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William Madison Whittington was born on May 4, 1878, near the Little Springs post office in Franklin County, Mississippi. He was a farmer's child, the son of Alexander Madison and Margaret McGehee Whittington, who remembered late in life that "there were not many books in our house." He borrowed what he could, and like so many other Southern boys, learned what men told him about the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Whittington graduated Mississippi College in 1898, and the following year he took a degree from the University of Mississippi Law School. He returned to south Mississippi to practice near Roxie, where he served also as the superintendent of the Baptist Sunday school. On September 7, 1904, he married Lena May McGehee. That same year they moved to Greenwood and where he established a law practice.

In Greenwood, he developed friendships that would carry him to the United States House of Representatives. While he was building a lucrative law practice, he continued teaching in Sunday school, and soon became involved in the Kiwanis Club, the Elks, the Masons, and other civic organizations. He rose to the presidency of the Mississippi State Baptist Convention in 1910, serving two terms. Around this time he also took up cotton farming, an occupation that would eventually supplant law as his main profession.

Lena McGehee Whittington died in September 1907. The couple was childless. Whittington remained a widower for the next three years. On July 20, 1910, he married Anna Ward Aven, the daughter of the president of Mississippi College. They had three children: W.M. Whittington Jr., Mary Whittington, and Charles Aven Whittington.

His personal life settled, Whittington set his gaze on the political horizon. He had served Greenwood as local commissioner (or "judge" as the office was called) but had begun to have ambitions for higher office. In 1916, he won election as a state senator representing Leflore and Tallahatchie counties. In this term he authored Mississippi's first Bone Dry law (an ordinance that gave him a somewhat undeserved reputation as a strict prohibitionist) and met the man who would become his nemesis, Governor Theodore G. Bilbo.

Leflore and Tallahatchie counties operated by a gentleman's agreement. Representation in the senate alternated, ensuring that each county could have its own man in Jackson every four years. Whittington stepped down in 1920, but was returned when Leflore's turn came again in 1924. He never served the term. In the Congressional primaries that year, Whittington defeated two other men and went to Washington as Congressman of the Third District of Mississippi. He served for 25 years.

Whittington had two talents essential for success in Washington. On the one hand, he had an amazing capacity for work. "Fishbait" Miller (for many years the doorkeeper of the House of Representatives) recalled that Whittington needed four secretaries working day and night to keep up with him. He did not like to leave any letter unanswered, even thank you notes from constituents that normally put an end to correspondence. On the other hand, the congressman was a political realist. He understood how Washington worked: the best path to success was to defer to senior representatives until study, silence, and seniority earned their respect.

He knew, too, the desires of his constituency. Farmers in the Delta had long demanded federal protection from the frequent flooding of the Mississippi; one historian, in fact, argues that this demand was a central one as far back as the Compromise of 1877. Whittington had promised to become an expert on flood control, and with characteristic hard work, soon achieved his goal.

The Great Flood of 1927 provided the chance to move Congress towards flood control. In the 1928 session, Whittington brought to Congress what was to become the Flood Control Act of 1928, a measure that provided authorization for the most extensive levee and dam work for the Delta ever enacted. Whittington wrote it and spoke for it, although Riley Wilson, the chairman of the Flood Control Committee, seems to have received most of the credit.

Whittington's career pivoted noticeably in 1932. That year, Bilbo challenged new district lines drawn after the 1930 census and broke into the normally impenetrable Democratic primary. To defend themselves against the intruder, the seven Democratic nominees decided on a strategy of "all for one, one for all" and chose Whittington as their spokesman. In September and October, he engaged Bilbo in a string of debates across the state, and generally seems to have gotten the worst of it. Whittington thought he and Bilbo had agreed to avoid "personalities and mudslinging," but obviously had misread the man. Bilbo's insurrection ended when the Supreme Court ruled the new districts legal, but Whittington never lost his distaste for the demagogue.

The only other serious challenge Whittington faced occured in 1936 when he felt himself "stronger than ever." The congressman had risen to the chairmanship of the Flood Control Committee where he pushed through even more extensive flood control bills for states that otherwise would not have been able to afford levees, dams, floodways, and reservoirs. And this time he received credit for it.

In 1940, friends talked an ambitious Whittington out of challenging Bilbo for his United States Senate seat. When Pat Harrison died in 1941,.Whittington was dissuaded from running for his United States Senate seat. In 1946 he thought of retirement but ran for Congress again; in 1948, he actually announced his retirement, but friends convinced him to stay in Congress (to the singular displeasure of his family). Finally, in 1951, Whittington quit Washington and returned to Greenwood.

Until his final days Whittington worked. He could not slow down. Once, during his years in Congress, he told Walter Sillers he had gone hunting, but asked Sillers to keep that information in confidence. A more delicious story is told by his son, W.M. Whittington, Jr.: Doctors had advised the Congressman to relax, and ordered him to take one drink a day before dinner. One day in the early evening, the younger Whittington called his father to discuss a problem on the family farm. Whittington grabbed the phone. "Son, don't bother me. I'm busy with my drinking." Then he hung up.

