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Terry Sanford was born in North Carolina in 1917, and when the Depression closed his family's hardware store he picked cotton, raised pigs and delivered newspapers. He put himself through the University of North Carolina and its law school, became an FBI special agent, then enlisted as a paratrooper, fighting in Italy and southern France and earning a Bronze Star and Purple Heart. In the Battle of the Bulge he ran down a German major and hauled him in by his belt. After watching a mentor lose a 1950 Senate race to race baiting, he wrote down never to let the opposition put him on the defensive. In the 1960 governor's race he beat segregationist I. Beverly Lake using polling and television, and he backed John F. Kennedy over Lyndon Johnson.

As governor he pushed a quality education program that raised average teacher pay 22 percent, paid for by ending sales tax exemptions on food and prescription drugs, which hurt his popularity but roughly doubled school funding. With a Ford Foundation grant he created the private North Carolina Fund, a model for Head Start and the War on Poverty. He integrated state parks, enrolled his children in an integrated Raleigh school, and in 1963 became the first Southern governor to call for an end to discriminatory hiring. He later led Duke University from 1970, ran twice for president, and won a U.S. Senate seat in 1986 at 69 before losing to Lauch Faircloth in 1992.

• He used the State Highway Patrol to protect Freedom Riders and sit-in protesters from mobs.
• Booed by Black student activists who said he moved too slowly, he replied, "I'm not a dictator, son."
• At Duke he defused anti-war unrest by inviting students to Tea with Terry.
• In the Senate he voted against authorizing the Gulf War and opposed the 1989 flag desecration amendment on First Amendment grounds.
• Heart surgery kept him off the campaign trail during his 1992 loss.

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Jeremiah Denton was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1924 and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946 in the same accelerated class as Jimmy Carter. Over a 34 year Navy career he was a test pilot, flight instructor and A-6 squadron commander, and in 1957 he developed the Haystack concept of hiding aircraft carriers among commercial shipping to confuse enemy radar. In July 1965, leading a bombing mission over North Vietnam, a bomb exploded as it left his A-6A Intruder, and he and navigator Bill Tschudy ejected and were captured. He spent nearly eight years as a prisoner of war, four in solitary confinement, and was beaten along with more than 50 other Americans in the Hanoi March of July 1966.

In a 1966 televised interview with a Japanese correspondent he voiced support for his government while blinking T-O-R-T-U-R-E in Morse code, confirming abuse to naval intelligence. In 1967 he was sent with ten other resisters, including James Stockdale, to the prison the Americans called Alcatraz, with cells three feet by nine and frequent leg irons. Promoted to captain in captivity, he was the first prisoner off the plane in Operation Homecoming in February 1973 and closed his remarks with "God bless America." He retired as a rear admiral in 1977, won Alabama's U.S. Senate seat in 1980, and narrowly lost reelection in 1986.

• He wrote When Hell Was in Session and consulted for the Christian Broadcasting Network.
• He was the first retired Navy admiral elected to the Senate and Alabama's first popularly elected Republican senator since Reconstruction.
• His 1981 Adolescent Family Life Act, nicknamed the Chastity Bill, funded $30 million in programs promoting teen abstinence.
• As chairman of the Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism he investigated alleged KGB infiltration of left wing groups, drawing comparisons to the Red Scare.
• He died in 2014 at 89, was buried at Arlington, and has an Alabama airport and the future destroyer USS Jeremiah Denton named for him.

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Maurine Brown was born January 9, 1907, in Cloverdale in Tillamook County, Oregon. She attended the Oregon College of Education at Monmouth, earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Oregon in 1929, and taught in Oregon public schools from 1932 to 1944. She met Richard L. Neuberger in Portland around 1937 and married him in 1945. Elected to the Oregon House in 1950, she also served on the board of the American Association for the United Nations. In 1952 both Neubergers won reelection to the legislature, and she received more votes than her husband. When Richard won a U.S. Senate seat in 1954 while she stayed in the state legislature, the pair were described as the Senate's first husband and wife legislative team.

