page_title: Jerry Voorhis
section_title: Early career
hierarchical_section_title: Jerry Voorhis / Early career
caption_attribution_description: English: Voorhis Park — at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, Southern California.
context_page_description: Horace Jeremiah "Jerry" Voorhis was a Democratic politician from California. He served five terms in the United States House of Representatives from 1937 to 1947, representing the 12th Congressional district in Los Angeles County. He was the first political opponent of Richard M. Nixon, who defeated Voorhis for re-election in 1946 in a campaign cited as an example of Nixon's use of red-baiting during his political rise.
  Voorhis was born in Kansas, but the family relocated frequently in his childhood. He earned a bachelor's degree from Yale University and a master's degree in education from Claremont Graduate School. In 1928, he founded the Voorhis School for Boys and became its headmaster. He retained the post into his congressional career.
  In the House of Representatives, Voorhis was a loyal supporter of the New Deal and compiled a liberal voting record. His major legislative achievement was the Voorhis Act of 1940 requiring registration of certain organizations controlled by foreign powers.
context_section_description: Voorhis was born in Ottawa, Kansas, on April 6, 1901, to Charles Brown Voorhis, of Dutch descent, and Ella Ward (Smith) Voorhis. Jerry was the grandson (and future biographer) of Aurelius Lyman Voorhis, who had "ventured out to the frontier in western Kansas" as merchant, land agent, and self-taught lawyer, and had scraped to send his son to college until he was forced, halfway through, to give his son the only two dollars he could spare and advise him to get a job.  Charles Voorhis took work in an investment company and as a semi-professional baseball player and rose to become an executive of the Kingman Plow Company. When that company dissolved, Charles Voorhis became an executive of the Oakland Motor Car Company, which became the Pontiac division of General Motors, and finally of the Nash Motor Company before his 1925 retirement. Jerry Voorhis began school in Ottawa, but also attended school in Oklahoma City, Peoria, Illinois and Pontiac, Michigan. He attended The Hotchkiss School, an elite boys' boarding school in Connecticut with close ties to Yale University, and subsequently attended Yale, graduating in 1923. Voorhis was elected as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, was president of the Christian Association, and was greatly influenced by the Social Gospel movement.
  Voorhis resisted all encouragement toward a business or management career, much to his father's disappointment.  While attending Yale, he came to believe  that "the Christian Gospel is to be taken seriously, and that needless poverty and suffering on the one hand and special privilege and inordinate power on the other are entirely contrary to its precepts".  He later stated that he lacked the faith in his own judgment to leave Yale and get a job in "the real world [which] lay beyond the college walls".  However, once he graduated, Voorhis engaged a room at a boarding house and went to work as a receiving clerk, a job he soon exchanged for one as a freight handler. Later in 1923, he was laid off. In 1923 and 1924, he served as a traveling representative for the YMCA in Germany, though his stay was cut short by illness. Suffering from pneumonia, Voorhis spent six weeks recovering in a London nursing home.
  Charles Voorhis's job with Nash had taken him to a new home in Kenosha, Wisconsin; Jerry Voorhis joined his parents there on his return from Europe. As part of his recovery from his illness, he spent several weeks in northwestern Wyoming, working on a ranch. In Kenosha, he met a social worker named Alice Louise Livingston and married her on November 27, 1924, in her hometown of Washington, Iowa. Resuming his blue-collar career after his marriage, Voorhis moved to North Carolina with his wife and went to work in a Ford plant in Charlotte until being offered work as a teacher in an Illinois school for underprivileged boys, teaching three grades, coaching sports, and giving religious talks in the school's chapel each morning. This was followed by a year in Laramie, Wyoming, where the Voorhises founded and ran an orphanage for boys.
  In 1927, the now-retired Charles Voorhis offered his son an opportunity to found a boys academy near the elder Voorhis's home in Pasadena, California. Jerry Voorhis responded by moving to California. In 1928, he founded and became headmaster of the  Voorhis School for Boys in San Dimas, California, a post he retained after his election to Congress. In addition to academic tutelage, the Voorhis School's boys received training in farming, mechanical work, and other manual vocations. Charles and Jerry Voorhis would put much of the family fortune into the school.  After Voorhis's election to Congress, the school would be closed down, with the land and buildings donated to California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona), later serving as the university's Southern California campus until it moved in 1950 to Pomona. Voorhis remained in close touch with his school's alumni.
  Voorhis also involved himself in the local community. He organized cooperatives among the local ranchers and farmers. When strikes occurred, he would walk
caption: Voorhis Park, Cal Poly Pomona, containing a stone from the Voorhis School campus
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