Overton Brooks

For other persons named Tom or Thomas Brooks, see Thomas Brooks (disambiguation)

Thomas Overton Brooks
United States Representative from Louisiana's 4th congressional district
In office January 3, 1937 – September 16, 1961
Preceded by	John N. Sandlin
Succeeded by	Joe Waggonner
Personal details
Born	December 21, 1897(1897-12-21) Baton Rouge East Baton Rouge Parish Louisiana, USA
Died	October 7, 2007(2007-10-07) (aged 89) Bethesda, Maryland
Resting place	Forest Park Cemetery in Shreveport, Louisiana
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	Mollie Meriwether Brooks (married 1932)
Children	Laura Anne
Residence	Shreveport, Louisiana
Alma mater	Louisiana State University Law Center
Occupation	Attorney
Religion	Episcopalian
Military service
Service/branch	United States Army
Years of service	World War I

Thomas Overton Brooks (December 21, 1897 – September 16, 1961) was a Democratic U.S. representative from the Shreveport-based Fourth Congressional District of northwestern Louisiana, having served for a quarter century beginning on January 3, 1937. Brooks was a nephew of U.S. Senator John Holmes Overton and a great-grandson of Walter Hampden Overton. At the time of his death, he was chairman of the House Science and Astronautics Committee.

Before politics

Brooks was born in Baton Rouge to Claude M. Brooks and the former Penelope Overton. He graduated from public schools. Brooks served overseas during World War I as an enlisted man in the Sixth Field Artillery, First Division, Regular Army, 1918-1919.

After the war, he obtained a law degree in 1923 from Louisiana State University Law Center in Baton Rouge. He was then admitted to the bar and began his practice in Shreveport, the seat of Caddo Parish.

On June 1, 1932, Brooks married the former Mollie Meriwether of Shreveport, a daughter of Minor Meriwether and the former Anne Finley McNutt. They had one child, Laura Anne.

Political career

Brooks succeeded John Nicholas Sandlin, Sr., a fellow Democrat from Minden, the seat of Webster Parish. Rather than seek reelection to the House, Sandlin ran unsuccessfully in the 1936 Democratic primary against Allen J. Ellender for an open seat in the U.S. Senate.

In 1940, newly elected Governor Sam Houston Jones urged that Brooks be defeated in the Democratic congressional primary, but Brooks won his third term that year. In 1950, Brooks overwhelmed the conservative intraparty challenge waged by James H. Greene (1918–1988), a 32-year-old graduate of Fair Park High School, a veteran of the U.S. Navy, and at the time a reporter for the since defunct Shreveport Journal. In 1952, Brooks defeated another young conservative intraparty rival, attorney Lawrence L. May, Jr. (1921–1995), of Vivian in Caddo Parish, who in an advertisement criticized the mounting casualties of the Korean War and the excesses of federal bureaucracy. May declared himself "an anti-Truman, anti-New Deal, anti-communist Demorat."

Brooks served on the U.S. House Committee on Armed Services from 1947 to 1958, and he then became the first chairman of the newly formed House Space Committee (later Science and Astronautics), reportedly because his seniority entitled him to a more important post on Armed Services than he was considered capable of handling. He was reappointed in 1961. Although little can be credited to his chairmanship, he was noted for having urged the development of a civil, rather than military, space program. On May 4, 1961, his committee sent a memo to then Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson on this subject. (President John F. Kennedy's speech which prompted the Apollo program came just a few weeks later.) From his Armed Services Committee berth, Brooks became a champion of veterans' causes. The veterans' medical center in Shreveport bears his name.

He was also president of the National River and Harbor Congress and was an early advocate of making the Red River navigable from Shreveport to Alexandria, a cause continued by his popular Democratic successor, Joseph David "Joe D." Waggonner, Jr., of Plain Dealing in northern Bossier Parish.

Brooks was reelected to Congress twelve times. He signed the Southern Manifesto, a failed congressional attempt to block desegregation of public schools. In 1956, he campaigned on issues popular with many of his constituents, including continued support for segregation. For a time the segregationist publisher Ned Touchstone of Bossier City worked on Brooks' staff. Brooks also urged the strengthening national defense, the expanded production of natural gas, rural electrification, and "fair prices" for farm, dairy, and ranch products. In November 1956, Brooks defeated by a 68-32 percent margin the Republican nominee Littleberry Calhoun Allen, Jr., who later turned Democratic and was elected as Shreveport's public utilities commissioner (1962–1970) and as mayor (1970–1978). Brooks declared himself a lifelong Democrat in that campaign and urged voters to support Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois for president over the Louisiana choice that year, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Allen, at the time, had termed himself an "Eisenhower Republican".

In Brooks' last election in 1960, he overwhelmed, 74-26 percent, the Republican challenger, Fred C. McClanahan, Jr. (1918–2007), an insurance agent from Shreveport.

Vote on Rules Committee

On January 31, 1961, Brooks voted with a narrow majority of 217-212 to increase the size of the House Rules Committee to permit Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas to appoint newer, more liberal members to the panel which determined which legislation goes to the House floor. Conservatives in both parties generally opposed this vote, which they termed "packing the Rules Committee." Waggonner later announced that he would challenge Brooks in the August 1962 Democratic primary. A civic group known as the Congressional Affairs League of Louisiana was formed to express a vote of "no confidence" in Brooks. Among the organizers of the League were Charles E. Roemer, Jr., of Bossier Parish, later the commissioner of administration under Governor Edwin Washington Edwards and the father of Governor Buddy Roemer. From Webster Parish, the organizers included building contractor John L. McInnis (1915–1994) and R. McIntyre Bridges (1926–1992), a physician who served on the parish school board as a conservative Democrat.

Opposition to Brooks' vote to expand the Rules Committee led to the burning of a cross on the congressman's lawn at his Linden Street home in Shreveport. Caddo Parish Sheriff J. Howell Flournoy advised Brooks to remain in Washington and not come home until tensions eased.

Death

Brooks later died of a heart attack in Bethesda Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. Former Shreveport Mayor James C. Gardner of Shreveport, who at the time lived only two blocks from Brooks, said in his memoirs that he believes Brooks' death was "largely a result of the strain that he experienced from the Rules Committee vote. The party had demanded a vote that had a large and vocal opposition among the congressman's constituents."

Brooks' death propelled Waggonner into the special election to choose a new representative. After winning an easy closed Democratic primary race, Waggonner faced a stronger-than-usual Republican challenger in Charlton Havard Lyons, Sr. (1894–1973), a Shreveport oilman originally from Vermilion Parish in south Louisiana. Waggonner nevertheless prevailed with 54 percent of the vote, having carried every parish in the district except Lyons' Caddo Parish.

Brooks was a member of the Masonic Lodge, the Shriners, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Kiwanis International.

Brooks is interred at Forest Park Cemetery in Shreveport, the final resting place of many Shreveport politicians. He was Episcopalian.

References

• http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=B000884

• Shreveport Times, September 17, 1961

• Ken Hechler, The Endless Space Frontier. A History of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 1959-1978 (Univelt, 1982) ISBN 0-87703-157-6 (hardback), ISBN 0-87703-158-4 (paperback)

• "Overton Brooks," A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, Vol. 1 (1988)
• http://www.legacy.com/shreveporttimes/Obituaries.asp?Page=Lifestory&PersonId=91314875

• James C. Gardner, Jim Gardner and Shreveport, Vol. II (Shreveport: Ritz Publications, 2006), pp. 30–31

United States House of Representatives
Preceded by John N. Sandlin	Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Louisiana's 4th congressional district 1937–1961	Succeeded by Joe Waggonner