Winston L. Prouty

Winston L. Prouty

Winston Lewis Prouty (born September 1, 1906 in Newport , Vermont , †  September 10, 1971 in Boston , Massachusetts ) was an American politician ( Republican Party ) who represented the state of Vermont in both chambers of the US Congress .

Origin and career

Winston Prouty came from a family who had made fortunes by trading timber and building materials. Prouty & Miller owned several forest areas east of the Mississippi and in Canada . His uncle, George H. Prouty, was also a politician and governor of Vermont from 1908 to 1910 .

After he had spent his school days at a boarding school in Pottstown ( Pennsylvania ), Prouty attended Yale College , which he had to leave early for family reasons. He later continued his education at Lafayette College in Easton , where he graduated in 1930. He then went into the family business, where he rose to director.

Political career

From 1938 to 1941, Winston Prouty was mayor of his home parish Newport. Immediately thereafter, he moved to the Vermont House of Representatives for the first time as a member of the House of Representatives , to which he also belonged in 1945 and 1947 as Speaker . The normal career at the time for an aspiring politician in Vermont would now have envisaged entry into the State Senate and the office of President there pro tempore, but Prouty wanted to skip this step and applied for the office of lieutenant governor . His party's nomination, however, went to the more conservative Harold J. Arthur , the incumbent Senate President pro tempore, who then also won the actual election.

Governor Ernest W. Gibson , a Liberal Republican mentor to Proutys, appointed him chairman of the Vermont Water Protection Agency in 1948. After Gibson accepted a federal district judge appeal in 1950, Harold Arthur took office as his deputy. When Charles Plumley , Vermont's only representative in the United States House of Representatives , declined to stand for re-election that same year, Prouty ran for the vacant seat, while Arthur, who would usually have been his greatest intra-party rival, could not run for governor. Prouty won the election and entered Congress on January 3, 1951.

After being re-elected three times, Prouty did not run for office in 1958 and left the House of Representatives on January 3, 1959. Instead, he ran for the US Senate and won the election. Here, too, he won re-elections in 1964 and 1970; However, he died a few months into his third term to cancer . Winston Prouty was buried in the Pine Grove Cemetery in Vermont; US President Richard Nixon gave a funeral speech.

Web links

• Winston L. Prouty in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)

• Winston L. Prouty in the database of Find a Grave (English)