Joe T. Robinson

About

Senate majority leader Joseph Taylor Robinson was undoubtedly one of the most powerful U.S. senators of the early twentieth century. An important political figure in Arkansas from the time he was elected to the state legislature in 1895, Joe T., as he was popularly called became nationally prominent when he ascended to the Democratic leadership of the U.S. Senate in 1923.

Robinson’s career spanned momentous legislative debates in the chambers of the Senate, such as the League of Nations charter, the Teapot Dome Scandal, and FDR’s plan to “pack” the Supreme Court. His run for the vice-presidency in 1928, the first Southerner on a major ticket after the Civil War, and his three terms as chairman of the Democratic National Convention, in 1920, 1928, and 1936, are all covered in this perceptive study.

Author

Cecil Edward Weller Jr. is a history instructor at San Jacinto College South in Houston, Texas. A recent doctoral graduate of Texas Christian University, he has served as coeditor of American History Reader and Our Legacy: Articles and Documents in American History.

Praise

“This well-researched biography focuses on Robinson’s political life. It is a clearly written, fair-minded, and perceptive portrait of a man who was both a broad-minded internationalist and a narrow-minded segregationist, [and] a strong New Dealer who largely ignored the plight of the sharecroppers. His complex range of attitude and positions suggest the contending forces in Arkansas—and southern—politics of the early twentieth century.”
-John B. Boles, Rice University