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Senate Years of Service: 1931-1941 Party: Democrat
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BYRNES, James Francis, a Representative and a Senator from South Carolina; born in Charleston, S.C., May
2, 1882; attended the public schools; official court reporter for the second circuit of South Carolina
1900-1908; editor of the Journal and Review, Aiken, S.C. 1903-1907; studied law; admitted to the
bar in 1903 and commenced practice in Aiken, S.C.; solicitor for the second circuit of South Carolina
1908-1910; elected as a Democrat to the Sixty-second Congress, reelected to the six succeeding
Congresses (March 4, 1911-March 3, 1925); was not a candidate for renomination in 1924, but was
an unsuccessful candidate for United States Senator; resumed the practice of law in Spartanburg,
S.C.; elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate on November 4, 1930; reelected in 1936
and served from March 4, 1931, until his resignation on July 8, 1941, having been appointed to the
Supreme Court; chairman, Committee to Audit and Control the Contingent Expense (Seventy-third
through Seventy-seventh Congresses); Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from
July 1941 until his resignation on October 3, 1942, to head the wartime Office of Economic
Stabilization until May 1943; director of the Office of War Mobilization, May 1943 until his
resignation in April 1945; Secretary of State in the Cabinet of President Harry Truman 1945-1947;
resumed the practice of law in Washington, D.C.; Governor of South Carolina 1951-1955; retired
and resided in Columbia, S.C., where he died April 9, 1972; interment in Trinity Episcopal Cathedral
Cemetery.
BibliographyAmerican National Biography; Byrnes,
James Francis. All in One Lifetime. New York: Harper, 1958; Robertson, David. Sly and Able: A Political Biography of James F. Byrnes. New York: W.W.
Norton Co., 1994.
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