Archives and Special Collections Exhibits
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Creation Date
10-1-2020
Description
A Mississippi Democrat, John E. Rankin (1882-1960) served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1921 to 1953. Co-author of the bill creating the Tennessee Valley Authority and a national advocate for rural electrification, he arranged for his hometown of Tupelo to become the first city to receive TVA power. Rankin chaired the Committee on World War Veterans’ Legislation from 1931 through 1947 and then the Veterans’ Affairs Committee from 1949 to 1953. His legislation also saved the House Un-American Committee from elimination after World War II by making it a standing committee.
The Modern Political Archives will soon complete work arranging and describing the John E. Rankin Collection for use by researchers. Most congressional collections are vast in size and scope. Files are typically filled with the correspondence of government bureaucrats, state and local officials, congressional colleagues, constituents, business leaders, organizations, and other parties. While processing these papers, archivists will occasionally discover signed letters from significant individuals. For greater security, such VIP correspondence is stored separately while photocopies are placed within the collection for use by researchers. All letters on view in this exhibit are of the original documents.
As with most white politicians from the South during this period, Rankin was a segregationist. He not only fought legislation which would improve the conditions of African Americans, he often expressed his bigotry in racial slurs on the floor of the House against blacks, Jews, and Japanese Americans.
Thomas Dixon Jr. shared Rankin’s white supremacy views. Dixon’s 1905 book, The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, became the basis for the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.
The author Lillian Smith, on the other hand, was a southern liberal who criticized segregation in her bestselling novel Strange Fruit (1944) and her collection of autobiographical essays Killers of the Dream (1949).
Correspondence featured in this exhibit include letters to Rep. Rankin from:
- President Franklin D. Roosevelt (15 November 1939)
- Walt Disney (21 March 1940)
- Joe Louis, Boxer (27 September 1941)
- Rep. Lyndon B. Johnson (29 March 1943)
- J. Edgar Hoover, FBI director (8 January 1947)
- Cecil B. DeMille, director, chairman of the Motion Picture Industry Council (28 May 1949)
- Rep. Richard M. Nixon (6 October 1949)
- Lillian Smith, author of Strange Fruit and Killers of the Dream (13 February 1950)
- Thomas Dixon, author of The Clansmen (25 March, year unknown)
Photo of John E. Rankin from the Library of Congress
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