s term,
which expired in early 1933. Caraway won the special
election on January 12, 1932, crushing two Independent
candidates with 92 percent of the vote.10 The election forged
the creation of the Arkansas Women’s Democratic Club,
which threw its support behind Caraway and sought to get
out the vote and raise money.
Almost immediately after the special election, Caraway
faced the daunting prospect of mounting a re-election
campaign in the fall of the 1932 without the support of the
Arkansas political establishment. But on May 10, the day of
the filing deadline for the August 10 Democratic primary,
Caraway shocked Arkansans and her six male contenders
by announcing her candidacy. She explained to reporters,
“The time has passed when a woman should be placed in
a position and kept there only while someone else is being
groomed for the job.”11 She confided in her journal that
she planned to test “my own theory of a woman running
for office.”12
It was an uphill battle against a field of contenders
that included a popular former governor and former
U.S. Senator. But Caraway had an important ally in
Louisiana Senator and political boss Huey Long, with
whom Thaddeus Caraway had often allied and whose
legislative proposals Hattie Caraway supported. Long had
presidential ambitions and wanted to prove his popularity
outside his home state by campaigning in the state of his
chief rival, Caraway’s Arkansas colleague, Senate Minority
Leader Joseph Taylor Robinson. On August 1, nine days
before the election, the “Kingfish” mobilized a small armada
of cars and a host of Louisiana state employees to canvass
Arkansas on Caraway’s behalf. Long and Caraway logged
more than 2,000 miles and made 39 joint speeches—with
the charismatic Louisianan doing most of the talking.
“We’re out here to pull a lot of pot-bellied politicians off a
little woman’s neck,” Long told audiences. “She voted with
you people and your interests in spite of all the pressure
Wall Street could bring to bear. This brave little woman
Senator stood by you.”13 For the more than 200,000 people
who came out to listen in courthouses, town halls, and city
parks, Long effectively portrayed Caraway as a champion
of poor white farmers and workers and as a Senator whom
the bankers were unable to control.14 In the seven-way
primary, Caraway won 44.7 percent of the vote, carrying 61
of the state’s 75 counties.15 Far less surprising was Caraway’s
landslide victory in the general election that November: In
the one-party, Democratic system she out-polled her hapless
Republican rival by a nearly nine-to-one margin.16
Known as “Silent Hattie” because she spoke on the floor
just 15 times in her career, Caraway nonetheless had a facile
wit. She once explained her tendency to avoid speeches:
“I haven’t the heart to take a minute away from the men.
The poor dears love it so.”17 Throughout her 14 years in the
Senate, she was a strong supporter of President Franklin D.
Roosevelt (FDR) and his New Deal reforms, most especially
farm relief and flood control. “He fumbles,” Caraway once
said of FDR, “but he fumbles forward.”18 She harbored deep
reservations about American intervention in World War II
but backed Roosevelt’s declaration of war after the attack on
Pearl Harbor in 1941. She was a strict prohibitionist, a critic
of lobbyists, and a sympathetic friend to veterans’ groups.
During her tenure in the Senate, Caraway secured $15
million to construct an aluminum plant in her home state
and the first federal loan funding for an Arkansas college.
During her second term, she voted several times against
the Roosevelt administration when she sided with the farm
bloc to override the presidential veto of the Bankhead Farm
Price Bill to restrict the administration’s use of subsidies to
lower food prices and to readjust the price cap on cotton
textiles.19 She also proved instrumental in preventing
the elimination of a U.S. House seat from Arkansas to
reapportionment in 1941 and methodically attended to
constituent requests.
Once ensconced in the Senate, Caraway set a number
of firsts for women. In 1933 she was named chair of the
Enrolled Bills Committee; the first woman ever to chair
a Senate committee, she remained there until she left
Congress in 1945. Caraway became the first woman to
preside over the Senate, the first senior woman Senator
(when Joe Robinson died in 1937), and the first woman
to run a Senate hearing. She also received assignments
on the Commerce Committee and the Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry.20 It was from the latter that she
was most attentive to the needs of her largely rural and
agricultural constituency.
Caraway’s record on civil rights was mixed. In one
respect she was progressive, as the first woman to endorse
and vote for the Lucretia Mott Equal Rights Amendment
in 1943—a measure that had been presented to the Senate
on 11 prior occasions and which Caraway herself had
worked for since 1937.21 Hattie Caraway chafed at the
Senate’s institutional prohibitions against women, at one
point noting in her journal that she had been assigned
the same desk as Rebecca Felton of Georgia. “I guess they
wanted as few [desks] contaminated as possible,” Caraway
quipped.22 Race was another matter entirely, largely because
she voted with the unified bloc of her southern colleagues
to uphold segregation. Caraway voted against the antilynching
law of 1938 and, in 1942, joined other southern
Senators in a filibuster to block a proposed bill that would
have eliminated the poll tax.
Most observers, including some of her supporters,
believed Caraway would retire in 1939. But she upset
expectations again by declaring her candidacy for the 1938
election. In the Democratic primary, Caraway faced two-term
Representative John Little McClellan, a 42-year-old
lawyer who declared, “Arkansas Needs Another Man in the
Senate.” McClellan adopted the antics and soaring oratory
that Huey Long once employed to get Caraway elected.23
Senator Caraway ran on her record of supporting New
Deal legislation to alleviate the economic hardships for the
state’s largely agrarian economy. Throughout the campaign
she was forced to defend not only her gender but her age as
well. But she held two advantages. The first was wide name
recognition and personal contact with voters, especially
women. More importantly, although Huey Long was no
longer there to support her, Caraway benefited from the
support of the state’s Federal Internal Revenue collector and
future Arkansas governor, Homer Atkins. She also garnered
endorsements from a number of key federal judges, the
federal marshal, and several trade and labor unions and a
mild endorsement from President Roosevelt, which she
advertised widely.24 In the August 9 primary, which many
observers considered another referendum on the New Deal,
Caraway prevailed by just 8,000 votes out of more than
260,000 cast.25
Though she went on to win the general election in 1938,
it was clear that Caraway spoke even less for the Arkansas
political establishment than she had in her first term. By
1944, Caraway faced a tough field of Democratic primary
challengers in her bid for renomination. Her campaign
was uninspired, and she finished last among the four
contenders. The winner, a dynamic freshman Representative
and former University of Arkansas president, James William
Fulbright, was eventually elected and served for three
decades as one of the Senate’s most influential Members.
Caraway was still a part of the capital city in her post-congressional
years. Franklin Roosevelt nominated her
in early 1945 as a member of the Federal Employees’
Compensation Commission, where she served for a year.
In 1946 President Harry S. Truman elevated her to the
commission’s appeals board, where she remained until her
death on December 21, 1950, in Falls Church, Virginia.
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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