John Sherman Cooper - Early Life

Early Life

John Sherman Cooper was born August 23, 1901, in Somerset, Kentucky. He was the second child and first son of seven children born to John Sherman and Helen Gertrude (Tartar) Cooper. The Cooper family had been prominent in the Somerset area since brothers Malachi and Edward Cooper migrated from South Carolina along the Wilderness Trail and through the Cumberland Gap around 1790, shortly after Daniel Boone. His father's parents – staunch Baptists – were active in the anti-slavery movement in the nineteenth century, and the elder John Sherman Cooper (called "Sherman") was named after the Apostle John and William Tecumseh Sherman, a hero of the Union in the Civil War. The family was very active in local politics; six of Cooper's ancestors, including his father, were elected county judges in Pulaski County, and two had been circuit judges. Sherman Cooper engaged in numerous successful business ventures and was known as the wealthiest man in Somerset. At the time of John Sherman Cooper's birth, his father was serving as collector of internal revenue in Kentucky's 8th congressional district, a position to which he had been appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt.

During his youth, Cooper worked delivering newspapers, in railroad yards, and in his father's coal mines in Harlan County. Despite having formerly served as county school superintendent, Cooper's father had a low opinion of the public schools, and until he was in the fifth grade, Cooper was privately tutored by a neighbor. While his father was away on business in Texas, his mother sent him to sixth grade at the public school, which he attended thereafter. At Somerset High School, he played both basketball and football. After the outbreak of World War I, Cooper joined an informal military training unit at the high school. Two of the school's instructors organized the boys into two companies, but Cooper, who was given the rank of captain, later recalled that "they taught us how to march and that's about all." During his senior year, Cooper served as class president and class poet. In 1918, he graduated second in his high school class and was chosen to give the commencement speech.

After graduation, Cooper matriculated at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. While at Centre, Cooper was accepted into the Beta Theta Pi fraternity. He also played defensive end on the Praying Colonels' football team. Cooper was a letterman on the team, playing alongside football notables Bo McMillan, Red Roberts, Matty Bell, and Red Weaver. Another member of the team, John Y. Brown, Sr., would later become one of Cooper's political rivals. Coached by Charley Moran, the team was undefeated in four games in the 1918 season, which was shortened by an outbreak of the Spanish flu.

Although Centre was known as one of Kentucky's foremost colleges, Cooper's father wanted him to broaden his education and, after one year at Centre, Cooper transferred to Yale College, a nationally-renowned college in New Haven, Connecticut. At Yale, he was a classmate of his future U.S. Senate colleague, Stuart Symington. Cooper was active in many extracurricular activities at Yale, including the Sophomore German Committee, the Junior Promenade Committee, the Student Council, the Class Day Committee, the Southern Club, the University Club, and Beta Theta Pi. A member of the Undergraduate Athletic Association, he played football and basketball, becoming the first person in Yale history to be named captain of the basketball team in his junior and senior years. In his senior year, he was accepted into the elite Skull and Bones society but regretted not being accepted into Phi Beta Kappa. Upon graduation, he was voted most popular and most likely to succeed in his class.

Cooper earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale in 1923 and enrolled at Harvard Law School later that year. During the summer break of 1924, he returned to Kentucky, where his father, dying of Bright's disease, told him that he would soon become the head of the family, and that most of the family's resources had been lost in the economic recession of the early 1920s. Cooper returned to Harvard after his father's death, but soon discovered that he could not simultaneously pursue a law degree and manage his family's affairs. He was admitted to the bar by examination in 1928 and opened a legal practice in Somerset. Over the next 20 years, he sold his father's remaining assets, paid off the family debts, and financed a college education for his six siblings.