Absalom Willis Robertson
Absalom Willis Robertson ( born May 27, 1887 in Martinsburg, West Virginia; † November 1, 1971 in Lexington, Virginia) was an American lawyer and politician. He represented the state of Virginia in both houses of Congress.
Personal career
Absalom Willis Robertson, was born in 1887 in Martinsburg, the son of Franklin Pierce Robertson and Josephine Ragland. With his parents he moved in 1891 to Lynchburg in Virginia. He visited there as well as in Rocky Mount Public Schools and graduated in 1907 from the University of Richmond. The following year, he passed his law exams at the university and was admitted to the bar, after which he began practicing in Buena Vista.
During the First World War, Robertson served in the U.S. Army. In 1919 he moved his residence and his law firm to Lexington. From 1922 to 1928 he served as a prosecutor in Rockbridge County.
Policy
1916 Robertson pulled one as a Democrat in the Senate of Virginia, where he remained until 1922. In 1932 he was elected for the seventh constituency of Virginia in the U.S. House of Representatives; the re-election, he managed six times. Then he joined in 1946 at the by-election for the seat of the late U.S. Senator Carter Glass and decided this for themselves. After he had completed the remaining two-year term, he ran three more times, and sat down by each.
Robertson was a typical Democrat Byrd and very conservative on social issues. In addition, he was Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs 1959-1966. In 1956, Robertson was one of 19 senators who signed the Southern Manifesto, a declaration that the judgment of the United States Supreme Court in the case "Brown v. Board of Education" and the consequently resulting desegregation ( desegregation ) condemned. While President Lyndon B. Johnson 's wife Lady Bird sent on a train trip through the South to obtain backing for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, Robertson was one of four Southern senators who refused a meeting with her on this trip. In retaliation, President Johnson personally campaigned in 1966 for William B. Spong as a U.S. Senator, a vastly more liberal Democrats in the next Democratic primary. Meanwhile moved even some of the Byrd Democrats from their stubborn attitude from opposite the inclusion as a supporter of Robertson and the creator of this movement Harry F. Byrd. In the following code Spong Robertson defeated in one of the largest uncertainties in Virginia's political history - an event which is considered as the beginning of the end of the dominance of the Byrd Democrats in Virginia's state policy.
After his election defeat, he retired and lived in Lexington until his death on November 1, 1971. Absalom Willis Robertson was buried in the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery. His most famous son is the Protestant televangelist Pat Robertson.