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PROFILE: Carl T. Curtis

Champion of natural resource conservation, labor and social equity, fiscal reform, and the IRA during 40-year Congressional career

Copyright © 2006 by E. A. Kral

Former Minden farmboy, teacher and attorney Carl T. Curtis not only served longer than any other Nebraskan as a member of the U.S. Congress but also set a high standard of political integrity, achievement, and dedicated public service during an era of growing federal involvement nationwide and overseas.

In the decade of the 1930s, the Great Depression brought hard times to America. In a nation of 120 to 130 million, some eleven million became unemployed, and the national debt of $2.5 billion in 1933 rose to nearly $43 billion by 1940.

Moreover, a prolonged drought in the Great Plains forced farm families and other workers to relocate elsewhere, causing a decline of up to one-fourth of the population of some Nebraska counties. And a once-in-a century flood in the southwestern area of the state in the spring of 1935 resulted in the loss of a hundred lives and devastation of a hundred miles of farmland in the Republican Valley.

Curtis' character and values had been influenced by these and other experiences. And after his election to Kearney County Attorney in 1930 as a member of the Democratic Party, he observed first-hand the predicament of the state and the nation. When his four-year term ended, he switched to the Republican Party, and continued as private attorney in Minden.

He had noticed the slowness of the federal government's commencement of a loan-support program for wheat farmers, its unresponsiveness to flood relief needed in the Republican Valley, and the growing national debt.

He also believed that President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" weakened local self-government and encouraged welfare dependency as a way of life. And he feared that the Neutrality Act passed in 1935 to avert American involvement in European conflicts might be disregarded, even though public opinion in general was opposed to foreign entanglements.

Consequently, Curtis wanted to work for changes on the national level, and was elected in 1938 to the U.S. House of Representatives from the Fourth Congressional District of Nebraska. His constituents were to be satisfied with his performance for four decades.

From January 3, 1939 to January 3, 1979, he was elected to the House of Representatives for eight terms (16 years) and to the Senate for four terms (24 years) for a combined total of 40 years and 12 days.

According to a March 10, 2005 Report of the Congressional Research Service, U.S. Library of Congress, his longevity surpassed that of Nebraskan George W. Norris, who from March 4, 1903 to January 3, 1943 served a total of 39 years, 10 months, and 10 days.

And Curtis is one of only 41 members of Congress with longevity of 40 years or more out of the 11,752 who have served since 1789.

During his tenure, he was engaged in many legislative and investigative issues, more than can be reported here. And in general, he would have preferred to concentrate on balancing the budget, but he also had to work on international affairs, labor disputes, flood control, and other worthwhile issues.

In the beginning, he advocated neutrality in foreign conflicts, and opposed what he called "the war crowd" in and out of the Roosevelt Administration. But after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, he voted for the declaration of war, and focused on removing obstacles to efficient war production in defense plants.

After industrial strikes appeared unjustifiable and detrimental to the nation's war effort and what Curtis thought was the Federal Government's partisanship toward the great labor unions, he offered a "right-to-work" proposal in 1942 that would have amended the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. His proposal lost at the time, but it foreshadowed the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which provided for restraining unfair labor union practices and for governmental intervention in a major strike harmful to the public interest.

In the 1950s, he participated in the McClellan Committee investigation of labor union abuses, and several of his recommendations were incorporated in the Landrum-Griffith Act of 1959, which gave more control to rank-and-file union members, protected their dues and pension funds, ended unreasonable control by union officials, and required accounting and reports.

Curtis was a leader in the successful efforts in 1965 and 1966 to prevent repeal of Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, which outlawed the requirement of membership in a labor organization as a condition of employment in any state or territory where such a requirement is prohibited by law. And in the 1970s, he introduced legislation that gave working men and women the right to vote in a secret-ballot election to decide whether they want to be represented by a union in dealing with their employers, to initiate a strike, or decide whether or not an offer or settlement should be accepted.

While he was opposed to a general expansion of programs and costs of the federal government, he was in favor of public works which enabled individuals to function independently and were under the immediate control of the Congress and the President. Moreover, he believed public works can contribute to the economy of an entire region or the nation.

Upon entering Congress in 1939, he became a member of the Committee on Flood Control, and advocated water must be retained upstream, not at the mouth of a river, by use of smaller dams, which store water that could also be used for irrigation. And he offered a resolution--approved by the Committee--requiring the Corps of Engineers to study the needs of the Republican Valley.

During World War II, he worked closely with general Lewis Pick of the Corps of Engineers Office in Omaha. After Curtis introduced a resolution on May 6, 1943 to re-study the entire Missouri River Basin, Pick offered a proposal to construct large dams on the Missouri River itself and smaller dams to hold back water on its tributaries.

Curtis and the Committee developed an omnibus flood control bill, which became known as the Flood Control Act of 1944, and sometimes as the Pick-Sloan Plan. It was a landmark in river legislation because it was the first comprehensive plan that involved both the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, and because it became the basis for future similar developments anywhere in the nation.

