page_title: Alben W. Barkley
section_title: U.S. Senator (1927–49, 1955–56)
hierarchical_section_title: Alben W. Barkley / U.S. Senator (1927–49, 1955–56)
caption_attribution_description: English: Arkansas Senator Joseph T. Robinson
context_page_description: Alben William Barkley was an American lawyer and politician from Kentucky who served in both houses of Congress and as the 35th vice president of the United States from 1949 to 1953. In 1905, he was elected county attorney for McCracken County, Kentucky. He was chosen County Judge/Executive in 1909 and U.S. representative from Kentucky's First District in 1912. As a Representative, he was a liberal Democrat, supporting President Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom domestic agenda and foreign policy.
  Endorsing Prohibition and denouncing parimutuel betting, Barkley narrowly lost the 1923 Democratic gubernatorial primary to fellow Representative J. Campbell Cantrill. In 1926, he unseated Republican Senator Richard P. Ernst. In the Senate, he supported the New Deal approach to addressing the Great Depression and was elected to succeed Senate Majority Leader Joseph T. Robinson upon Robinson's death in 1937. During his 1938 re-election bid, his opponent A. B. "Happy" Chandler accused him of using Works Progress Administration employees to campaign for him; Barkley claimed Chandler used state employees in the same way.
context_section_description: Because of Barkley's role in crafting the Railway Labor Act, the Associated Railway Labor Organizations endorsed him to unseat Ernst even before he formally announced his candidacy on April 26, 1926. Since the 1923 gubernatorial contest, he had distanced himself from Haly and promised the conservatives that he would not push a ban on parimutuel betting if elected. Consequently, he had no opposition in the primary. Congressman (and later Chief Justice) Fred M. Vinson managed his general election campaign.
  Coolidge supported Ernst, and Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover campaigned in the state on his behalf. Ernst had opposed a bonus for veterans of World War I, an unpopular position in Kentucky, and at 68 years old, his age worked against him. Barkley contrasted his impoverished upbringing with Ernst's affluent lifestyle as a corporate lawyer, and also attacked him for supporting Michigan Senator Truman Handy Newberry, who resigned due to allegations of election fraud. Republican voters were angered that Ernst did not support Republican Kentucky Congressman John W. Langley when Langley was charged with illegally aiding a large bootlegging operation in Louisville. Ernst tried to resurrect the issues of Barkley's support for the coal tax and opposition to parimutuel betting, but in the general election, Barkley won by a vote of 287,997 to 266,657.
  In the Senate, Barkley was assigned to the Committee on the Library, and the committees on Finance and Banking and Currency; later, he was added to the Commerce Committee. In early 1928, Vice President Charles G. Dawes assigned him to a special committee to investigate the campaign expenditures of the leading candidates in the upcoming presidential election.
  Democrats considered nominating him for vice president that year, calculating that his party loyalty and appeal to rural, agricultural and prohibitionist constituents, could balance a ticket headed by likely presidential nominee Al Smith, an urban anti-prohibitionist. When the Kentucky delegation arrived at the 1928 Democratic National Convention, they approached Smith supporters with a view to pairing Barkley to their candidate. They were received cordially, but Smith's advisors thought placing candidates with such differing views on the ticket would seem contrived to the electorate. They did not tell Barkley of their decision until after he seconded Smith's nomination for president. Smith then announced Arkansas Senator Joseph T. Robinson as his preferred running mate. The Kentuckians nominated Barkley in spite of Smith's preference, but the overwhelming majority of delegates voted for Robinson, and Barkley announced that Kentucky was changing its support in order to make the nomination unanimous.
  Barkley and his wife Dorothy took a vacation after the convention, returning to Kentucky in August 1928 to find that, in his absence, Barkley had been chosen state chairman of Smith's campaign. He campaigned for Smith, but Herbert Hoover won a landslide victory. After the election, Barkley led a coalition of liberal Democrats and Republicans that opposed Hoover's use of protective tariffs, a debate that took particular urgency following the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Barkley opposed the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, claiming it would cost Americans both jobs and exports, but Congress approved it, and Hoover signed it on June 17, 1930. When Congress adjourned, Barkley accompanied Sherwood Eddy and fellow senators Burton K. Wheeler and Bronson M. Cutting to the Soviet Union in August 1930. He was impressed by the industrial development brought about by Joseph Stalin's first five-year plan but did not advocate closer diplomatic ties with the Communist nation, as some of his colleagues did.
  Barkley maintained that Hoover's response to the continuing depression and the severe drought in 1930 were inadequate and pointed out that the $45 million in loans to farmers that he approved amounted to less than half the losses sustained by Kentucky's farmers alone. He was angered that Hoover refused to call a special legislative session to adopt relief
caption: Joseph T. Robinson received the Democratic vice presidential nomination in 1928 instead of Barkley.
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