Hattie
Wyatt was born in Bakerville, Tennessee on 1st February, 1878. After
graduating from Dickson College in 1896 and married fellow student,
Thaddeus Caraway, and moved to Arkansas
where her husband worked as a lawyer. In 1912 he was elected to Congress.
When
her husband died on 6th November, 1931, the Governor of Arkansas,
Harvey Parnell appointed Hattie Caraway as his replacement. She was
confirmed in a special election on 12th January, 1932, and therefore
became the first woman to win a place in the Senate.
In
May 1932, Hattie Caraway announced she was a candidate for re-election
to a full term. Joseph T. Robinson
and other leaders of the Democratic Party
in Arkansas were opposed to the idea and told her she would not win
the party nomination. Caraway approached Huey
Long and he agreed to help her in her campaign. The American
Federation of Labor also
supported her and she defeated her nearest competitor by two to one.
On
her return to the Senate she became a loyal advocate of Huey Long's
Share Our Wealth campaign. Caraway
also supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt
and his New Deal. In the Senate she served
as chairwoman of the Committee on Enrolled Bills.
In
1944 Caraway was defeated by William Fulbright.
The following year she was invited to join the United States Employees'
Compensation Commission (1945-46) and the Employees' Compensation
Appeals Board (1946-1950). Hattie Caraway died at Falls Church, Vermont,
on 21st December, 1950.
(1)
Huey
Long, speech in support of Hattie
Caraway (October, 1932)
It is nip and tuck with us, up there in the Senate. If
Wall Street and their trust gang succeed in defeating enough senators
who have stood with the people like this little woman senator from
Arkansas has, they'll have the whip hand on you. You'll never be able
to get anyone from this state to stand by you again.
(2)
Hermann Deutsch, Saturday
Evening Post (15th October, 1932)
Farmers
drove to town in their own automobiles - and no few
of the cars were this year's models - in such numbers that highways
were congested in every direction. Fifteen minutes after he began
to talk, Huey Long would have these same farmers convinced that they
were starving and would have to boil their old boots and discarded
tires to have something
to feed the babies till the Red Cross brought around a sack of meal
and a bushel of sweet potatoes to tide them over; that Wall Street's
control of the leaders - not the rank and file - of both Democratic
and Republican parties was directly responsible
for this awful condition; that the only road to salvation lay in the
reelection of Hattie W. Caraway to the Senate.
(3)
Raymond Gram Swing, The
Nation (January, 1935)
Huey Long is the best stump
speaker in America. He is the best political radio speaker, better
even than President Roosevelt. Give him time on the air and let him
have a week to campaign in each state, and he can sweep the country.
He is one of the most persuasive men living." This is the opinion
not of a Long supporter, but of one of the key men in the fight against
the Kingfish in Louisiana. The North, he said, is misled into dismissing
him as a clown, and has no conception of Huey's talents and of his
almost invincible mass appeal. Mrs. Hattie Caraway of Arkansas can
testify to his powers, for when she entered the primary asking to
succeed her late husband in the United States Senate, she was generally
expected to run last among five candidates and to poll not more than
2, 000 votes. The four men against her were experienced and able.
But Huey took his sound van into Arkansas for one week, and though
he could not get into every county, he made a circular tour during
which he spoke six times a day. Instead of 2,000 votes Mrs. Caraway
won a majority over
the combined opposition in the first primary, tantamount to
election in a Democratic state. An analysis of the vote showed that
the districts where
Huey did not appear virtually ignored her, while those which
he toured gave her a landslide.
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