Absalom Willis Robertson

Absalom Willis Robertson

Absalom Willis Robertson (born May 27, 1887 in Martinsburg , West Virginia , † November 1, 1971 in Lexington , Virginia ) was an American lawyer and politician . He represented the state of Virginia in both houses of Congress .

Personal history

Absalom Willis Robertson was born in Martinsburg in 1887 to Franklin Pierce Robertson and Josephine Ragland. He and his parents moved to Lynchburg , Virginia in 1891 . He attended public schools there and in Rocky Mount and graduated from the University of Richmond in 1907 . The following year he passed his law exam at that university and was admitted to the bar, after which he began to practice in Buena Vista .

During World War I served Robertson in the US Army . In 1919 he moved his residence and his law firm to Lexington. From 1922 to 1928 he served as a district attorney in Rockbridge County .

politics

In 1916 Robertson became a Democrat in the Virginia Senate , where he remained until 1922. In 1932 he was elected to the US House of Representatives for the seventh constituency of Virginia ; he was re-elected six times. Then he stood in the 1946 by-election for the mandate of the late US Senator Carter Glass and won it. After completing the remaining two-year term, he ran three more times and prevailed each time.

Robertson was a typical Byrd Democrat and very conservative on social issues. He was also chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs between 1959 and 1966. In 1956, Robertson was one of 19 Senators who signed the Southern Manifesto , a statement supporting the judgment of the United States Supreme Court in the case " Brown v. Board of Education ”and the resultant desegregation . While President Lyndon B. Johnson sent his wife Lady Bird on a train tour of the south in search of backing for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act , Robertson was one of four Southern Senators who refused to meet with her on the trip. In retaliation, President Johnson personally campaigned for William B. Spong as a US Senator, a considerably more liberal Democrat, in the next Democratic primary in 1966 . Meanwhile, even some of the Byrd Democrats moved away from their stubborn stance on inclusion as a supporter of Robertson and the movement's creator Harry F. Byrd . In the subsequent primary election, Spong defeated Robertson in one of the greatest uncertainties in Virginia's political history - an event believed to mark the beginning of the end of Byrd Democratic dominance in Virginia's state policy.

After his election defeat, he retired and lived in Lexington until his death on November 1, 1971. Absalom Willis Robertson was buried in the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery . His best-known son is the Protestant television preacher Pat Robertson .

swell

1. ↑ http://www.wargs.com/other/robertson.html

Web links

• Absalom Willis Robertson in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)