In Republican-controlled, predominantly Protestant, and
traditionally conservative northwestern Kansas, Kathryn
O’Loughlin McCarthy was an unusual politician: a
Democrat, a Catholic, and a single woman. But her political
roots, connection with farmers and cattlemen devastated by
the Great Depression, and a strong Democratic tide in the
1932 elections helped her win election to the U.S. House
of Representatives.
The daughter of John O’Loughlin, a Kansas state
representative and cattleman, and Mary E. O’Loughlin,
Kathryn Ellen O’Loughlin was born on April 24, 1894,
in Hays, Kansas. She grew up on the family ranch and
remembered a childhood shaped by farm chores—feeding
livestock, milking cows, and familiarizing herself with
the latest farm equipment.1
She graduated from Hays
High School in 1913 and, four years later, received a
BS in education from the State Teacher’s College in
Hays. After she received a University of Chicago LLD
in 1920, she passed the Kansas and Illinois bar exams.2
O’Loughlin began positioning herself for a career in
elective office. She returned briefly to Kansas and served
as a clerk for the Kansas house of representatives’ judiciary
committee while John O’Loughlin was a member of the legislature. “Sometimes I could hardly sit still at
the debates,” she recalled. “I wanted to get in there and
argue, too.”3
O’Loughlin returned to Chicago, where she
participated in legal aid and social welfare work. In 1929
she resettled in Kansas and, a year later, was elected to the
state legislature.
In 1932 O’Loughlin defeated eight men for the
Democratic nomination in the race for a sprawling
26-county House district that covered the northwestern
quarter of Kansas—compelled largely by her desire to
seek progressive reform at the national level.4
Only one
Democrat had ever represented the district since its creation
in 1885. Republicans, and briefly Populists in the 1890s,
dominated the elections. O’Loughlin challenged two-term
incumbent Republican Charles Isaac Sparks, a former
state judge. She focused on the devastated agricultural
economy of western Kansas and proposed federal relief
for farmers and ranchers. She logged more than 30,000
miles and delivered a dozen speeches daily. She stanched a
“whisper campaign” against her religion, “wet” position on
Prohibition, and status as a single woman. “A large part of
the population of Kansas consists of German farmers who
are terribly opposed to women in public life,” O’Loughlin recalled after the election. “In fact the slogan of my county
[Ellis County] in regard to women invading politics is
‘Kinder und cookin’—meaning ‘children and cooking.’ . . . But I soon discovered that when I proved to the people
that I knew what I was talking about, and was better
informed than the average man, they gradually dropped
their prejudices.”5
On November 8, 1932, O’Loughlin defeated Sparks
with 55 percent of the total vote, thanks in good part
to concerns about the Great Depression and President
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s long coattails in the presidential
election.6
When she took her seat in the 73rd Congress
(1933–1935) in March 1933, she became the first Kansan
woman and first woman lawyer to serve in Congress. She
also changed her name, to Kathryn O’ Loughlin McCarthy,
when she wed Daniel McCarthy, a newly elected Kansas
state senator, whom she met on the campaign trail, and
who initially opposed women holding public office. “I
want it understood that I am not out of politics,” the
Congresswoman-elect declared on her wedding day,
February 4, 1933. “I consider marriage an asset and not a
liability in the political field.”7
From the beginning, Congresswoman Kathryn
O’Loughlin McCarthy faced an almost insuperable obstacle
to re-election when House leaders rejected her appeal for
a seat on the Agriculture Committee and instead assigned
her to the Committee on Insular Affairs—in charge of
U.S. overseas territories. “Where, pray tell, are the islands
of Kansas?” she protested.8
Outraged, she demanded
an assignment more useful to her constituents. Her
challenge caught House leaders off guard. Contending
with an avalanche of freshman Democrats elected from
traditionally Republican districts, they denied her request
for an Agriculture seat. The decision disappointed farm
constituents, who had hoped to have a stronger voice
in federal projects for the state. Instead, McCarthy was
reassigned to the Education Committee. She also received
posts on the Public Buildings and Grounds and the World
War Veterans’ Legislation committees.
The repeal of Prohibition was one of the first issues
McCarthy confronted. Long-standing Kansan support for
temperance conflicted with the needs of the state’s cash-strapped wheat and barley farmers—shaping her middle
of the road position. The issue was contentious in a state
that had produced Carry Nation, a petite grandmotherly
figure who had led the militant forefront of the Prohibition movement at the turn of the century. Her “Home
Defenders” network of temperance zealots descended
on saloons in Wichita, Topeka, and other Kansas towns,
smashing them up with canes, bricks, and stones in a series
of attacks that became known as “hatchetations.” Against this
backdrop, McCarthy steered her course. Her home county
permitted the production of alcoholic beverages, but not
all the counties in her district did. Shortly after her election
she pledged to modify the Eighteenth Amendment to allow
“wet” states to have liquor if states that wished to prohibit
alcohol were still protected. In her largely agricultural
district, grain growers insisted that the alcohol market could
generate revenue for devastated farming operations. Many
Kansans, including some former temperance advocates,
agreed the Eighteenth Amendment should be relaxed.9
When
the Cullen Beer Bill, which legalized beer production,
advertising, and distribution, overwhelmingly passed the
House on March 14, 1933, however, McCarthy joined her
six Kansas colleagues to vote against the measure.10 “You
may expect me to be an ardent supporter of this bill; but I
think this bill is premature, will not accomplish its purpose,
and will not raise the revenue desired,” she explained. “It is
a discrimination in favor of big business . . . I do not think
all the home-brewers in my county could raise the $1,000
license fee.”11 Later in 1933, the Twenty-First Amendment
repealed Prohibition altogether.