Its benefits extended to the lower Mississippi River Basin and the entire Missouri River Basin, the latter including a large portion of the states of Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado, and all of Nebraska--which comprise a sixth of the land area of the continental United States.

One significant provision of the 1944 Act allowed electricity revenues produced anywhere in the Missouri River Basin to be used to subsidize the building of irrigation districts anywhere in the Basin. Since then, hundreds of thousands of acres of land in the Mississippi Basin have gained irrigation, and some 800,000 acres in the Missouri Basin.

Curtis was a co-author of the Small Watershed Act of 1954, which authorized the Department of Agriculture with the Soil Conservation Districts to build projects which are too large for an individual farmer or an individual soil conservation district to manage alone. It involved ponds, retention dams, water courses, plus the terracing, contouring, and similar work on a smaller scale. The localities pay a part of the costs as well as the individual landowners and the federal government.

The Act of 1954 was initiated by 62 pilot projects for the nation, with four located in Nebraska. Since then, it has resulted in the installation of more than 880 dams and structures in Nebraska alone. Numerous benefits have included flood control, irrigation, wildlife habitat, and recreation, which have helped generate businesses and jobs in towns as well as cities.

Throughout his forty years, Curtis tried to convince national leaders to adopt a pay-as-you-go budgetary policy rather than continuing the trend of deficit financing and increasing the national debt. In 1951, he introduced a House Resolution to amend the Constitution to require a balanced budget, and his renewed effort in the Senate in 1978 included a provision that the requirement might be set aside in time of war or national emergency. Years later during President Clinton's Administration, an agreement with Congress in 1997 called for a balanced budget by fiscal year 2002. However, at this writing, the United States has a budget deficit. And the national debt is $8 trillion.

Because he rejected the belief that the role of the government was to provide individuals with material gain which had always been the reward of personal effort, he feared that governmental programs originally charitable in purpose might gradually become instruments for large social change. And after World War II, he worried that the time may come in America when the minority of citizens become self-supporting taxpayers and the majority become recipients of public assistance. Thus he opposed, for example, hot lunch, food stamp, and public housing programs.

With respect to the Social Security program begun in 1935, which was intended originally to assist the aged as a supplement to their private savings, assistance from relatives, and other sources of income for retirement, Curtis became an advocate of equity and fiscal reform after World War II, and attempted to establish Social Security on a sounder basis.

In the beginning, the Social Security Act did not cover all individuals but some jobs by classification. Those employees covered were workers under age 65 in commerce and industry (except railroads). Curtis worked to change the inequities so that benefits were extended to the self employed, including farmers, to public employees, including school teachers, and to members of the professions and the uniformed services. By the late 1960s, some 90 percent of the work force was covered.

Though Social Security was intended primarily to be a program for retirement, it was extended to provide benefits for survivors, the disabled, and a child's education. In the Medicare Act of 1965, another entitlement covered by Social Security, Curtis offered an amendment that would have given assistance to the needy rather than those people age 65 in the upper 20 percent income bracket.

And he proposed an alternative health plan that would have extended to all the nation's elderly the successful and long-established medical and hospital program provided for the retired government employees. Had these proposals been accepted by Congress, the costs of the Federal Government could have been reduced by half, Curtis asserted.

Though he voted for Social Security improvements in 1939, 1949, 1954, 1960, and 1961, and was chairman of a subcommittee that studied the programs in 1954, Curtis realized the benefits were not enough for various reasons. So he examined the operation of pension plans, and concluded the solution was to give an individual the same tax advantages in providing for his own retirement as is given to corporations when they provide retirement benefits for employees.

He supported the Keogh Plan adopted by Congress in 1962 that allowed the self-employed to set aside certain amounts from earned income, free from taxation, place the sums into a retirement fund, and protect the earnings from taxation. Because Keogh's tax relief plan covered only about half of the nation's work force, Curtis worked to extend the 1962 plan to all persons who had earned income. Though rejected by Congress, his idea was the beginning of what became known as the Individual Retirement Account (IRA).

Subsequent efforts also failed. But after the Nixon Administration in late 1970 agreed that revisions of the pension law were needed, Curtis again argued that an IRA would bring about equality before the law for the other half of the nation's workers. Finally, he successfully added the IRA to a pension plan under study in 1973 that ultimately gave the individual the freedom to decide how to manage his retirement fund, and the legislation was signed into law in September 1974.

The IRA was a supplement to the existing Social Security program, and after a 1981 Tax Act, the IRA program was enlarged so that an individual could participate even if already covered by a company pension. Unlike the Keogh Plan of 1962, the IRA Plan of 1974 was not named after its originator Carl T. Curtis.

