Spessard Holland - As Senator

As Senator

Holland was elected in 1946 to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Charles O. Andrews. Following the death of Senator Andrews in September 1946, Holland assumed his seat in the U.S. Senate. Re-elected in 1952, Holland defeated former U.S. Senator (and later U.S. Representative) Claude Pepper in the 1958 Democratic primary. Returned to the U.S. Senate in 1958, Holland was re-elected to a fourth and final term in 1964, having defeated Republican Claude R. Kirk, Jr., who two years later was elected governor.

At the age of seventy-seven, Holland announced in November 1969 that he would not seek re-election in 1970. He subsequently campaigned for his fellow Democrat and Polk County resident Lawton Chiles, a state senator from Lakeland, who defeated the Republican U.S. Representative William C. Cramer of St. Petersburg in the general election. Cramer carried the backing of U.S. President Richard M. Nixon in the election.

Holland, along with all other senators from the former Confederate states (except Lyndon B. Johnson, Estes Kefauver, and Albert Gore, Sr.), signed the "Southern Manifesto," which condemned the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education and promised to resist its implementation. Ten years later, in 1964, Holland sponsored the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibiting the poll tax. Holland's opposition to the poll tax was atypical of his general stand in support of racial segregation.