Age took most of his eyesight, and by the summer of 1962 Whittington could no longer climb stairs. On August 21, 1962, he died at the age of 84.

The William M. Whittington Collection consists of 316 boxes organized first into chronological file series and then by document-type subseries. The first box contains speeches Whittington gave between 1897 and 1924 before he represented Mississippi's third district in the U.S. House of Representatives. The next two sequential series consist of fourteen boxes dating from 1925 to 1932, followed by thirty-two boxes dating from 1933 to 1939. Thereafter, each file series comprises a single year during the remainder of his tenure in office. The last series represents Whittington's post-retirement activities and interests, spanning the period from 1952 to his death in 1962.

The relative paucity of pre-1939 records reflects the possibility that files were lost in storage. In a 1967 letter to the university, William M. Whittington, Jr. wrote: "I am puzzled that I do not find very much in the way of Congressional files prior to 1939, for as you know, my father first went to Congress in 1925. Apparently Dad was having trouble locating these old files when he was closing his office in Washington in 1950, as I have found an old letter where he wrote to my brother, saying that neither he or his secretary can locate his Congressional files prior to 1939, and that they have no recollection of forwarding those to Greenwood, that he recalled them being in a storage room in Washington, but that he does not know what happened to them when he moved his offices in 1948. It's possible that these earlier Congressional files have been lost in Washington."

Within each chronological file series, the following subseries are potentially present: Speeches; Politics; Letters, Legislation, & Publications; Veterans Claims; Federal Agency Files; Applications for Influence; Academy Appointments; Census; and District Correspondence.

Speeches are present in twenty-one boxes across the entire chronological span of the collection from 1897 to 1962. One of his post-retirement boxes (Box 309) contains speeches of a religious nature representing Whittington's continued interest in his Baptist-supported alma mater, Mississippi College. Scholars should also note that Box 316 holds three notebooks of speeches from various years arranged by Whittington.

The Politics subseries consists of twelve boxes containing material related to Whittington's campaigns as well as national elections. Documents range from campaign literature, correspondence, speeches, clippings, and voting lists. This subseries also includes files related to Whittington's canvass for the Senate in 1940 and 1941, as well as letters written to his successor, U.S. Representative Fred Smith, from 1951 to 1962. The earliest material in the Politics subseries dates from 1932.

Twenty-one boxes contain Veterans Claims that date from 1925 to 1950. Veterans Claims files in the 1944 file series also hold documents dating through 1948; while those in the 1950 file series span 1949 through 1950. Files are organized alphabetically by the last name of the veteran.

Federal Agency Files (fifty-one boxes) exist in every file series from 1933-39 through 1950. Organized by the name of the federal agency or department, file contents may contain constituent case files (when the congressman and his staff act as liaison between a government agency and a constituent who requires specific assistance with a claim or some other government action); information and correspondence on local Mississippi public works projects; agency correspondence, publications, and press releases; and issue letters from constituents to Whittington concerning the agency and related legislation. Scholars interested in World War II will find the multitude of files devoted to war agencies useful.

With 120 boxes, Letters, Legislation, & Publications is the largest subseries in the collection and appears in every file series except the first (1897-1924). However, the number of Letters, Legislation & Publications boxes drops noticeably in 1948 and subsequent years from an average of eleven boxes per year to just three or four. Material is filed by subject which can range from federal projects and programs in Mississippi, to specific pieces of legislation or subjects such as agriculture, flood control, Mississippi Post Offices, patronage, civil rights, Mississippi College, and the Mississippi Baptist Foundation. Files also exist for invitations, publication & photo requests, congressional correspondence, and office correspondence. Several folders contain correspondence with A.H. Stone, chairman of the Mississippi Tax Commission.

The subseries Applications for Influence comprise thirty-eight boxes dating from 1933 through 1948. The subseries does not appear in 1949 but reappears in 1950. Files are arranged alphabetically by the last name of the individual, organization or locale which sought Whittington's intervention with the government or his assistance in gaining employment.

Academy files comprise fifteen boxes that range from 1933-39 through 1950. These files contain records of individuals who applied to Whittington for appointment to the military service academies of West Point and Annapolis.

Census files (eight boxes) appear in the 1933-39 file series for the 1934-35 agricultural census and in 1940 and 1950 for the regular decennial census. These records primarily contain applications for the temporary government jobs of census takers as well as lists of appointments, payrolls, press releases, and government publications regarding the census.

Totaling nineteen boxes, the District Correspondence subseries appears in every year from 1940 through 1950, except for 1949. The files are arranged alphabetically by locale, followed by files with out-of-district and out-of-state correspondence and occasionally files devoted to correspondence with a single individual such as Walter Sillers (Mississippi Speaker of the House) and cotton merchant E.W. Montgomery of Greenville, South Carolina. District Correspondence contains routine requests for government publications, Whittington's sympathy and congratulatory correspondence with constituents, and issues letters from constituents expressing their opinions and concerns on specific topics.

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