Richard died of cancer in 1960, and the governor appointed Hall S. Lusk to the seat. Maurine won both the special election for the remaining weeks of the term and the full six year term, becoming the sixth woman elected to the Senate and still the only woman Oregon has elected to it. Serving from 1961 to 1967, she sponsored early bills for cigarette warning labels, sat on John F. Kennedy's Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, and co-chaired Hubert Humphrey's Task Force on Women's Goals with Muriel Fox. After she married Harvard psychiatrist Philip Solomon in 1964, Governor Mark Hatfield began addressing her by a hyphenated married name. She did not run in 1966, divorced in 1967 and later taught government.

• As a student she belonged to Delta Zeta and was chosen for the Mortar Board honor society.
• Time magazine profiled her in 1964 as a longtime crusader for labeling laws.
• She framed cigarette warnings as a consumer's right to know a product's risks.
• She taught at Boston University, the Radcliffe Institute and Reed College.
• She died in Portland on February 22, 2000, at 93, and is buried in Beth Israel Cemetery.

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Gordon H. Smith was born in Pendleton, Oregon, in May 1952 and grew up partly in Bethesda, Maryland, while his father served as an assistant secretary of agriculture. An Eagle Scout, he served a Latter-day Saint mission in New Zealand, studied at Brigham Young University and Southwestern Law School, and later ran the family's Smith Frozen Foods. His mother was a Udall, a cousin of Mo and Stewart Udall, and he is a double second cousin of Mark and Tom Udall. Elected to the Oregon Senate in 1992 and its president by 1995, he lost a January 1996 special election to Ron Wyden on the strength of Multnomah County, then won Mark Hatfield's open seat later that year, becoming the first person to run for the U.S. Senate twice in one calendar year.

In 2006 National Journal placed him at the exact ideological center of the Senate. He voted with Bill Frist 82 percent of the time and seconded Trent Lott's nomination, yet was one of four Republicans to back the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1999. He supported the 2003 partial birth abortion ban and the 2006 stem cell bill, partnered with Ted Kennedy on hate crime legislation and backed the 2004 Federal Marriage Amendment. After his son Garrett died by suicide in 2003, he championed the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act, signed in 2004 with $82 million for youth suicide prevention. Jeff Merkley defeated him 49 to 46 percent in 2008, the same night his cousins Mark and Tom Udall won Senate seats.

• He voted to authorize the Iraq war in 2002, called continuing the policy possibly criminal in December 2006, and backed withdrawal resolutions in 2007.
• A 2016 leaked video of a 2009 meeting recorded him telling church leaders he "felt the Lord's hand" in the Iraq war.
• He wrote the book Remembering Garrett about his family's experience.
• He led the National Association of Broadcasters from 2009 to 2022, handling issues such as retransmission consent.
• He served as an Area Seventy from 2012, and in 2025 he and his wife Sharon were named directors of hosting at Temple Square.

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Edward D. Baker was born in London in 1811 to poor Quaker parents who moved to Philadelphia in 1816, where he worked as a boy operating a loom. The family tried the utopian community at New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825, then settled in Illinois near St. Louis, where Baker hauled goods by cart until Governor Ninian Edwards opened his law library to him. Admitted to the bar in 1830, he preached for the Disciples of Christ and, from 1835 in Springfield, became one of Abraham Lincoln's closest friends; Lincoln named his second son Edward Baker Lincoln. Baker took the 1844 Whig congressional nomination under a rotation arrangement, won the seat, then resigned in December 1846 to fight in Mexico, taking command at Cerro Gordo after General James Shields was wounded.

A Panama railroad venture left him seriously ill, and he moved to Gold Rush San Francisco, where he was called the Gray Eagle and won a hung jury for gambler Charles Cora before the Committee of Vigilance lynched Cora. In 1860 he moved to Salem, Oregon, and was elected to the Senate alongside James Nesmith after pro-slavery state senators hid in a barn to break the quorum. He answered Judah Benjamin's defense of secession with a three hour speech and introduced Lincoln at the 1861 inauguration. Raising the California Regiment, he was killed on October 21, 1861, at Ball's Bluff, the only sitting senator to die in battle, and Lincoln wept in the street at the news.

