Douglas R. Stringfellow

Douglas R. Stringfellow (1953)

Douglas R. Stringfellow (born September 24, 1922 in Draper , Utah , † October 19, 1966 in Long Beach , California ) was an American politician . Between 1953 and 1955 he represented the first constituency of the state of Utah in the US House of Representatives .

Early years

Douglas Stringfellow moved to Ogden in 1935 while at school . He attended high school there until 1941 and then Weber College . He later stated that he also studied at Ohio State University and the University of Cincinnati . However, neither university has any records about him. During the Second World War he was an ordinary soldier in the US Army Air Corps .

Political rise and fall

Douglas Stringfellow joined the Republicans and became the head of the party's youth organization in Utah in 1946. Between 1947 and 1948 he was missionary on behalf of his Mormon Church in northern California. From 1949 to 1952, Stringfellow worked as a radio announcer. In 1952 he ran for his party for the US House of Representatives. During the election campaign, he drafted a different story of his wartime: he declared himself to be a secret agent who had carried out important jobs behind the German front, was captured and abused and had fled in an adventurous manner. This story later turned out to be untrue and fictitious.

At the time of the congressional elections in 1952, however, the hoax had not yet been exposed and Stringfellow was elected as a war hero with 60.5% of the vote in the House of Representatives. There he took over from Walter K. Granger on January 3, 1953 . In 1954 he tried to run again. In the run-up to the elections, however, the truth about his war stories came to light. His church forced him to confess; the Republican Party distanced itself from him and replaced him 16 days before the election by Henry Aldous Dixon , whose integrity was beyond question. He was elected Stringfellow's successor in Congress .

Another résumé

In the years that followed, Stringfellow tried to capitalize on what had happened through guest speeches. However, this project was unsuccessful. Stringfellow also tried a return as a radio announcer, always appearing under a pseudonym . He died in Long Beach in 1966 at the age of 44. Most recently he worked as a landscape painter.

Web links

• Douglas R. Stringfellow in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)

• Douglas R. Stringfellow in the database of Find a Grave (English)