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Lister Hill (1894-1984)
Lister Hill was a Democratic Congressman (1923-1937) and Senator (1938-1968) from Alabama, and an ardent New Dealer. The New Deal and World War II resulted in the first Jewish revolution in America (the 60s being the second). Hill was obviously not sympathetic to Whites, but nevertheless did what was minimally necessary to appease voters and retain office during the “civil rights” era. Reminds me of Sen. William Fulbright (D.-Ark.) (memorably dubbed “Senator Halfbright” by Joseph McCarthy) in that regard. Of particular interest to me is the fact that “some of his maternal ancestors had been Jewish.” What proportion? His mother’s maiden name, “Lilly Lyons,” sounds Jewish. She insisted on adhering to Catholicism in Protestant Alabama—Hill later became a Methodist. The author of the article even suggests that Hill’s Jewish ancestry might partly explain his aloofness from the Klan (though his Catholic upbringing admittedly clouds the issue). It does seem that the ethnic loyalty of half-Jews and part-Jews consistently favors Jewish over White genetic interests. Finally, the Jewish intermarriage (and gene flow) here was into the White upper middle class, and Hill himself married a socially prominent Southern woman.
Paul Westman
American National Biography Online Hill, Lister (27 Dec. 1894-20 Dec. 1984), U.S. congressman and senator, was born Joseph Lister Hill in Montgomery, Alabama, the son of Luther Leonidas Hill, Jr., a prominent physician, and Lilly Lyons. Dr. Hill named his son for the world-renowned British surgeon Sir Joseph Lister, under whom he had studied in London. At his mother's insistence, Lister Hill--as he preferred to be known--attended a Catholic grade school and was reared in the Catholic church. Before embarking on a political career in overwhelmingly Protestant Alabama, Hill publicly announced his conversion to Methodism, the faith of his paternal ancestors. After graduating from Starke School, an elite prep school in Montgomery, Hill attended the University of Alabama (1911-1915), where he earned A.B. and law degrees, and Columbia University Law School (1915-1916), where he earned a second law degree. Returning to Montgomery, he entered the practice of law. During World War I he served eighteen months in the Seventeenth U.S. Infantry, rising from private to first lieutenant. Although hostilities had virtually ended by the time he reached France, Hill acquired the valuable political credential of war veteran. Thanks in large measure to his father's wide acquaintance with physicians, nurses, hospital administrators, and grateful patients, Hill was elected in 1923 on the Democratic ticket as representative of Alabama's Second Congressional District, which encompassed the infertile piney hills of south central Alabama as well as Montgomery and a strip of rich Black Belt soil. Unlike many politically ambitious Alabamians in the 1920s, Hill did not affiliate with the then-powerful Ku Klux Klan, perhaps in part because of his Catholic upbringing and because some of his maternal ancestors had been Jewish. When he took the oath of office at the age of twenty-eight, Hill became the youngest member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He retained his House seat with ease, running unopposed in seven Democratic primaries and encountering only token opposition in 1932 and 1936. A highly eligible bachelor during his early years in Washington, D.C., Hill married Henrietta Fontaine McCormick, member of a socially prominent southern family, in 1928; they became the parents of two children. When Democrats took over the presidency and leadership of Congress in 1933, Hill came under the charm and influence of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who inspired the young congressman with the spirit of noblesse oblige. Originally cautious about expanding the role of the federal government, Hill became in 1933 the House sponsor of a bill that embraced the sweeping concept, originated by Nebraska senator George Norris, of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Joining the congressional majority that authorized the New Deal, Hill supported its public works and employment programs, the National Industrial Recovery Act, and federal subsidies to cut back agricultural production; he even took political risks by opposing a bonus for war veterans and by supporting Roosevelt's plan to enlarge the Supreme Court. Following Roosevelt's reelection in 1936, the president named Hill to head the steering committee that in 1937 helped frame and enact the Farm Security Administration, which offered government loans to aid small farmers in becoming landowners. In 1938 Hill won the Senate seat vacated by Hugo L. Black, Roosevelt's first nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. Campaigning against former Alabama senator J. Thomas Heflin, Hill vigorously supported the principle of a federally mandated minimum wage and maximum work week, the major issue in this contest. His victory, closely followed by that of Senator Claude Pepper in Florida, helped bring about passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Hill's ardor for New Deal programs won him the honor of placing Roosevelt's name in