Fred Harris

Fred Harris (born November 13, 1930, Walters, Oklahoma, U.S.) is an American politician, educator, and writer who served as a U.S. senator from 1964 to early 1973.

From a young age Harris helped out on the farm with wheat and cotton harvests. By his own account, those experiences taught him the value of hard work and helped him understand the plight of sharecroppers. Harris graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Oklahoma (OU) in 1952 and finished first in his OU law school class of 1954.

At age 25 Harris was elected to the Oklahoma state senate, where he served for eight years. While in the Oklahoma legislature, he worked to establish the Oklahoma Human Rights Commission. He also encouraged the development of the Oklahoma Wheat Commission. In addition to these populist measures, he supported tax breaks for western Oklahoma’s rapidly developing oil industry.

Harris lost a bid for the governorship of Oklahoma in 1962. In 1964 he was elected to complete the term of the late U.S. senator Robert S. Kerr. The wealthy Kerr family’s support helped Harris win over two former governors as well as Bud Wilkinson, legendary gridiron football coach for the University of Oklahoma Sooners.

In the U.S. Senate, Harris had a reputation for putting in long hours, and he became known as “Mr. Science.” As a freshman senator, he convinced the chairman of the Government Operations Committee to create a subcommittee on government research and became one of the few freshmen ever to chair a subcommittee. When elections came up again in 1966, Oklahomans elected him to a full six-year term.

In 1967 Harris and others persuaded President Lyndon Johnson to form the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known (for the Ohio committee chairman) as the Kerner Commission. Harris described his work on the commission as a “Damascus Road experience.” Although he had been active in the civil rights movement, he began to see the problems of poverty and race in a new light.

Harris had entered the Senate calling himself an “independent Democrat,” but soon he made friends with a variety of liberal senators such as Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and Robert Kennedy. Much to the frustration of his conservative Democratic constituency, Harris became known as an “establishment liberal.” He ultimately became a critic of the Johnson policy on Vietnam. In 1968 he cochaired Humphrey’s presidential campaign. After Humphrey’s loss to Richard M. Nixon, Harris became chairman of the Democratic National Committee (1969–70) while retaining his seat in the Senate.

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By 1972 Oklahoma had become a conservative state. Harris, who had moved in the opposite direction, did not seek reelection. That year he chose instead to run for president. He found a platform in The New York Times reporter Jack Newfield’s 1971 article “New Populist Manifesto.” Harris began to decry many of the Great Society programs that he had helped to put in place. He felt those programs placed too much emphasis on inner-city racism and did not do enough to address the broader problem of poverty in America. Harris ran again in 1976, whistle-stopping across the country in a Winnebago camper.

When his political career ended, Harris taught political science at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and continued the writing he had begun while in office. Among his many books are the nonfiction works Alarms and Hopes: A Personal Journey, A Personal View (1968), Now Is the Time: A New Populist Call to Action (1971), Quiet Riots: Race and Poverty in the United States (1988; with Roger W. Welkins), and Locked in the Poorhouse: Cities, Race, and Poverty in the United States (1998; with Lynn A. Curtis); the novels Coyote Revenge (1999) and Following the Harvest (2004); and a memoir, Does People Do It? (2008).