• In 1844, after Joseph Smith's murder, he crossed the Mississippi alone and brought back fleeing mob leaders.
• His law partner Isaac Wistar said Baker kept his legal papers in his hat and lost his fees at faro.
• Oregon's Joseph Lane refused to introduce him to the Senate, breaking tradition.
• The day before he died he told Mary Todd Lincoln that her flowers and his memory would wither together.
• Outrage over his death led Congress to create the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.

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Harrison "Jack" Schmitt was born in 1935 and grew up in the copper mining country of Santa Rita and Silver City, New Mexico. He earned a geology degree at Caltech in 1957, mapped rock formations in Norway as a Fulbright scholar, received a Harvard PhD in 1964 and helped develop lunar field techniques for NASA with the U.S. Geological Survey in Arizona. Selected in NASA's first scientist astronaut group in 1965, he completed Air Force jet pilot training and was slated for Apollo 18. When Apollo 18 and 19 were canceled, geologists lobbied for a scientist on the final flight, and in August 1971 NASA assigned him to Apollo 17, replacing test pilot Joe Engle. In December 1972 he landed in the Taurus-Littrow valley with Gene Cernan.

The troctolite sample 76535 he collected became key evidence that the Moon once had a magnetic field. Schmitt left NASA in August 1975, won a U.S. Senate seat from New Mexico as a Republican by defeating a two term incumbent and chaired a subcommittee on science, technology and space. In 1982 Jeff Bingaman beat him during a recession by asking what he had done for voters lately. He later taught engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and wrote a 2006 book advocating mining helium-3 on the Moon for fusion power. He resigned as chair of the NASA Advisory Council and quit the Planetary Society in 2008, and in opinion pieces he rejected the scientific consensus that recent warming is mainly human caused.

• He is the only practicing scientist among the 12 people who walked on the Moon, and the second to last to leave its surface.
• He claims he took the Blue Marble photograph; Cernan and Ron Evans also claim it, and NASA credits the whole crew.
• His 2011 appointment as New Mexico energy secretary collapsed after he refused the required background investigation.
• In 2018 he advised a company that flew a commercial space Wi-Fi device on a Blue Origin rocket.
• In July 2026 he was honored on the National Mall for the Semiquincentennial alongside the Artemis II crew.

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David Rice Atchison was born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1807 and attended Transylvania University, where five classmates, including Jefferson Davis, later served in the Senate. In 1830 he moved to Liberty, Missouri, opened a law practice, bought a plantation and became a slaveholder, partnering with Alexander William Doniphan. He defended Joseph Smith in land disputes, entered the Missouri House in 1834, secured the Platte Purchase in 1837 and became a major general in the 1838 Mormon War. Appointed to the Senate at 36, the youngest senator from Missouri at the time, he was elected president pro tempore by December 1845.

On Sunday, March 4, 1849, Zachary Taylor delayed his oath to Monday, and allies later claimed Atchison was president for that day, though his own Senate term had also ended and he never took an oath. In the Senate he demanded repeal of the Missouri Compromise as the price for organizing Kansas and Nebraska, leading Stephen Douglas to introduce the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. On March 30, 1855, he led about 5,000 armed Missourians across the border to seize polling places and install a pro-slavery legislature, which President Franklin Pierce accepted while firing the territorial governor. In the Civil War he served in the Missouri State Guard under Sterling Price, won at Liberty in 1861, resigned after Pea Ridge and went to Texas.

• His tombstone in Plattsburg, Missouri, reads "President of the United States for one day."
• He later joked that he slept through his presidency and fired no one during his administration.
• Charles Sumner's Crime Against Kansas speech of May 1856 compared him to the Roman conspirator Catiline.
• Days later he urged hired Texans under a red flag to move on Lawrence, Kansas, and destroy anti-slavery printing presses.
• A fire at his cottage before his death in 1886 destroyed his library of letters and records.

