John Jackson Sparkman (December 20, 1899 – November 16, 1985) was an American jurist and politician from the state of Alabama. A Southern Democrat, Sparkman served in the United States House of Representatives from 1937 to 1946 and the United States Senate from 1946 until 1979. He was the Democratic Party's nominee for vice president in the 1952 presidential election.
Born in Morgan County, Alabama, Sparkman established a legal practice in Huntsville, Alabama, after graduating from the University of Alabama School of Law. He won election to the House in 1936 and served as house majority whip in 1946. He left the House in 1946 after winning a special election to succeed Senator John H. Bankhead II. While in the Senate, he helped establish Marshall Space Flight Center and served as the chairman of several committees. Sparkman served as Adlai Stevenson's running mate in the 1952 presidential election, but they were defeated by the Republican ticket of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.
Although supportive of progressive social and economic legislation during the course of his political career,Times Daily 28 Mar 1954Times Daily 29 Oct 1972 Sparkman was also known as a defender of segregation during the Civil Rights era; voting regularly against civil rights legislation and condemned the "judicial usurpation" of the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education, Sparkman signed the 1956 Southern Manifesto, which pledged opposition to racial integration and promised to use "all lawful means" to fight the ruling that put court power behind the integration of public institutions. He became the longest-serving senator from Alabama in 1977, a record that was surpassed by Richard Shelby in 2019. Sparkman chose not to seek re-election in 1978 and retired from public office the following year.
Early life and education Sparkman, a son of Whitten Joseph and Julia Mitchell (Kent) Sparkman, was born on a farm near Hartselle, in Morgan County, Alabama. He grew up in a four-room cabin with his eleven brothers and sisters. His father was a tenant farmer and doubled as the county's deputy sheriff. As a child, Sparkman worked on his father's farm picking cotton. He was raised Methodist.
He attended a one-room elementary school in rural Morgan County, then walked every day to his high school. Sparkman graduated from Morgan County High School in 1917 and enrolled in the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. During World War I he was a member of the Students Army Training Corps. Sparkman worked shoveling coal in the university's boiler room to help pay for his education. He worked on The Crimson White (the university's newspaper), becoming the paper's editor-in-chief, and served as his class's student-body president. Sparkman was awarded a teaching fellowship in history and political science, he became a founding member of the Gamma Alpha chapter of Pi Kappa Alpha in 1921, and was chosen as the university's "most outstanding senior" the same year. He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1921, and his Bachelor of Laws from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1923. In 1924, Sparkman earned his master's degree in history; his master thesis, on former Confederate colonel William C. Oates's 1894 campaign for Governor of Alabama, was titled "The Kolb-Oates Campaign of 1894".
Legal career
Sparkman briefly worked as a high school teacher before he was admitted to the Alabama State Bar in 1925. He commenced his practice in Huntsville. He was also an instructor at Huntsville College from 1925 to 1928. He was appointed as a U.S. Commissioner (magistrate judge) for Alabama's northern judicial district, serving from 1930 to 1931.
Sparkman was involved in many civic organizations, including serving as the district governor of the Kiwanis Club of Huntsville in 1930, and later as the president of the Huntsville Chamber of Commerce. A Freemason, he was life member of Helion Lodge#1 in Huntsville. He was also member of the Huntsville Scottish Rite bodies and a recipient of the Knight Commander Court of Honor (KCCH).
Political career
After Representative Archibald Hill Carmichael announced his retirement in 1936, Sparkman ran in the Democratic primary for the open seat. A teacher of the Big Brother Class at the First Methodist Church in Huntsville, his campaign was launched through fundraising, campaigning and advertising by students in his Sunday class. Sparkman was elected to the United States House of Representatives in the 1936 election, defeating Union Party candidate, architect Harry J. Frahn with 99.7% of the vote. He was reelected in 1938 and 1940. During this time, World War II began in Europe. Sparkman took a pro-British foreign policy stance, advocating the United States should assist Great Britain in the war against the Nazis. In 1941, he voted in favor of the Lend-Lease Act of 1941 in order to provide military equipment and food to the United Kingdom. Sparkman was reelected in the elections of 1942 and 1944, serving in the 75th, 76th, 77th, 78th, and 79th Congresses.
As a Member of the House of Representatives, "[Sparkman] gained renown for his sponsorship of such programs as the farm-tenant purchase program, rehabilitation loans for small farmers, and lower interest rates for farm loans. He was a champion of the TVA and REA."Biographical sketch on John Sparkman, Alabama Academy of Honor, archived here.
In 1946, he served as house majority whip. He was reelected in the 1946 House election to the 80th Congress and on the same date was elected to the United States Senate in a special election to fill the vacancy caused by the death of John H. Bankhead II, for the term ending on January 3, 1949. Sparkman resigned from the House of Representatives immediately following the election and began his Senate term on November 6, 1946. He served until his retirement on January 3, 1979, having not sought reelection in 1978.
