Key Pittman: Klondike Miner, Cash and Carry, and a Deathbed Election

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Key Pittman was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1872, tutored privately, and studied law at Southwestern Presbyterian University, now Rhodes College. In 1897 he left law for the Klondike Gold Rush and worked as a miner until 1901, then moved to the silver boomtown of Tonopah, Nevada, in 1902. He lost a nonbinding 1910 popular vote for the Senate to Republican George S. Nixon, but after Nixon died in 1912, Pittman beat interim Senator William A. Massey in the popular vote, and the legislature seated him in January 1913, months before the 17th Amendment was ratified. He won every election after that through 1940, becoming president pro tempore and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

His 1918 Pittman Act let the U.S. melt up to 350 million silver dollars for Britain, which faced a run on the banks in India, while requiring the Treasury to buy replacement silver from American miners at $1 an ounce. In 1937 he co-wrote the Pittman-Robertson Act, funding wildlife habitat with an excise tax on firearms and ammunition, and in 1939 he wrote the cash and carry law that let warring nations buy U.S. arms if they paid upfront and shipped them themselves. Days before the November 1940 election he suffered a severe heart attack, and aides described him as hospitalized for exhaustion. He won and died on November 10 at Washoe General Hospital in Reno.

• A popular legend says aides kept his body on ice in a bathtub at Tonopah's Mizpah Hotel, which the episode shows could not have happened.
• Former Nevada State Archivist Guy Rocha called the real cover-up just as disreputable as the myth.
• Because Britain controlled the seas, cash and carry worked in practice for the Allies.
• The Key Pittman Wildlife Management Area near Hiko and the Pittman Wash in Henderson carry his name.
• His widow, Mimosa Gates, gave his papers to the Library of Congress in 1941, withdrew them in 1942, and returned them in 1954.