nomination for a third term at the 1940 Democratic National Convention. In 1946, however, faced with the prospect of having to rally support for President Harry S. Truman's civil rights proposals, Hill resigned as Democratic whip, thereby relinquishing his chance to succeed Kentucky senator Alben Barkley as majority leader. A political pragmatist, Hill, in order to keep his Senate seat, had opposed attempts by Congress to abolish the poll tax, outlaw lynching, and curb the filibuster. After the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision, he publicly supported the Alabama legislature's futile gesture, a resolution declaring the decision null and void within their state, and he joined one hundred other members of Congress in signing the Southern Manifesto of protest. Referring to another politician who had made a similar compromise, Hill once remarked to a friend, "Do you want him to stick his neck out and get beat, or stay here and get something done?" (Hamilton, p. 291). Having thus deflected the politics of race, Hill won easy reelection over token opposition in 1950 and 1956. Thereafter he concentrated his enormous power and influence on sponsoring legislation in the less controversial fields of health and education. In 1946, with Ohio senator Harold Burton as titular cosponsor, he had won passage of the Hill-Burton Act, which forestalled Truman's proposal for national health insurance by providing federal funds for a vast hospital construction program, particularly in rural areas. In 1956 Hill and Alabama representative Carl Elliott cosponsored the Library Services Act, which provided federal funds to upgrade the nation's libraries. In 1958 Hill and Elliott succeeded in persuading Congress to enact the so-called National Defense Education Act, passed amid the national hysteria that followed the Russian launch of Sputnik. Invoking the need to educate more scientists for national defense, this legislation pioneered federal loans for college students in all fields of study. Hill, occupying the powerful post of chairman of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, also convinced Congress to commit billions to expand the National Institutes of Health into a medical research empire funding thousands of projects concerned with the causes and control of major diseases and other health problems. But as the civil rights movement became stronger and parts of it more militant during the 1960s, Hill's longtime opponents--leaders of big business, agriculture, and the timber industry--sensed the opportunity to lure Alabama's white, working-class majority, heretofore loyal Democrats due to the economic benefactions they had received from the New Deal, into the ranks of the Republican party. By fielding a vigorous, young candidate, James D. Martin, and inciting the emotions of white voters over issues such as school prayer and the integration of the neighboring University of Mississippi, Republicans almost defeated Hill in 1962. George C. Wallace, obsessed by his presidential ambitions, encouraged further defections from the New Deal wing of the Alabama Democratic party during his first term as governor (1963-1967). Rather than face a reelection campaign centered on the issue of race, Hill retired in 1968, having served forty-five years in the House and Senate. On the Senate floor, colleagues paid high tribute to Hill's long and productive career; Texas senator Ralph Yarborough declared that Hill ranked among the top five members who had rendered "the greatest service to the people" in the history of the Senate (Hamilton, pp. 280-81). Numerous organizations in the fields of medicine, education, and librarianship honored Hill; he received a special Lasker Foundation Award for his sponsorship of health research, and in 1980 the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Research was dedicated on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Hill lived quietly in his unpretentious bungalow in Montgomery until his death there a week short of his ninetieth birthday. Although he deliberately chose political survival over the championship of civil rights, Hill, because of his major legislative achievements in the areas of education and health, indirectly benefited all Americans. Bibliography Hill's papers, a collection of more than 1.8 million pieces containing detailed files on all aspects of his long congressional career, are housed at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. An immense clipping file, located in the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery, complements the papers. Further materials related to Hill can be found in the papers of the presidents under whom he served: Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. For a comprehensive overview of his career, see Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton, Lister Hill: Statesman from the South (1987). Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton
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Copyright Notice From American National Biography, published by Oxford University Press, Inc., copyright 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Further information is available at http://www.anb.org.
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