William W. Hastings

William W. Hastings

William Wirt Hastings (born December 31, 1866 in Benton County , Arkansas , † April 8, 1938 in Muskogee , Oklahoma ) was an American politician . Between 1915 and 1921 and from 1923 to 1935 he represented the 2nd Congressional constituency of Oklahoma in the US House of Representatives .

Career

William Hastings was born on a farm in Arkansas near the Indian border. Soon after, he and his parents moved to what is now Delaware County (Oklahoma), which was then part of the Cherokee Indian territory. Hastings attended the Cherokee Tribal School and then until 1884 the Cherokee Male Seminary in Tahlequah . Between 1884 and 1886 and again from 1889 to 1891 he was a teacher at various schools in the Cherokee. In between he studied law at Vanderbilt University in Nashville until 1889 . After his admission as a lawyer in the same year, he also worked in this profession in Tahlequah in addition to his teaching activities.

Between 1891 and 1895, William Hastings was Attorney General for the Cherokee Nation . From 1907 to 1914 he represented their interests at the federal level. Politically, he became a member of the Democratic Party . In 1912 he was both a delegate to their party convention in Oklahoma and to the Democratic National Convention , where Woodrow Wilson was nominated as the party's presidential candidate.

In 1914, Hastings was elected to the US House of Representatives in the Second District of Oklahoma. There he took over from Dick Thompson Morgan on March 4, 1915 , who moved to the eighth constituency. After he was re-elected in 1916 and 1918, he was initially able to complete three consecutive terms in Congress until March 3, 1921 . There he was temporarily chairman of the committee that controlled the spending of the interior ministry. In the 1920 elections he was defeated by Alice Mary Robertson of the Republican Party . However, he was able to win back his mandate in the next elections in 1922 and successfully defend it in the following five ballots. Thus he exercised his mandate between March 4, 1923 and January 3, 1935 in six further legislative periods. In 1934 he refused to run again.

After his tenure in Congress, Hastings returned to practice as a lawyer. On January 22, 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made him head of the Cherokee Indians for a day to sign important documents. William Hastings died in 1938 and was buried in Tahlequah.

Web links

Commons : William Wirt Hastings  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• William W. Hastings in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)

• William W. Hastings in the database of Find a Grave (English)