Maryland Will Miss... U.S. Senator Joseph Da-


vies Tydings, a Harford County Democrat,


died


on October 8 at the age of 90. Tydings was known for many progressive policies and authored the landmark Federal legislation known as the American Horse Protec- tion Act. As the news of his death circulated, many Equi- ery readers provided us with their own unique, personal thoughts on Tydings.


From Jay Young Joseph D. Tydings, an early


“Kennedy man” who became Maryland’s U.S. Attorney, its United States Senator and a longtime Regent at the Uni- versity of Maryland, died October 8 at the age of 90 after a courageous battle with cancer. An unrepentant progressive throughout his


Joe Tydings with now-retired AHC Executive Director Jay Hickey at the 2014 Walk on Washington


member and as Chairman of the Board of Regents of his alma mater, the University of Maryland. Tydings was appointed to three separate terms on the Regents by three diff erent governors in three diff erent decades. His quick rise through


Maryland politics was helped by having a last name that was already well-known in the state. He was the ad- opted son of Millard Tyd- ings, a World War I hero and four-term U.S. Senator from Harford County. T e elder Tydings fi nally lost his Senate seat in 1950, due, in part, to the dirty tricks by the communist witch hunter


life, Tydings was an early and relentless advo- cate for gun safety laws, but incurred the wrath of the National Rifl e Association, which made an example out of him by helping defeat him for re-election in 1970. In later years, Tydings would be credited with establishing the non-partisan reputa- tion of the U.S. Attorney’s offi ce in Maryland as well as giving birth to the reform wing of Maryland’s Democratic Party. He was so po- litically independent that his party’s bosses and elected leaders fought him at every step of his career – yet usually lost. T e party establishment fought his eff orts in the Maryland General Assembly to require regulation of state savings and loan associa- tions after the state’s fi rst major S&L scandal. T ey unsuccessfully tried to stop President Kennedy from appointing him the chief fed- eral prosecutor in Maryland. T ey opposed his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in 1964. And when his political career was fi nally on the ropes after six years in the Senate, the party machine wouldn’t lift a fi nger to help him. Even after his career in elective offi ce was


over, Tydings kept his hand in Maryland poli- tics, supporting various reform candidates and pushing for legislation to protect his beloved Chesapeake Bay. He went on to serve as a


Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Two decades later, young Joe Tydings would lose his Senate seat, in part, because of the dirty tricks of the Nixon administration. Tydings’ illustrious family included his namesake grandfather, Joseph Davies, an early advisor to Woodrow Wilson who later was ap- pointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt as America’s second ambassador to Joseph Stalin’s Russia. While Joe Tydings was still a boy, his grand- father married Marjorie Merriweather Post, perhaps the richest woman in America. Part of young Joe’s upbringing involved visits to Post’s various homes on Long Island, in the Adirondacks, in New York City, and at the fabulous winter residence she built in Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, now the famous Trump resort. He even sailed home from Europe aboard the Sea Cloud, Post’s luxurious 322- foot, four-masted barque. But young Joe Tydings’ political rise was also due in large part to another famous name– Kennedy. In 1960, Tydings directed John F. Kennedy’s campaign in Maryland and then helped the Massachusetts senator in other primaries, at the party convention in Los An- geles, and throughout the fall election. After Kennedy won, Tydings was off ered a post in the new administration, and he asked to be ap- pointed U.S. Attorney for Maryland. But the Maryland Democratic Party estab- lishment told the new President that he could


name Tydings to any other post he wanted, domestic or foreign, but that he was “person- ally unacceptable” to be the federal prosecutor in Maryland. Every Democratic congressman in the state but one opposed his appointment. President Kennedy questioned his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, about the opposition, saying “how can I appoint him with all these people opposed to him.” Robert Kennedy famously replied, “that’s exactly why you are going to appoint him.” Tydings went on to build a modern federal


prosecution force that has eff ectively targeted political corruption in Maryland up to the present day. Tydings’ successful prosecutions of Congressman T omas Johnson of Mary- land, Frank Boykin of Alabama, and Mary- land House Speaker A. Gordon Boone rocked the political establishment. As U.S. Attorney, Tydings assembled a staff of neophyte trial attorneys that included a fu- ture Attorney General of the United States, Benjamin R. Civiletti, and a future Attorney General of Maryland, Stephen H. Sachs, and other lawyers who would become judges and successful attorneys with prominent law fi rms. In 1963, President Kennedy visited Oak-


ington, the 550-acre Tydings’ estate along the Chesapeake Bay in Harford County, to urge the young prosecutor to run for the Senate. But on the November day that Tydings held his farewell luncheon with colleagues to pre- pare for his Senate run, word came that Ken- nedy had been assassinated in Dallas. T e Maryland Democratic Party put up the popular state Comptroller Louis L. Goldstein to oppose Tydings in the 1964 party primary and most pundits thought Goldstein would easily win. But Tydings, whose campaign slo- gan was “Working for Maryland, Not the Ma- chine,” energized reformers within the state party, attracted a statewide army of volunteers, and won decisively.


It was Goldstein’s only


loss during six decades in public offi ce. T at fall, in a race that contrasted an older genera- tion with the youthful, more active generation of the Kennedys, Tydings easily beat incum- bent Republican Senator J. Glenn Beall, Sr. In later years, he would admit that as a Sena-


tor, he often had more courage than good po- litical sense. Whereas his adoptive father was a Southern conservative, Tydings always said the infl uence of his Wisconsin-born mother,


continued...


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