Richard Russell Jr.: School Lunch Act, Southern Caucus, Warren Commission

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Richard Russell Jr. was born in 1897 in Winder, Georgia, into a large family headed by Richard Russell Sr., chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, whose repeated losses in races for the Senate and governor strained the family's finances. The family had lost its plantation and mill in Sherman's march, and young Russell was groomed to restore its standing. After a University of Georgia law degree in 1918, he ran unopposed for Speaker of the Georgia House at 29 and was elected governor at 33, then the youngest in state history, cutting state agencies from 102 to 18 and balancing the budget during the Depression. As governor he sought the extradition of chain gang escapee Robert Elliott Burns, author of I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, and denounced New Jersey's refusal as a slander on Georgia.

Elected to the Senate in 1932, he was placed on Appropriations, soon chaired its agriculture subcommittee, backed the New Deal, and was chief sponsor of the National School Lunch Act of 1946, which bought surplus crops such as peanuts for schools. For decades he also led the Southern Caucus, organizing filibusters in rotating shifts and voting against the civil rights acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1968, the Voting Rights Act and the 24th Amendment, and he coauthored the Southern Manifesto. His 1952 presidential bid carried only the Florida primary. He mentored Lyndon Johnson, then broke with him over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and chaired Armed Services for nearly two decades.

• In the 1950s he personally investigated a complaint from Hercules Moore of Dublin, Georgia, about how the school lunch program treated Black children.
• He stayed with the Democrats in 1948 rather than join the Dixiecrats, keeping his committee chairmanships.
• In 1964 he told Johnson that Vietnam was a mess and would get worse.
• On the Warren Commission he rejected the single bullet theory, but Earl Warren refused his request for a dissenting footnote.
• He died in 1971 as the Senate's most senior member; a 2018 proposal sought to rename his Senate office building for John McCain, and in 2020 Georgia's Board of Regents kept his name on university buildings.