Walter Lafferty

Walter Lafferty (1913)

Abraham Walter Lafferty (born June 10, 1875 in Farber , Audrain County , Missouri , † January 15, 1964 in Portland , Oregon ) was an American politician . Between 1911 and 1913 he represented the second and from 1913 to 1915 the third constituency of the state of Oregon in the US House of Representatives .

Early Years and Rise in Oregon

Lafferty attended the public schools of his home country and then studied law at the University of Missouri until 1896 . After his admission to the bar in the same year, he began to work in Montgomery City in his new profession. Between 1902 and 1904 he was a district attorney in Montgomery County . He was also a captain in the Missouri National Guard for three years.

In 1905 Walter Lafferty was hired as a special commissioner for the federal state administration. Since his new area of ​​responsibility was Oregon, he moved to Portland in March 1905. He only held his new office until 1906, but stayed in Oregon and worked as a lawyer in Portland. In 1907 he took on the fall of his life. He represented the 18 western counties of Oregon against the Oregon and California Railroad . This legal battle, which lasted intermittently until Lafferty's death in 1964, concerned claims for damages by the counties against the railroad, which resulted from the fraudulent sale of former railroad land ( Oregon Land Fraud Scandal ). The process ended in 1915 with a settlement that Lafferty refused to accept. He continued to complain about this until his death.

Political career

Lafferty was a member of the Republican Party . In 1910 he was elected to the US House of Representatives, where he replaced William R. Ellis on March 4, 1911 . During this time, the constituencies in Oregon were reorganized and a third district was created for Congress , for which Lafferty ran in the next election in 1912. After his election, he was the first MP for the third electoral district. Overall, he completed two terms in Congress between March 4, 1911 and March 3, 1915. In the 1912 election, in which Republicans were divided nationwide because the former Republican Theodore Roosevelt ran as a candidate for the short-lived Progressive Party against Republican President William Howard Taft , Lafferty in Oregon was able to be nominated and elected as a joint candidate for both parties . In 1914 he ran again for his party's nomination for Congress. This time he was defeated within the Clifton N. McArthur party . He then ran unsuccessfully as an independent applicant.

Another résumé

After his tenure in Congress, Lafferty returned to working as a Portland attorney. During World War I he was a major in a training camp in San Francisco . Between 1919 and 1933 he worked as a lawyer in New York . Then he moved to Riverdale , Maryland . In 1946 he returned to Portland, Oregon, where he again worked intensively on his old case against the railroad. He also applied regularly for a return to the US House of Representatives from 1950 to 1956. In 1950 he ran as an independent candidate, in the three subsequent elections he was a candidate for the Republican Party. All four candidacies were ultimately unsuccessful. Walter Lafferty died in January 1964 at the age of 88. He was buried in Middletown, Missouri, his native state.

Web links

• Walter Lafferty in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)

• Walter Lafferty in the database of Find a Grave (English)