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Dale Bumpers was born in 1925 in Charleston, Arkansas, served in the Marine Corps in World War II, and earned a law degree at Northwestern, becoming an admirer of Adlai Stevenson. In 1949 his parents died five days apart after a car accident. Back home as city attorney, he advised the school board after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling to comply immediately, making Charleston the first district in th...

David C. Broderick was born in 1820 in Washington, D.C., blocks from the Capitol, where his Irish immigrant father worked as a stonecutter. The family moved to New York City around 1823, and Broderick apprenticed as a stonecutter before rising in the city's Democratic ward politics. In 1846 he won the Democratic nomination for New York's fifth congressional district but took only about 38 percent...

Glenn H. Taylor was born in 1904 in a Portland, Oregon, boarding house, the 12th of 13 children of a retired Texas Ranger turned preacher, and left school after the eighth grade. From 1919 he toured with his brother's stock theater company as an actor and country western singer, and the Depression turned him toward progressive economics, including the writings of Stuart Chase and King Camp Gillett...

Carl Hayden was born in 1877 in the Arizona Territory, where his family ran a river ferry; his father was a merchant and local judge and his mother a teacher who campaigned for women's suffrage. At Stanford he lost a race for student body president and blamed his own overconfidence, resolving to always campaign as if he were behind. His father's illness forced him home before graduation to settle...

Scott Brown grew up in Wakefield, Massachusetts, after his parents divorced when he was one, and at 13 or 14 he stood before Judge Samuel Zoll in Salem for shoplifting record albums. Instead of detention, Zoll ordered a 1,500 word essay on how his siblings would feel watching him play basketball in jail, a moment Brown credited with ending his stealing. He earned a history degree at Tufts, attende...

Richard Russell Jr. was born in 1897 in Winder, Georgia, into a large family headed by Richard Russell Sr., chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, whose repeated losses in races for the Senate and governor strained the family's finances. The family had lost its plantation and mill in Sherman's march, and young Russell was groomed to restore its standing. After a University of Georgia law degr...

Alan Cranston was born in Palo Alto, California, in 1914, graduated from Stanford in 1936 and became a foreign correspondent for the International News Service. Alarmed that the English edition of Mein Kampf sold in America was abridged and sanitized, he published his own annotated translation in cheap tabloid form and sold about half a million copies before Hitler's publisher won a copyright case...

Thomas Hart Benton was born in North Carolina in 1782 and was expelled from the University of North Carolina in 1799 after admitting he stole money from classmates, vowing as he left that they would hear his name again. He rebuilt his life on a 40,000 acre family estate near Nashville, trading otter, bear and beaver pelts as frontier currency, and passed the Tennessee bar in 1805. As a young lawye...

John Pastore was born in 1907 in the Federal Hill neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island, the second of five children of Michele and Erminia Pastore, who had arrived from Potenza, Italy, in 1899. His father's death when John was nine sent him to work delivering suits, running errands for a law office and operating a foot press in a jewelry factory. He graduated with honors from Classical High Sc...

Chauncey Depew was born in Peekskill, New York in 1834, descended from Huguenots among the town's original land purchasers and, on his mother's side, from the family of Roger Sherman. After 12 years at the Peekskill Military Academy he entered Yale in 1852, led the Linonian Society and joined Skull and Bones, graduating in 1856 with future Supreme Court justices David Josiah Brewer and Henry Billi...

Gerald Nye was born in Hortonville, Wisconsin in 1892. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was 13, and he grew up writing and editing the family newspaper while his father, a follower of Robert La Follette, introduced him to the progressive senator. In 1916 he bought a weekly paper in North Dakota and wrote editorials defending farmers against banks and railroads. After losing a 1924 House rac...

Henry S. Foote was born in Virginia in 1804, graduated from Washington College around age 15 in 1819 and was admitted to the bar in 1822. In Tuscumbia, Alabama he practiced law, started a Democratic newspaper and helped found LaGrange College, then set up practices in the Mississippi river towns of Jackson, Natchez, Vicksburg and Raymond, and in 1841 published the two volume Texas and the Texans....