In Congress, McCarthy generally endorsed New Deal
legislation, though she had none of the contacts with the
Roosevelt administration that were enjoyed by several
women colleagues. She made the best of her seat on the
Education Committee, fighting for an emergency grant of
$15 million in federal assistance for private, denominational,
and trade schools. In particular, she hoped to boost teacher
pay and put money into home economics and agriculture
instruction courses. “The children of today cannot wait for
the passing of the Depression to receive their education,”
McCarthy told colleagues.12 By January 1, 1934, more
than 2,600 schools nationwide, and more than 300 in
Kansas, had been closed because of the Great Depression.
Realizing that many Members would object to federal
aid for nonpublic schools on the grounds of separation of
church and state, McCarthy said, “That is all well and good
and must be continued as a permanent policy, but this is
temporary emergency legislation, to meet a time of stress.”13
McCarthy zeroed in on the needs of her farm
constituents. She recommended extending experimental Agricultural Department programs to promote better
“dry land” farming practices: crop rotation, soil
erosion prevention, water conservation, and summer
fallowing.14 In arguing on behalf of low interest rates for
direct credits authorized under the 1933 Farm Bill, better
known as the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), she
blasted bankers and business interests as the root cause
of agricultural economic collapse. “If we had not had the
high protective-tariff rates which compelled the farmer to
buy everything he used in a protected market and to sell
everything he produced in a world market, he would not
be in the condition he is in today,” she said to applause
on the House Floor.15 McCarthy fervently supported the
AAA, which she believed would bring relief to farmers
through a combination of federal loans, parity pricing,
and quota restrictions on basic farm commodities. In 1934
McCarthy introduced bills setting compulsory caps for
wheat production and taxing extra wheat crops on new
land that was brought into production. For decades farmers
had suffered from a market that had been deflated by
overproduction, and regulation seemed to hold out hope
for improved profits. Through 1933 McCarthy had argued
that frequent meetings with her constituents convinced
her that they broadly supported federal intervention in
agriculture.16 But by late 1934 that support had begun
to erode as farmers felt AAA programs were bureaucratic
and intrusive. By 1936, the Supreme Court had ruled the
AAA unconstitutional.
Kansas Governor Alf Landon tapped into that growing
resentment during the 1934 campaign season. Landon, a
wealthy oilman elected in 1932, led the effort to unseat
Kansas’s congressional Democrats. He targeted McCarthy as
an obedient tool of Washington New Dealers. “I believe the
people of Kansas are opposed to the licensing of agriculture
to the extent that each man can be told what he is going to
plant,” Landon said.17 McCarthy countered that Landon
misrepresented her record. “Those misrepresentations will
be corrected [in Kansas], when I get on the stump,” she
predicted on the House Floor, “but when he throws down
the gauntlet on my own doorstep, I am going to fight
back. Remember my initials are K.O.—and ‘Knock Out’
McCarthy is on the job.”18
McCarthy sailed through the Democratic primary
unopposed. In the general election she faced Frank Carlson,
Landon’s handpicked challenger, who had been the
governor’s 1932 campaign manager and chaired the Kansas Republican Party. Carlson effectively turned the election
into a referendum to endorse or to repudiate the New Deal
programs.19 McCarthy defended the federal programs and
ran on her record as a friend of farmers. Public opinion,
however, had already shifted. In late October, Kansas
livestock producers voted against a proposal to limit corn
and hog production—one of the first revolts against the
AAA legislation. McCarthy’s claims that most farmers
supported the administration’s policies were substantially
weakened.20 In a close campaign, Carlson edged out
McCarthy, winning by a margin of 2,796 votes out of more
than nearly 123,000 cast, or 51 percent of the vote.21
After leaving Congress, McCarthy returned to her
law practice in Hays and to attend to the businesses once
managed by her father, who passed away in the summer of
1933.22 In 1937 she led a reform effort to stop the wholesale
practice of sterilizing young girls at state correctional
facilities.23 She paid the tuition for dozens of low-income
students to attend Fort Hays State University, including
several African Americans to whom she also extended
free room and board in her home.24 In 1940 and 1944,
McCarthy attended the Democratic National Conventions
as a Kansas delegate.25 On January 16, 1952, she passed
away in Hays, Kansas, after an extended illness.
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
[ Top ]
.jpg)