He was chairman of the Select Committee on Small Business (81st, 82nd, and 84th through 90th Congresses), co-chairman of the Joint Committee on Inaugural Arrangements (86th Congress), chairman of the Committee on Banking and Currency (90th and 91st Congresses), co-chairman of the Joint Committee on Defense Production (91st and 93rd Congresses), Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs (92nd and 93rd Congresses), and a member of the Committee on Foreign Relations (94th and 95th Congress).
The 1943 Sparkman Act, which allowed female physicians to be commissioned as officers in the armed forces, was named after him.
In 1949, Sparkman was instrumental in convincing the United States Department of the Army to transfer the missile development activities from Fort Bliss, Texas, to Redstone Arsenal. This brought Wernher von Braun and the German Operation Paperclip scientists and engineers to Huntsville, forming the foundation to what eventually became the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. Von Braun selected Huntsville to relocate his fellow German engineers because it reminded him of Germany.
Sparkman was a representative of the United States at the Fifth General Assembly of the United Nations in 1950.
In January 1951, Sparkman stated that he believed the Truman administration housing defense program could increase inflationary pressures, a view that aligned with Republican senators Irving Ives and Andrew Frank Schoeppel, but furthered that the plan was essential and should be undertaken regardless of inflation concerns. On September 8, 1951, he was the fourth signatory to the Treaty of Peace with Japan (with two declarations).
In 1952, he was the Democratic Party's nominee for vice president, running on the ticket of Adlai Stevenson II. However, the election was won by the Republican candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Sparkman ran against Richard Nixon, the junior senator from California, who would later became president.
After the election, Sparkman in an interview expressed approval that American small businessmen were giving large firms competition for foreign aid contracts. "The large firms once dominated this field. Now we are insisting that the small business get a fair share of these contracts and it has had a good effect. The increasing competition has cut costs in the entire American foreign aid program."Sen. Sparkman Says Small Business Is Giving Competition (December 4, 1952)
In January 1955, the University of Alabama News Bureau released remarks of Sparkman he had made during an interview following the 1954 midterm elections. Sparkman predicted a larger number of Democrats would cooperate with the Eisenhower administration, furthering that their tendency to criticize the Republicans rather than the president directly was ending, and Republicans, by contrast, would be more likely to oppose the president's foreign policy. Sparkman advocated for studying of the administration's defense program to confirm that the reduction in numbers would not be concurrent with a decrease in strength.Sparkman Says Demos To Cooperate With Ike (January 9, 1955)
On January 21, 1955, Sparkman introduced a bill authorizing $50 million in appropriation each quarter of the year for G.I.s to see a reduction dependent on the sales of home mortgages to private lenders of properties owned by the Veterans Administration. In a statement, Sparkman argued that the past few years had seen a home loan program which had come up short in meeting the needs of GI applications and the government was making a profit from the loans to GI's.
On February 2, 1955, during an interview, Sparkman said the US would have to weigh giving Nationalist islands to Red China if the United Nations succeeded in imposing a cease-fire in Formosa. He said the Eisenhower administration had a foggy attitude towards defending the islands.Sparkman Says Loss of Islands Possible (February 2, 1955)
In February 1955, Sparkman criticized the farming policies of the Eisenhower administration, charging them with having hurt the financial situations of American farmers the most since before the beginning of World War II and that the plight of farmers would continue so long as legislation affecting controls on crop acreage and the flexible price support system was enacted.Sparkman Raps Farm Policies of Republicans (February 16, 1955)
Sparkman delivered a speech at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Rome, Georgia on February 21, 1955, assailing Republican economic promises as a hoax and asserting the Eisenhower administration was operating on a theory of reactionary trickle-down economics. He said the school and road programs of the Eisenhower administration were intended to deliver larger funds to investment bankers rather than children or those using highways, predicting that the enactment of Eisenhower's school program would not see a single classroom built in either Georgia or Alabama.Sparkman Rips At Republicans At Demo Dinner (February 22, 1955)
On February 25, 1955, Sparkman predicted the Senate would approve the authorization of one and a half billion dollars of government insurance to be granted for housing mortgages, saying that if the bill was not enacted, "our housing program will come to a stop."Sparkman Predicts More Housing Aid (February 25, 1955)
In 1956, Sparkman was one of 82 representatives and 19 senators who signed the Southern Manifesto opposing the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education and racial integration. In 1956, the Democrats did not renominate Sparkman as Stevenson's vice presidential running mate, opting instead for U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver of neighboring Tennessee, partly because he had refused to sign. The Associated Press, as reported in the Reading Eagle, Reading, Pennsylvania, August 10, 1963. Accessed July 18, 2012. In 1957, Sparkman voted against HR 6127, the Civil Rights Act of 1957.Vote Tally. Civil Rights Act of 1957 GovTrack.