Henry Cabot Lodge was born in Boston in 1850 into the Lodge and Cabot families and grew up on Beacon Hill. As a boy in Nahant he testified to help convict the kidnappers of a classmate, and his father died in 1862 after being kept out of the Civil War. After Harvard College and Harvard Law School, he became in 1876 one of the first Americans to earn a PhD in history, studying under Henry Adams and...

Jeff Bingaman was born in El Paso, Texas in 1943 and raised in Silver City, New Mexico, where his father taught at Western New Mexico University and his mother taught in the public schools. He made Eagle Scout by 15, earned a government degree at Harvard and a law degree at Stanford, where he met his wife, Anne, and from 1968 to 1974 served in the Army Reserve as a chaplain's assistant. He was cou...

Harrison A. Williams Jr., known as Pete, was born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1919 and graduated from Oberlin College in 1941. He left Georgetown's School of Foreign Service to fly as a naval aviator in World War II, was discharged as a lieutenant junior grade in 1945, worked in the steel industry, and graduated from Columbia Law School in 1948. He lost races for the state assembly in 1951 and ci...

The U.S. Senate has served its bean soup every day for more than a century. The modern recipe uses navy beans, ham hocks and onions, while earlier versions added celery, garlic, parsley and sometimes mashed potatoes as a thickener. A 1967 memo from the Architect of the Capitol to the Librarian of the Senate fixed the standard at two pounds of small Michigan navy beans. The Senate's own history lis...

After five men were arrested inside the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate on June 17, 1972, the White House called it a third rate burglary and Richard Nixon won 49 states that November. The House Banking Committee under Wright Patman of Texas tried to investigate in October 1972, but its subpoena vote failed when several Democrats joined Republicans. In February 1973 the Sena...

John C. Stennis was born in 1901 in Kemper County, Mississippi, graduated from Mississippi State in 1923 and won a seat in the Mississippi House while still a law student at the University of Virginia. As a state prosecutor in the 1930s he tried the case that became Brown v. Mississippi, in which three Black sharecroppers were convicted on confessions obtained by torture that deputies admitted in...

Andrew Johnson was born in North Carolina in 1808. His father, Jacob, died of a heart attack after rescuing drowning men when Andrew was three, and at ten his mother bound him as an apprentice to a tailor named James Selby. About five years later he and his brother ran away, with a $10 bounty posted for their return. He settled in Greeneville, Tennessee, where his wife, Eliza McCardle, taught him...

Leland Stanford was born in New York in 1824 and practiced law in Port Washington, Wisconsin until an 1852 fire destroyed his property, including a prized law library. He followed five brothers to California, opened a store for miners in Placer County and then a wholesale business in Sacramento. In 1861 he joined Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins and Collis Huntington, the Big Four, and engineer Theod...

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was born on December 24, 1946 in Selma, Alabama, named for his father and grandfather and, through them, for Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard. He grew up in Camden, where his father ran a general store and later a farm equipment dealership, became an Eagle Scout, served as student body president at Huntingdon College in 1969, attended the University of Alabam...

Clifford P. Case was born in 1904 in Franklin Park, New Jersey, the eldest of six children of a Dutch Reformed minister so partisan that he canceled a newspaper subscription in 1912 when it endorsed Woodrow Wilson. After his father died in 1920, Case paid his way through Rutgers partly by playing the pipe organ in churches, earned Phi Beta Kappa, and finished Columbia Law School in 1928, the year...

Thomas Kuchel was born in Anaheim, California in 1910, the son of a local newspaper editor. As Anaheim High School's student body president and yell leader, he beat a Whittier High debater named Richard Nixon. After undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Southern California, he served in the California Assembly and state Senate from 1937 to 1945, took leave as a lieutenant commander in...

Pat McCarran, the Nevada senator who helped inspire the corrupt Senator Pat Geary in The Godfather Part II, was born in Reno in 1876 to Irish Catholic immigrants Margaret and Patrick McCarran. The 1897 Reno High School valedictorian left Nevada State University to run the family sheep ranch after his father was injured, read law on his own and passed the bar in 1905. He served in the state assembl...

In 1854 Illinois Democrat Stephen A. Douglas wanted the eastern terminal of a transcontinental railroad in Chicago, but the northern route ran through unorganized Louisiana Purchase land west of Iowa and Missouri, where the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had banned slavery for more than 30 years. Southern senators, led by a bloc living together in a Washington boardinghouse known as the F Street Mess...