Warren Magnuson: Freight Train Orphan Who Held the Senate Purse Strings

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Warren Magnuson was born in 1905 in Moorhead, Minnesota, with sealed birth records, and was adopted by William and Emma Magnuson, Scandinavian immigrants who ran a bar. After his adoptive father left, he played quarterback, captained the baseball team, delivered telegrams and rode freight trains into Canada to work on wheat threshing crews. In 1925 he followed a high school girlfriend to Seattle, enrolled at the University of Washington, and hauled ice for the Teamsters under Dave Beck. He passed the bar in 1929, became a King County special prosecutor in 1932, and as a state representative sponsored the first unemployment compensation bill in the country. In 1936 he won the Seattle area House seat of his friend Marion Zioncheck, who withdrew and then took his own life.

Magnuson served on the USS Enterprise in the Pacific before Franklin Roosevelt recalled members of Congress in 1942. After winning a Senate seat in 1944, he had the governor appoint him to the vacancy a month early, giving him seniority over the rest of his freshman class. As Commerce Committee chair he managed the hearings that moved the Civil Rights Act of 1964 around the segregationist controlled Judiciary Committee, and he wrote the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act. After 44 years in Congress, and while serving as president pro tempore, he lost to Slade Gorton in 1980. He died in 1989, still lobbying for school funding despite diabetes and amputations.

• He was endorsed in 1936 by both the left wing Washington Commonwealth Federation and Seattle's business community.
• In 1949 he passed a private bill granting residency to Poon Lim, a Chinese sailor who survived 133 days on a raft.
• In 1950 he cabled General Douglas MacArthur proposing that Japanese individuals be allowed to enlist in the U.S. armed forces.
• He banned oil supertankers from Puget Sound by attaching a few lines to a routine bill placed on the consent calendars.
• He married a former Miss Seattle and, after their divorce, spent decades as one of Washington's best known bachelors.