Herman Orville Welker (December 11, 1906 – October 30, 1957) was an American politician from the state of Idaho. He was a member of the Idaho Republican Party and served one term in the United States Senate, from 1951 to 1957.[2][3]
Early years
Born in Cambridge, Idaho, Welker was the youngest of seven children of John Thornton and Anna Zella Shepherd Welker, who had moved from North Carolina and started a potato farm. He was the grandson of Rev. George W. Welker of North Carolina.[4] He attended grade school in Cambridge and high school in Weiser. After graduation from Weiser High School in 1924, Welker went north to Moscow to attend the University of Idaho, where he started off in a general studies program and was a member of the Sigma Chifraternity.[5] He switched to the College of Law in 1926 and graduated with an LL.B. degree in 1929.[6]
Legal career
In April 1929, Welker was appointed prosecuting attorney for Washington County; he graduated from law school in May, and was admitted to the bar later that year. He was re-elected and served as prosecutor from 1929 to 1935. In 1937, Welker moved to Los Angeles, where he had a private practice until 1943, when he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces for World War II. He served until 1944, when he returned to Idaho and began to practice law in Payette. He was a member of the state senate from 1949 to 1951.
U.S. Senate
In Idaho in 1950, Welker ran for the U.S. Senate,[7] as both seats were up for election that year. He won August's Republican primary over CongressmanJohn Sanborn and GovernorC. A. Robins,[8] then defeated former Democratic Senator D. Worth Clark in the general election.[9] Welker gained seats on several important committees, including the Armed Services and Judiciary committees. He soon distinguished himself as one of the most conservative and anticommunist senators, becoming a leading member and spokesperson for the Republican Party's right wing.[2]
In the early 1950s, Welker became closely associated with fellow Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and "McCarthyism", so much so that he was often referred to by Senate colleagues as "Little Joe from Idaho."[15] In 1954, Welker was McCarthy's chief defender during censure proceedings in the U.S. Senate against McCarthy for the questionable investigative techniques McCarthy had used in pursuing individuals he accused of being communists, and others he accused of being homosexuals, within the government.[16] Welker was one of 22 Republicans (out of a total of 46 Republican senators) who voted against the censure of McCarthy in 1954 for these "red scare" communist witch hunts, and his so-called "lavender scare" tactics aimed at homosexuals in government.[17]
Welker, along with Republican Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, was a key collaborator with McCarthy in the blackmail of Democratic Senator Lester C. Hunt of Wyoming and his son, which led to Hunt's suicide in his Senate office on June 19, 1954.[18][19][20][21] Welker threatened Hunt, a staunch opponent of McCarthy's tactics, that if he did not immediately resign from the Senate and end his re-election bid that year, Welker would see that the younger Hunt's arrest for soliciting an undercover policeman was prosecuted and would widely publicize Hunt Jr.'s alleged homosexuality. Welker also threatened Inspector Roy Blick of the Morals Division of the Washington Police Department with the loss of his job if he failed to prosecute the younger Hunt.[22][23] After Hunt's suicide, a Republican, Edward D. Crippa, was appointed by the Republican acting governor of Wyoming, Clifford Joy Rogers, to fill the vacant seat.[24]
Alex Ross in The New Yorker wrote in 2012 of an event "loosely dramatized in the novel and film Advise & Consent [in which] Senator Lester Hunt, of Wyoming, killed himself after ... Welker [and others] ... threatened to expose Hunt's son as a homosexual".[25]
In 1955, Welker would be one of two non-Southern senators to vote against the nomination of John Marshall Harlan II to the Supreme Court,[26] opposing Harlan because he was unsatisfied that Harlan[27]
adheres to the doctrine that American sovereignty could not and must not be diluted
1956 election
In 1956, Welker ran for a second term in the Senate. Although he won the Republican nomination, again defeating Sanborn, he was decisively defeated by 32-year-old Democrat Frank Church of Boise, a relative of his 1950 opponent; Welker received less than 39 percent of the vote. One of the issues was whether the proposed Hells Canyon Dam would be publicly or privately owned with one of Church's aides saying "The campaign was Frank Church against Idaho Power. They fought him tooth and nail."[28]
The defeat increased Democratic control of the Senate and led to much anger within the Republican Party, with Joseph McCarthy even accusing President Dwight Eisenhower of not supporting Welker's reelection campaign enough.[29][30]
After leaving the Senate in January 1957, Welker practiced law in Boise and participated in farming. After a few months, however, he became ill, and traveled to Bethesda, Maryland, for medical treatment at the National Institutes of Health. He was admitted on October 16, 1957, where he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Operations were quickly performed, but Welker died later that month at age 50.[2][31] McCarthy had died earlier that year in Bethesda (Welker had attended McCarthy's funeral).
^Huston, Luther A. (March 10, 1955). "Senate Unit Backs Harlan For Supreme Court, 10–4: SENATE UNIT, 10–4, SUPPORTS HARLAN". New York Times. New York City, New York. p. 1.
