Clarence J. Brown - Life and Career

Life and Career

Brown was born in Blanchester, Clinton County, Ohio or West Union, Clermont County, Ohio, the son of Owen and Ellen Barerre (McCoppin) Brown. His middle name is "J" and does not stand for anything. He attended the Blanchester public schools, and then attended law school at Washington and Lee University, in Lexington, Virginia, from 1913 to 1915.

On his twenty-first birthday Brown married Ethel McKinney. He was state statistician in 1915 and 1916 in the Ohio Secretary of State's office. Brown was engaged in newspaper work in Blanchester in 1917 and was publisher of several country newspapers. He then was president of the Brown Publishing Company in Blanchester and also owned and operated several large farms. In 1918, at age 25, he was elected the 36th Lieutenant Governor of Ohio, serving from 1919 to 1923, the youngest man ever to hold the office. In 1926, he was elected Ohio Secretary of State and served from 1927 to 1933. He ran for governor twice: in 1932, he lost the primary; in 1934, he won the Republican nomination but lost the general election. Brown was a delegate to the Republican National Conventions in 1936, 1940, 1944 and 1948, and a member of the Republican National Committee beginning in 1944.

Brown was elected as a Republican to the Seventy-sixth and the thirteen succeeding Congresses, serving from January 3, 1939 until his death in 1965. While in Congress, he was chairman of the Select Committee on Newsprint in the Eightieth Congress and was very close to Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas.

In the 1930s, Brown was a staunch isolationist and opposed Franklin D. Roosevelt's policies. When Harry S. Truman became president, he opposed Truman's Fair Deal. Brown co-sponsored legislation to create the Hoover Commission to study the Federal government and served on the commission, formally the Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of Government. By the 1950s, he was the ranking minority member of the Rules Committee and worked with its chairman, Howard W. Smith of Virginia to block liberal legisation sought by presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. At the end of his life, however, Brown broke with the ardent segregationist Smith, checking himself out of the hospital to help shepherd the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through Smith's Rules Committee, and earning the lasting gratitude of the civil rights movement.

Brown died at Bethesda Naval Hospital, Bethesda, Maryland on August 23, 1965, and was buried in the I.O.O.F. Cemetery, Blanchester, Ohio.

Brown was a member of the Masons, K. of P., I.O.O.F., Moose, and M.W.A.

His son Clarence J. "Bud" Brown Jr. won the special election in 1965 to fill his father's seat in Congress. His grandson is Clancy Brown, an actor. He is no relation to the film director of the same name.