Millard Tydings: Defying FDR, Grilling McCarthy, and a Faked 1950 Photo

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Millard Tydings was born in 1890 in Havre de Grace, Maryland, graduated from the Maryland Agricultural College in 1910, and worked as a civil engineer for the B&O Railroad before passing the bar in 1913. In World War I he served as a division machine gun officer, rose to lieutenant colonel, and earned the Distinguished Service Cross and Army Distinguished Service Medal. He became speaker of the Maryland House by 1920, entered the U.S. House in 1922 and the Senate in 1926. He co-sponsored the Tydings-McDuffie Act setting a path to Philippine independence, introduced a 1934 resolution condemning Nazi persecution of Jews, and proposed Puerto Rican independence in 1936.

He opposed Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1937 court packing plan, and in 1938 Roosevelt campaigned in Maryland for his primary opponent, Congressman David J. Lewis, but Tydings won easily. In 1950 he chaired the committee investigating Joseph McCarthy's claims of communists in the State Department, including the charge against scholar Owen Lattimore, and its report called the accusations a hoax. That fall McCarthy allies circulated a composite photo pairing Tydings with former Communist Party leader Earl Browder, and Tydings lost to John Marshall Butler. He won the 1956 Senate nomination but withdrew for health reasons and died in 1961 at his farm, Oakington.

• He interrupted McCarthy 85 times in his first 250 minutes of testimony.
• The composite joined a 1938 photo of Tydings at a radio with a 1940 photo of Browder speaking.
• Its caption quoted him saying thank you, sir, words he used to dismiss Browder as a committee witness.
• Biographer Caroline H. Keith wrote that his harshness left him without allies when the backlash came.
• The Millard E. Tydings Memorial Bridge carries I-95 over the Susquehanna, and his son Joseph won a Senate seat in 1964.