John Sharp Williams

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Early lifeEdit

Williams was born in Memphis, Tennessee, but raised in Yazoo County, Mississippi, after he was orphaned during the American Civil War. After graduating from the Kentucky Military Institute in 1870, he studied at the University of the South before transferring to the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, where he was Phi Beta Kappa but did not complete all his science courses for his bachelor's degree.<ref name="MS History">Mississippi History Now – The Political Career of John Sharp Williams (1854–1932)</ref> He spent two years in Europe at the University of Heidelberg and what is now the University of Burgundy before returning to the University of Virginia to receive his law degree in 1876.<ref name="MS History"/> After a brief return to Memphis (where he married Elizabeth Dial Webb in 1877), Williams returned to Yazoo County, where from 1878 to 1893 he ran the family plantation and kept a law practice.

Political careerEdit

Elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1893, Williams soon became a leader of the Democratic minority, renowned for his speaking skill and wit. Like most other Southern Democrats of the day, he was a proponent of coining silver and an opponent of high tariffs. In 1906, when Great Britain launched HMS Dreadnought, Williams flippantly proposed that the name of an American battleship being built in response at the urging of Theodore Roosevelt be changed from Michigan to Skeered o' Nothin' and that the ship's first mission be to challenge Dreadnought to a duel off the coast of Long Island, Roosevelt's home, with Roosevelt and most of his cabinet on deck.<ref>Congressional Record, House of Representatives, May 16, 1906, p.6959 (retrieved July 21, 2024).</ref>

During his time as ranking Democrat in the Republican-controlled House, Williams was given the privilege of choosing the Democrats assigned to committees by the House Speaker Joseph Gurney Cannon (by the rules of the House, Cannon was entitled to make all appointments himself), giving him tremendous power within the minority party. In gratitude, Williams was known to omit Democrats whom Cannon found particularly objectionable from committee assignments. Recognizing his status vis-à-vis Cannon, Williams jokingly described his relative political impotence in the Cannon-dominated Committee on Rules, "I am invited to the seances but I am never consulted about the spiritualistic appearances."<ref>Bolles, Blair. Tyrant from Illinois: Uncle Joe Cannon's Experiment with Personal Power, W. W. Norton & Company, 1951, p. 54</ref>

By beating one of Mississippi's leading racebaiters, James K. Vardaman, Williams moved to the United States Senate in 1911 after an early election on 21 January 1908. He became one of Woodrow Wilson's strongest supporters, from Wilson's nomination for the Presidency in 1912 to the losing battle to ratify American participation in the League of Nations in 1920. During his time as a senator, he also served as a chairman of the Committee to Establish a University of the United States.

He made a notorious denunciation of the black race when he declared on December 20, 1898: "You could ship-wreck 10,000 illiterate white Americans on a desert island, and in three weeks they would have a fairly good government, conceived and administered upon fairly democratic lines. You could ship-wreck 10,000 negroes, every one of whom was a graduate of Harvard University, and in less than three years, they would have retrograded governmentally; half of the men would have been killed, and the other half would have two wives apiece."<ref>Logan, Rayford W. The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson, Da Capo Press, 1965, p. 90. Template:ISBN</ref>

After retiring from the Senate in 1923, Williams returned to his family plantation, where he spent the last decade of his life, dying in late 1932.