Up for auction “Mississippi Senator” John C. Stennis Hand Signed 3X5 Card. This item is authenticated By Todd
Mueller Autographs and comes with their certificate of authenticity.
ES-8951E
John Cornelius Stennis (August 3,
1901 – April 23, 1995) was an American politician who served as a U.S. Senator from the
state of Mississippi. He was a Democrat who
served in the Senate for over 41 years, becoming its most senior member for
his last eight years. He retired from the Senate in 1989, and is, to date, the
last Democrat to have been a U.S. Senator from Mississippi. Furthermore, at the
time of his retirement, Stennis was the last United States Senator to have
served during the Presidency of Harry Truman.
While attending law school, Stennis won a seat in the Mississippi
House of Representatives, holding office from 1928 to 1932. After
serving as a prosecutor and state judge, Stennis won a special election to fill
the U.S. Senate vacancy following the death of Theodore G. Bilbo. He won election to a full term in 1952 and
remained in the Senate until he declined to seek re-election in 1988. Stennis
became the first Chairman of the Senate
Ethics Committee and also chaired the Committee on Armed Services and the Committee on Appropriations. He also served as President pro tempore of the Senate from 1987 to 1989. In
1973, President Richard Nixon proposed
the Stennis Compromise,
whereby the famously hard-of-hearing Stennis
would be allowed to listen to, and summarize, the Watergate tapes, but this
idea was rejected by Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. Stennis was a zealous supporter of racial segregation. Along
with James Eastland, he
supported the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948 headed
by Strom Thurmond, and signed the Southern Manifesto, which
called for massive resistance to
the Supreme Court ruling
in Brown v. Board of
Education. He also voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
and the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
He supported the extension of
the Voting Rights Act in 1982 but voted against the
establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day as
a national holiday. He was also the trial level prosecutor of Brown v. Mississippi (1936).
The transcript of the trial indicated Stennis was fully aware that the
confession was obtained by subjecting three black defendants to brutal
whippings and hanging by the officers.