Several other legislative efforts by Curtis ere less publicized but valuable to various sectors of society. Following the abolition of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation after the Truman Administration, he supported creation of the Small Business Administration, which provides loans to establish industries in the states. As author of a law that created the Welsh Commission during the Eisenhower Administration, he encouraged research and experimentation of farm surpluses for industrial uses, such as motor fuel, plastics, building materials, and many other items. He also worked to protect the nation's farmers from over-aggressive importing of foreign agricultural products.

In the field of education, he favored local control of elementary and secondary schools, but supported the federal aid to higher education bill in 1965, and authored legislation to spread the issuance of federal grants to colleges and universities in a manner that gave recognition to every region and section of the nation.

Curtis was a major supporter of veterans' legislation, beginning with the G.I. Bill of Rights in 1945. Of 258 public laws enacted relating to veterans through the Vietnam War era, he supported 251. And in 1965, even though some national officials attempted to have the Veterans Administration Hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska closed, he succeeded in keeping it open.

He had a sterling record in civil rights legislation, voting against segregation in the armed services in 1949 and opposing segregation in veterans hospitals in 1951. He voted for an important civil rights bill on August 29, 1957, voted for continuation of the Civil Rights Commission in 1959, for the civil rights bills of 1960 and 1964, and for the voting rights act of 1965.

A hallmark of Curtis' public service was his dedication to his constituents no matter what the issue was, and no task was too small or too large to perform. Often he sent personal notes on the occasion of a voter's marriage, wedding anniversary, or death. In the fall of 1944, Nebraska native Ben Kuroki asked Curtis during a visit to his Minden home to help overturn a regulation that forbid Japanese Americans from flying in the Pacific theater of operations during World War II.

After Curtis as well as other national leaders contacted the U.S. Secretary of War and two top generals, Kuroki was granted an exception, and he became known as the first Japanese American war hero, and in peacetime as a crusader for racial equality.

Curtis did not have district offices in Nebraska (as a cost-cutting measure), rarely had need for political consultants or issuance of press releases, and did not seek out members of the media. His one re-election innovation first used in 1966 was the 30-minute film titled "The Man From Minden," narrated by Hollywood movie star Robert Taylor, a Nebraska native.

As for partisan politics, he did serve as floor manager of Barry Goldwater's campaign in July 1964 for the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention at San Francisco. Curtis also advocated that the campaign that year be based on reasons and persuasion of voters, not merely travel and handshakes. And ten years later, despite criticism from his colleagues and others, he justified his defense of President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal as protection of the power of the nation's highest office.

His fondness and historical knowledge of Nebraska were revealed in his Congressional tribute to the state in recognition of its centennial year, which was also published in the Summer of 1967 issue of Nebraska History.

Various forms of recognition were accorded him. He received honorary doctorate degrees from Nebraska Wesleyan in 1958 and Creighton University in 1971, a medal from the mayor of Athens, Greece in 1974 and the Master Key to the Panama Canal in 1976, and U.S. Highway 6/34 in Kearney County, Nebraska designated as Carl T. Curtis Drive in 1998. He was posthumously honored by the U.S. Congress with the naming of the new Carl T. Curtis National Park Service Midwest Regional Headquarters near the Missouri River in Omaha in 2003.

Reliable sources for the author were Curtis' political autobiography (with Regis Courtemanche) titled Forty years Against The Tide (Regnery, 1986) and the Carl T. Curtis Collection housed at the Nebraska State Historical Society in Lincoln. Other useful information may be found in articles in the Omaha Sunday World Herald Magazine, December 29, 1963 and December 30, 1984 and in George Douth, Leaders in Profile: The United States Senate (Sperr & Douth, 1975).

Obituaries appeared in the January 26, 2000 Lincoln Journal Star, Omaha World Herald, and New York Times. Entries are in Current Biography (1954) and American National Biography, Supplement 1 (2002).

Born in 1905 near Minden, Kearney County, Nebraska, the youngest of eight children of Frank and Alberta Smith Curtis, he lived on his father's farm, attended nearby Rural School District 48 through the 5th grade, then moved to Minden, where he graduated from Minden High School in 1923. Carl taught for one year at Danbury in Red Willow County, then enrolled for a year at Nebraska Wesleyan. From 1925 to 1930, he taught at a Kearney County School and the Minden Elementary School, where he also served as principal. After attending summer school at Nebraska Wesleyan in 1927 and the University of Nebraska in 1928, he studied at a local law office part-time, and in 1930 was admitted to the Nebraska Bar.

He married local teacher Lois Wylie Atwater in 1931, and the couple adopted two children. Upon his first wife's death in 1970, he married Mildred Genier Baker two years later. After being associated with a Washington, DC law firm from 1979 to 1983, Curtis returned to Lincoln, where he died at the age of 94 on January 24, 2000, with interment in the Minden Cemetery.

For more information, consult "900 Famous Nebraskans" on the Internet at www.nsea.org or www.beatricene.com/gagecountymuseum or www.nebpress.com.