Thomas Gore: Oklahoma's Blind Senator and His Lone Vote Against the WPA

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Thomas Pryor Gore was born in Mississippi in 1870 and lost his sight in two separate accidents, one to his left eye at eight and another to his right eye three years later, becoming fully blind by 20. He kept his childhood goal of reaching the U.S. Senate, built a near perfect memory, worked as a page in the Mississippi Senate, earned a law degree in Tennessee, and campaigned for the Farmers' Alliance, the Populists in Texas and William Jennings Bryan in 1900. His wife, Nina, whom he married that year, read documents aloud and described the rooms he worked in. The couple moved to Lawton in Oklahoma Territory, he won a territorial Senate seat in 1902, and at statehood in 1907 he became one of Oklahoma's first two U.S. senators.

An early backer of Woodrow Wilson, Gore broke with him over World War I, warning Americans off merchant ships, opposing the draft, proposing a national referendum before any declaration of war, and fighting the League of Nations. He lost the 1920 primary, returned in 1930, and soon turned on the New Deal. In 1935 he cast the lone vote against the Works Progress Administration, and in 1936 he took only 18 percent in the primary. He died in 1949 without a personal fortune, according to his grandson Gore Vidal.

• Colleagues tried to slip papers under his pen to trick him into signing, and he turned the trick back on them, earning the nickname the blind cowboy.
• In 1910 he publicly accused a lobbyist of trying to bribe him.
• A 1914 civil suit accusing him of misconduct in a hotel room ended with a jury siding with him.
• Amid the Dust Bowl, he told constituents begging for WPA jobs that he would not buy their votes with taxpayer money.
• Vidal quoted him saying that if there were any race other than the human race, he would join it.