Tom Connally

Thomas Terry Connally was born near Hewitt in McLennan County in 1877, graduated from Baylor and the University of Texas law school, practiced in Marlin and served in the Texas House before winning a U.S. House seat in 1916. After six House terms he won election to the Senate in 1928. He served there from 1929 through 1952 and chaired the Foreign Relations Committee from 1941 to 1947 and again from 1949 to 1953.

Connally became a leading southern internationalist before and during World War II. He supported repeal of the arms embargo, backed Lend-Lease and, as Foreign Relations chairman, worked with the Roosevelt and Truman administrations on the postwar international order. He served as vice chairman of the U.S. delegation to the 1945 San Francisco conference that created the United Nations and later represented the United States at early General Assembly sessions. His domestic record was sharply different: in 1937 he helped lead a Senate filibuster against federal anti-lynching legislation and defended other positions associated with the segregated South.

Connally was one of the Texans most directly involved in the transition from prewar American caution to postwar international institution building. Senate history credits his committee leadership, together with Republican Arthur Vandenberg, with helping the United Nations Charter avoid the partisan collapse that had doomed the League of Nations in the United States.

That internationalist record coexisted with a defense of white-supremacist political arrangements in the South. His role in blocking anti-lynching legislation is not peripheral context; it is essential to understanding the contradiction between the democratic principles he promoted internationally and the civil-rights limits he defended domestically.