Wayne Morse - Election To The U.S. Senate

Election To The U.S. Senate

In 1944 Morse won the Republican primary election for Senator, unseating incumbent Rufus C. Holman, and then the general election that November. Once in Washington, D.C., he revealed his progressive roots, to the consternation of his more conservative Republican peers. He was outspoken in his opposition to the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which concerned labor relations.

Morse was reelected in 1950. In protest of Dwight Eisenhower's selection of Richard Nixon as his running mate, Morse left the Republican Party in 1952. The 1952 election produced an almost evenly-divided Senate; Morse brought a folding chair when the session convened, intending to position himself in the aisle between the Democrats and Republicans to underscore his lack of party affiliation. Morse expected to retain certain committee memberships but was denied membership on the Labor Committee and others. He used a parliamentary procedure to force a vote of the entire Senate, but lost his bid. Senator Herbert Lehman offered Morse his seat on the Labor Committee, which Morse ultimately accepted.

Following Morse's defection, Republicans had a 48–47 majority; the deaths of nine other Senators, and the resignation of another, caused many reversals in control of the Senate during that session. In 1955, Democratic leader Lyndon Johnson persuaded Morse to join the Democratic caucus.

Morse was kicked in the head by a horse in 1951. He sustained major injuries: the kick "tore his lips nearly off, fractured his jaw in four places, knocked out most of his upper teeth, and loosened several others."

In 1953, Morse conducted a filibuster for 22 hours and 26 minutes protesting the Tidelands Oil legislation, which at the time was the longest one-person filibuster in U.S. Senate history (a record surpassed four years later by Strom Thurmond's 24 hour, 18 minute filibuster in opposition of the Civil Rights Act of 1957). After a term as an independent, during which he campaigned heavily for Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Richard Neuberger in 1954, Morse switched to the Democratic Party in 1955. Despite these changes in party allegiance, for which he was branded a maverick, Morse won re-election to the United States Senate in 1956. He defeated U.S. Secretary of the Interior and former four-term governor Douglas McKay in a hotly-contested race; campaign expenditures totaled over $600,000 between the primary and general elections, a very high amount by contemporary standards.

In 1959, Morse opposed Eisenhower's appointment of Clare Boothe Luce as ambassador to Brazil. Morse, who had known Luce for many years, chastised Luce for her criticism of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Although the Senate confirmed Luce's appointment in a 79–11 vote, Luce retaliated against him. In her acceptance speech to the Senate, Luce commented that her troubles with Senator Morse were attributable to the injuries he sustained from being kicked by a horse in 1951. She also remarked that riots in Bolivia might be dealt with by dividing the country up among its neighbors. An immediate backlash against these remarks from Morse and other Senators, and Luce's refusal to retract the remark about the horse, led to her resignation just three days after her appointment.