United States Senator
When Senator Lundeen, an isolationist, was killed in a plane crash, Stassen appointed Ball to fill the remaining two years of Lundeen's term. One of the youngest persons ever to become a U.S. Senator, Ball, at 35, was also the first Senator to be required to register for the draft, when a law passed in October 1940. After being sworn in on October 14, 1940, Ball stunned his fellow conservatives in his first speech on the Senate floor, calling for the United States to aid Britain as "a barrier between us and whatever designs Hitler and his allies may have on this continent,"
He opposed the New Deal, but he supported FDR's foreign policy, voting in favor of the lend-lease program on March 8, 1941 in spite of letters from his constituents that ran "25 to 1 against the bill". After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, however, Minnesotans came to appreciate their foresighted Senator. The change in sentiment was best illustrated by the editorial pages of the Fairmont Daily Sentinel, as quoted in an article in The New Republic. When he had first been appointed, the Sentinel ran an editorial with the headline, "Joe Ball for U.S. Senator! Good God!"; upon Ball's re-election, the Sentinel ran another editorial entitled "Joe Ball for U.S. Senator! Thank God!".
Ball was elected to the Senate in the 1942 election, receiving 47% of the vote against Farmer-Labour, Independent and Democratic opposition. Because Ball's 1940 appointment had been set to expire on the day of the next senatorial election rather than the expiration of Lundeen's term, Ball ceased being Senator on the day that he won a six-year term. Arthur E. Nelson won a special election to fill the remaining two months of Senator Lundeen's original term, and was sworn in on November 17.
Ball then took office again, as a freshman Senator, on January 3, 1943, serving until January 3, 1949. In 1943, he was one of four Senate sponsors of the bill to establish what would become the United Nations. He soundly lost his reelection bid in 1948 to another young Minnesotan, 37 year old Hubert Humphrey. Ball, who had never stopped writing his column for the Pioneer Press, even during his service in the United States Senate, returned to the news business and continued to comment on American foreign policy in a newsletter. He worked as an executive in the shipping industry until retiring in 1982, and died in Chevy Chase, Maryland at the age of 89.
Read more about this topic: Joseph H. Ball
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states and/or senator:
“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“What lies behind facts like these: that so recently one could not have said Scott was not perfect without earning at least sorrowful disapproval; that a year after the Gang of Four were perfect, they were villains; that in the fifties in the United States a nothing-man called McCarthy was able to intimidate and terrorise sane and sensible people, but that in the sixties young people summoned before similar committees simply laughed.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“Colonel “Bat” Guano: Okay, I’m going to get your money for you. But if you don’t get the President of the United States on that phone, you know what’s going to happen to you?
Group Captain Lionel Mandrake: What?
Colonel “Bat” Guano: You’re going to have to answer to the Coca-Cola company.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“Helicon: “It takes one day to make a senator and ten years to make a worker.”
Caligula: “But I am afraid that it takes twenty years to make a worker out of a senator.””
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)