J. Lister Hill

Joseph Lister Hill

Joseph Lister Hill (born December 29, 1894 in Montgomery, Alabama , † December 21, 1984 ibid) was a politician in the United States . He was a member of the House of Representatives and the United States Senate for the state of Alabama .

Life

Joseph Lister Hill, son of Dr. Luther Leonidas Hill was born on December 29, 1894 in Montgomery, Alabama. He was named after Dr. Joseph Lister, 1st Baron Lister , the father of antiseptic surgery. Hill graduated from Starke University in Montgomery. He was also admitted to the University of Alabama at the age of sixteen, where he received his doctorate four years later with a law degree and a Phi Beta Kappa key. While studying at the University of Alabama, he was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon . He was also the founder of the Student Government Association (SGA) and its first president. He was also the founder of Jason's Senior Men's Honorary (which the university later closed, but awarded him in 1976 for his all-man policy. This honor took place every spring at Franklin Mound and was only awarded to 31 other men) and The Machine (the local Local chapter of Theta Nu Epsilon).

He also studied law at the legal department of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and at the Columbia Law School in New York City . He was admitted to the Alabama bar in 1916 and then opened a practice in Montgomery, Alabama. There he was also chairman of the Montgomery Education Committee between 1917 and 1922.

politics

Hill was elected Alabama Second District MP to Congress on August 14, 1923 to fill the vacant space left by the death of MP John R. Tyson . During that time he was chairman of the United States House Committee on Military Affairs and was nominated to the United States Senate in 1938 when Senator Hugo Black moved to the Supreme Court . Hill was then elected to the Senate as a Democrat on April 26, 1938, to fill the position vacated by the resignation of Senator Dixie Bibb Graves . Their term of office would have ended on January 3, 1939. Hill was re-elected to the US Senate in 1938, 1944, 1950, 1956 and 1962. In January 1969 he resigned. His term of office therefore ran from January 11, 1938 to January 3, 1969.

Hill was known as a moderate senator. He was known in a wide variety of disciplines, best known for his landmark public health policy. Perhaps the most famous law that bears his name is the Hospital and Health Center Construction Act of 1946, better known as the Hill-Burton Act . He also supported the Hill-Harris Act of 1963, which provided funding to the facilities under construction for the mentally retarded and the mentally ill. He was also known for standing up in Congress to support medical research at Nation's Medical Schools and other research institutions. He also endorsed other key laws, including the TVA Act , Rural Telephone Act , Rural Housing Act , Vocational Education Act, and National Defense Education Act . In 1956 he signed the Southern Manifesto , in which the judgment of the Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education was convicted. This ruling lifted racial segregation in schools. (Hill was a close friend of the Supreme Court Judge and Alabamian comrade Hugo L. Black, who voted for Brown).

Lister Hill was a national figure as well as an MP from Alabama and the South. During his long years in Congress, he occasionally broke up with his southern counterparts and followed his own conscience. For example, unlike most southerners in Congress, he advocated a federal oil drilling protection law that would allow the tax revenue from oil drilling to benefit education.

Hill was Senate Majority Whip from 1941 to 1947 . He was also the Senate Chairman of the Labor and Welfare Committee, which discussed key veteran education and health laws, as well as hospitals, libraries, and wage relations. He was also a member of the Senate Funding Committee and the Senate Democratic Politics Committee. He has received honorary degrees from 13 colleges and universities, including the University of Alabama and Auburn University . He was a Methodist , a Freemason , a United States Army World War II veteran in the seventeenth and seventy-first infantry regiments, and a member of the American Legion .

Joseph Lister Hill died on December 21, 1984 in Montgomery, Alabama. He was buried in Greenwood Cemetery .

literature

• American National Biography; Hamilton, Virginia Van der Veer. Lister Hill: Statesman From the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987; US Congress. Memorial Addresses for Lister Hill. 99th Cong., 1st sess., 1985. Washington: United States Government Printing Office , 1985.

Web links

Commons : J. Lister Hill  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• J. Lister Hill in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)
• The Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications at the National Institutes of Health , Bethesda, Maryland .
• The Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham .