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James Monroe enrolled at the College of William and Mary at 16, then left and joined classmates in raiding the royal governor's palace in Williamsburg for muskets and swords for the Virginia militia. At 18, as a Continental Army lieutenant at the Battle of Trenton on December 26, 1776, he took a musket ball that severed an artery and survived. He wintered at Valley Forge sharing a hut with John Marshall, befriended the Marquis de Lafayette, and became the last president to have fought in the Revolution. Mentored by Thomas Jefferson, he opposed ratifying the Constitution in Virginia, objecting to the missing Bill of Rights and to the Electoral College.

As minister to France from 1794 he secured the release of Lafayette's wife and Thomas Paine from prison, but his pro-French stance led George Washington to recall him, and he answered with a book attacking the administration. In 1803 he and Robert Livingston, sent to spend up to $9 million on New Orleans, bought all of Louisiana for $15 million. After Jefferson and Madison shelved his British treaty, he ran against Madison in 1808, then served as his Secretary of State and, after Washington burned in 1814, also as Secretary of War. Elected president in 1816, he signed the Missouri Compromise, gained Florida in the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819 and issued the Monroe Doctrine in 1823.

• In 1814 he rode out with a small cavalry troop to scout the British advance and warned Madison in time to evacuate the White House.
• He defended Andrew Jackson's invasion of Spanish Florida and used it to push Spain into selling.
• He issued the 1823 warning unilaterally after John Quincy Adams advised against a joint declaration with Britain.
• He called slavery a blight while owning and selling enslaved people, and backed the American Colonization Society, whose Liberian capital Monrovia bears his name.
• Deep in debt, he sold his Highland estate and died in New York City on July 4, 1831.

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Dale Bumpers was born in 1925 in Charleston, Arkansas, served in the Marine Corps in World War II, and earned a law degree at Northwestern, becoming an admirer of Adlai Stevenson. In 1949 his parents died five days apart after a car accident. Back home as city attorney, he advised the school board after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling to comply immediately, making Charleston the first district in the 11 former Confederate states to fully integrate its public schools. With only a failed 1962 state House bid behind him, he entered the 1970 governor's race, beat Orval Faubus in a primary runoff, and unseated Winthrop Rockefeller.

As governor from 1971 to 1975 he condensed 60 agencies into 13 cabinet departments, raised the top income tax rate to fund schools and teacher pay, and created state kindergartens and free high school textbooks, though legislators rejected the Equal Rights Amendment and a wilderness purchase. In 1974 he defeated J. William Fulbright for the Senate, where he chaired the Small Business Committee and refused to support any constitutional amendment. He survived William Clark's 1980 challenge, turned down pressure to run for president in 1984 and 1988, and retired in 1999.

• Clark attacked his votes on the Panama Canal treaties and had once handed out candy bars bearing his own name.
• A key 1978 vote that killed a labor law reform bill angered organized labor.
• In his closing argument at Bill Clinton's Senate impeachment trial he said the case was about private failings, not a crime against the state.
• He asked the senators to let the American people get a good night's sleep.
• The NIH Vaccine Research Center is named for him and his wife Betty, and a 1970s Jeffrey Archer novel made a fictional Bumpers vice president.

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David C. Broderick was born in 1820 in Washington, D.C., blocks from the Capitol, where his Irish immigrant father worked as a stonecutter. The family moved to New York City around 1823, and Broderick apprenticed as a stonecutter before rising in the city's Democratic ward politics. In 1846 he won the Democratic nomination for New York's fifth congressional district but took only about 38 percent against his Whig opponent. He moved to Gold Rush California, reached the new state senate by 1850, served as its president in 1851 and 1852, and briefly became acting lieutenant governor.

In San Francisco his machine controlled the ballots and polling places, and he required officeholders whose posts earned fees of up to $50,000 a year to kick back half to him. The legislature sent him to the U.S. Senate in 1857, where he led California's free soil Democrats against the pro-slavery faction. His friendship with Chief Justice David S. Terry collapsed after Terry lost reelection and blamed him; Broderick called Terry a miserable damned wretch and compared him to President James Buchanan. On September 13, 1859, at Lake Merced, Broderick's hair trigger pistol fired into the ground and Terry shot him in the right lung; he died on September 16.

• He remains the only sitting U.S. senator killed in a duel.
• Edward Dickinson Baker's eulogy recast the duel as a political assassination by pro-slavery forces.
• His portrait hung at the May 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago that nominated Abraham Lincoln.
• He was buried at Lone Mountain Cemetery and moved decades later to Colma.
• In 1889 deputy marshal David Neagle shot Terry dead after Terry assaulted Justice Stephen Johnson Field, an old Broderick ally, on a California train.

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Glenn H. Taylor was born in 1904 in a Portland, Oregon, boarding house, the 12th of 13 children of a retired Texas Ranger turned preacher, and left school after the eighth grade. From 1919 he toured with his brother's stock theater company as an actor and country western singer, and the Depression turned him toward progressive economics, including the writings of Stuart Chase and King Camp Gillette. Between losing Idaho Senate races in 1940 and 1942 he worked as a sheet metal worker and painter's assistant in California. He drew crowds in small towns by singing cowboy songs, then delivered political speeches, and in 1944 he won the Senate seat.

He rode his horse Nugget up the Capitol steps, sang a rewritten Home on the Range to find housing, and by one measure ranks as the second most liberal senator in history. He opposed the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, proposed a world republic, pushed onto the floor to disrupt a 1946 filibuster against job discrimination protections, and tried to block Theodore Bilbo's swearing in. On May 1, 1948, in Birmingham, Alabama, he used the entrance designated for Black attendees at a Southern Negro Youth Congress meeting and was arrested under Commissioner Eugene Bull Connor, then ran for vice president with Henry Wallace on the Progressive ticket, which won 2.4 percent.

• On election night 1946 he allegedly broke the jaw of 66 year old Idaho Republican Ray McCaig in a Boise hotel lobby brawl.
• In 1947 he said he almost hoped the Roswell flying saucers were real, since aliens might force humanity to unite.
• Sentenced in Birmingham to 180 days of hard labor, he avoided it when Idaho's governor refused extradition.
• After losing the 1956 primary to Frank Church, he demanded that Church take a lie detector test.
• He patented his tin pie plate toupee in 1958, and Taylor Topper Inc. became the major U.S. hairpiece maker by 1960.

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Carl Hayden was born in 1877 in the Arizona Territory, where his family ran a river ferry; his father was a merchant and local judge and his mother a teacher who campaigned for women's suffrage. At Stanford he lost a race for student body president and blamed his own overconfidence, resolving to always campaign as if he were behind. His father's illness forced him home before graduation to settle the family's debts. Elected Maricopa County sheriff in 1907, he once commandeered an early automobile to chase train robbers, and in 1912, on the day Arizona became a state, he handed over his jail keys and left for Washington as its sole congressman.

In the House he started the San Carlos project by tucking money for a small downstream diversion dam into an Indian affairs appropriations bill, then argued it was useless without the upstream reservoir, which became Coolidge Dam. Elected to the Senate in 1926, he filibustered for nine hours against California's Boulder Canyon Project, then took a colleague's advice to be a worker rather than a performer and gave no major floor speech for 20 years. He wrote highway funding formulas weighted by land area, tied road money to driver's licenses and uniform traffic laws, and retired in 1969 after a record 56 continuous years in Congress.

• As a candidate he refused to say his opponents' names in public.
• During World War I he served as an army major and targeted draft loopholes that let the wealthy buy exemptions.
• After his wife's 1945 stroke he served as her primary caregiver while running Senate committees.
• In 1962 his feud with the House appropriations chairman over where to meet froze billions until they chose a room halfway between the chambers.
• He won the Central Arizona Project by attaching it to a package of other lawmakers' projects while a House rival was on vacation.

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Scott Brown grew up in Wakefield, Massachusetts, after his parents divorced when he was one, and at 13 or 14 he stood before Judge Samuel Zoll in Salem for shoplifting record albums. Instead of detention, Zoll ordered a 1,500 word essay on how his siblings would feel watching him play basketball in jail, a moment Brown credited with ending his stealing. He earned a history degree at Tufts, attended Boston College Law School, and joined the Massachusetts Army National Guard at 19, inspired by its rescues during the blizzard of 1978; he served 35 years and rose to colonel. In 1982, at 22, he won Cosmopolitan's America's Sexiest Man contest after a diet of three cans of tuna a day, putting the $1,000 fee toward tuition.

He climbed from property assessor in Wrentham in 1992 to the state House in 1998 and the state Senate in 2004, where he was one of five Republicans among 40 senators and wrote a 2007 law helping veterans claim a $1,000 welcome home bonus. In January 2010 he won the special election for Ted Kennedy's seat over Martha Coakley, campaigning in a pickup truck with more than 200,000 miles and calling it the people's seat. In the Senate he coauthored the STOCK Act with Kirsten Gillibrand, then lost to Elizabeth Warren in 2012 and to Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire in 2014, 51 to 48 percent.

• When a late Coakley ad attacked his record on emergency contraception, his daughter Ayla, an American Idol semifinalist, called it a lie on camera.
• His campaign raised $1.3 million in 24 hours and about $5 million within days.
• In February 2016 he became the first current or former senator to endorse Donald Trump.
• Confirmed 94 to 4 as ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, he gave the New Zealand prime minister a New England Patriots jersey.
• After a brief 2021 stint as dean of New England Law Boston, he lost the September 8, 2026, New Hampshire Senate primary to John E. Sununu.

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Richard Russell Jr. was born in 1897 in Winder, Georgia, into a large family headed by Richard Russell Sr., chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, whose repeated losses in races for the Senate and governor strained the family's finances. The family had lost its plantation and mill in Sherman's march, and young Russell was groomed to restore its standing. After a University of Georgia law degree in 1918, he ran unopposed for Speaker of the Georgia House at 29 and was elected governor at 33, then the youngest in state history, cutting state agencies from 102 to 18 and balancing the budget during the Depression. As governor he sought the extradition of chain gang escapee Robert Elliott Burns, author of I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, and denounced New Jersey's refusal as a slander on Georgia.

Elected to the Senate in 1932, he was placed on Appropriations, soon chaired its agriculture subcommittee, backed the New Deal, and was chief sponsor of the National School Lunch Act of 1946, which bought surplus crops such as peanuts for schools. For decades he also led the Southern Caucus, organizing filibusters in rotating shifts and voting against the civil rights acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1968, the Voting Rights Act and the 24th Amendment, and he coauthored the Southern Manifesto. His 1952 presidential bid carried only the Florida primary. He mentored Lyndon Johnson, then broke with him over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and chaired Armed Services for nearly two decades.

• In the 1950s he personally investigated a complaint from Hercules Moore of Dublin, Georgia, about how the school lunch program treated Black children.
• He stayed with the Democrats in 1948 rather than join the Dixiecrats, keeping his committee chairmanships.
• In 1964 he told Johnson that Vietnam was a mess and would get worse.
• On the Warren Commission he rejected the single bullet theory, but Earl Warren refused his request for a dissenting footnote.
• He died in 1971 as the Senate's most senior member; a 2018 proposal sought to rename his Senate office building for John McCain, and in 2020 Georgia's Board of Regents kept his name on university buildings.

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Alan Cranston was born in Palo Alto, California, in 1914, graduated from Stanford in 1936 and became a foreign correspondent for the International News Service. Alarmed that the English edition of Mein Kampf sold in America was abridged and sanitized, he published his own annotated translation in cheap tabloid form and sold about half a million copies before Hitler's publisher won a copyright case against him in a Connecticut court in 1939. After work at the Office of War Information he enlisted as a private in 1944, asked for combat, and was instead assigned to edit Army Talk magazine, finishing as a sergeant. The atomic bomb made nuclear war his lifelong cause, and he led the United World Federalists from 1949 to 1952.

In 1952 he cofounded the California Democratic Council, and in 1958 he won the state controller's office, ending a Republican hold dating to 1891. After losing the 1964 Senate primary to Pierre Salinger, he beat Max Rafferty in 1968 and served four terms, including as Democratic whip from 1977 to 1991. His 1984 presidential run on a nuclear freeze collapsed with a seventh place finish in New Hampshire and a $2 million debt, and the savings and loan crisis later pulled him into the Keating Five affair. In 1991 the Senate Ethics Committee reprimanded him and judged his conduct the most egregious of the five; he did not seek a fifth term, citing a prostate cancer diagnosis.

• Charles Keating of Lincoln Savings steered about $850,000 to voter registration groups aligned with Cranston.
• In 1981 he declared on the Senate floor that India and Pakistan were preparing nuclear tests, and the Reagan administration later conceded the intelligence was accurate.
• A competitive masters sprinter, he ran wind sprints down hotel hallways while traveling.
• An onstage fight between Glenn Frey and Don Felder at his 1980 benefit concert broke up the Eagles for 14 years.
• He chaired the Gorbachev Foundation USA from 1996, founded the Global Security Institute in 1999, and died at Los Altos Hills on the last day of 2000 at 86.

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Thomas Hart Benton was born in North Carolina in 1782 and was expelled from the University of North Carolina in 1799 after admitting he stole money from classmates, vowing as he left that they would hear his name again. He rebuilt his life on a 40,000 acre family estate near Nashville, trading otter, bear and beaver pelts as frontier currency, and passed the Tennessee bar in 1805. As a young lawyer he won a pardon for Harriet, an 11 year old enslaved girl charged with murder, even as he bought and sold enslaved people himself. He served as Andrew Jackson's aide during the War of 1812, and in 1813 a Nashville hotel brawl between the Jackson and Benton camps ended with Jesse Benton shooting Jackson in the left arm.

Benton moved to St. Louis, where his feud with attorney Charles Lucas led to two duels on Bloody Island in the Mississippi in 1817; in the rematch, fought at nine feet, Benton killed Lucas. Elected one of Missouri's first senators in 1821, he reconciled with Jackson, refused Henry Clay's 1824 request to steer Missouri's House vote to John Quincy Adams, and became Jackson's floor leader in the Bank War, earning the name Old Bullion for his defense of gold and silver coin. Later he turned against the expansion of slavery into the western territories, a stand that cost him his Senate seat in 1851.

• He spent years fighting to expunge the Senate's censure of Jackson from the Senate Journal and succeeded in 1837.
• He opposed the Mexican-American War and pushed for a compromise at the 49th parallel instead of 54-40 or Fight.
• He argued against recognizing Haiti, warning that its diplomats could inspire slave revolts in the South.
• In April 1850 Mississippi senator Henry Foote aimed a loaded pistol at him in the Senate chamber during the Compromise of 1850 debate.
• In 1856 he voted for James Buchanan rather than his son-in-law John C. Frémont, the first Republican presidential nominee; he died in 1858.

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John Pastore was born in 1907 in the Federal Hill neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island, the second of five children of Michele and Erminia Pastore, who had arrived from Potenza, Italy, in 1899. His father's death when John was nine sent him to work delivering suits, running errands for a law office and operating a foot press in a jewelry factory. He graduated with honors from Classical High School in 1925, earned a law degree through a Northeastern University night program held at the YMCA, and opened a practice in his family's basement in 1932, at the depth of the Great Depression. With few paying clients, he turned to Democratic politics, winning a Rhode Island House seat in 1934 and later serving as an assistant attorney general.

He was elected lieutenant governor in 1944 and became governor when J. Howard McGrath resigned on October 6, 1945, to become U.S. Solicitor General. His 1946 win made him the first Italian American elected governor anywhere in the country, and he enacted primary election laws, a sales tax, a corporate income tax and a $20 million bonus for World War II veterans. When McGrath left the Senate in 1949 to become Attorney General, Pastore won the 1950 special election and became the first Italian American elected to the U.S. Senate, where he served 26 years. He helped pass the civil rights acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, gave the keynote at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, and as chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications treated the airwaves as a public trust.

• In May 1969 President Nixon proposed cutting public broadcasting funds from $20 million to $10 million, and Fred Rogers' six minute testimony gave Pastore goosebumps and saved the money.
• The following year the appropriation for public broadcasting rose to $22 million.
• Weeks before the Rogers hearing, the Smothers Brothers mocked him with a satirical award, and the network refused to air that episode.
• He complained publicly about a French actress wearing a low cut evening gown on the Merv Griffin talk show.
• In 1970 he beat Catholic priest and future TV host John McLaughlin 68 to 32 percent; he retired in 1976 and died in 2000 at 93.