Hattie Caraway - Legacy

Legacy

Caraway was a prohibitionist and voted against anti-lynching legislation along with other Southern Democratic Senators. She was generally a supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt's economic recovery legislation. Caraway's defiance of the Arkansas establishment in insisting that she was more than a temporary stand-in for her husband enabled her to set a valuable precedent for women in politics. Although she remained at the margins of power, Caraway's diligent and capable attention to Senate responsibilities won the respect of her colleagues, encouraged advocates of wider public roles for women, and demonstrated that political skills were not the exclusive property of men.

She loved her family and paid her debts; in the 1930s, one of her sons was visiting a relative in West Tennessee, in the little town of Newbern. The child was thrown from a horse, mortally wounded, in front of the house of local banker Bush Crenshaw. Crenshaw had tried to save the farmers from foreclosure during the Great Depression but his monkeying with papers to do so had incurred a sentence to the federal penitentiary. In gratitude for Mr. Bush's kindness to her son, Senator Caraway intervened with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to get a presidential pardon for Bush Crenshaw. On February 21, 2001, the United States Postal Service issued a 76¢ Distinguished Americans series postage stamp in her honor. Her gravesite was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 20, 2007.