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Thomas J. Walsh was born in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, in 1859 to Irish Catholic immigrants Felix Walsh and Bridget Comer, and taught school to pay for University of Wisconsin law school, graduating in 1884. In 1890 he moved his family to Helena, Montana, and practiced personal injury, water rights and copper mining law. After losing a House race in 1906 and a Senate bid in 1910, he won a Senate seat from the legislature in 1912. In 1918, his first popular vote race, he beat Republican Oscar M. Lanstrum and Jeannette Rankin despite voting for war with Germany and backing the League of Nations and prohibition, positions unpopular with many Irish Catholic voters. He won again in 1924 and by a landslide in 1930.

On the Senate Judiciary Committee he pursued Teapot Dome, noticing Interior Secretary Albert Fall's sudden wealth, disproving a claimed $100,000 loan and tracing Liberty bonds from oil men to Fall. In December 1927 he launched a Federal Trade Commission investigation of utility holding companies that ran until 1935. Franklin Roosevelt chose him as attorney general in 1933. In late February, at 73, Walsh secretly married a wealthy Cuban widow in Havana, and on March 2, 1933, he died on the train to Washington days before the inauguration. Rumors that his new wife poisoned him spread at once but were never proven.

• He managed Woodrow Wilson's western campaign in 1916.
• He served as permanent chairman of the Democratic National Convention in 1924 and 1932.
• The utility inquiry produced nearly a hundred volumes of testimony and led to four major laws that broke up holding company structures.
• He also backed a graduated income tax, farm loans, women's suffrage and limits on child labor.
• His funeral was held in the Senate chamber, and he was buried at Resurrection Cemetery in Helena.

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Reed Smoot was born in Salt Lake City in 1862, a son of mayor and Latter-day Saint leader Abraham O. Smoot, who had six wives and 27 children; Reed's mother, Anne, was the fifth wife. Reed graduated from Brigham Young Academy in 1879, served a mission in England, married Alpha Eldredge in a monogamous marriage in 1884, and built interests in banking, mining, railroads, retail, lumber, livestock and woolens. In April 1900 he was ordained an apostle in the Quorum of the Twelve, and in 1903 the Utah legislature elected him to the U.S. Senate. His arrival set off the Smoot hearings of 1904 to 1907, which examined his church's doctrines and practices and whether an apostle could serve.

The committee recommended his removal, but in February 1907 the full Senate fell short of the two thirds needed to expel him. He stayed until 1933, became dean of the Senate and chaired the Finance Committee from 1923 to 1933. In 1916 he sponsored the Senate bill, alongside Representative William Kent, that created the National Park Service. In 1930 Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised duties on more than 20,000 items to record levels; trading partners retaliated, and Smoot lost his seat in 1932 to Democrat Elbert D. Thomas. He died in 1941 while visiting Florida, third in line to lead the church.

• The church had ended plural marriage with the 1890 Manifesto, but rumors of secretly approved new plural marriages persisted.
• Utah's B. H. Roberts had earlier been denied his House seat for practicing polygamy.
• Opponents cited a rumored oath of vengeance against the United States, which Smoot flatly denied.
• Contemporaries described his "dry, holy passion for financial soundness."
• More than a thousand economists petitioned Hoover to veto the tariff bill.

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This episode reads a single disambiguation page for the name George Norris as a composite biography of very different lives. The earliest entry is a George Norris who, as master of the vessel Sprightly, named Bouvet Island in 1825, a legacy that depended on fixing coordinates by hand at sea and surviving the voyage home to report them. The next is George W. Norris, an American politician who lived from 1861 to 1944, from the start of the Civil War to the last years of World War II, whose name was given to the Liberty ship SS George W. Norris and to the George W. Norris House, a National Historic Landmark in Nebraska.

The page also lists George A. Norris, a Canadian sculptor who lived from 1928 to 2013, and, in its see also section, George Norris Williams, who lived from 1866 to 1949, almost exactly the same span as the politician. The hosts contrast a legacy won through physical discovery, one conferred by the state through steel and preserved architecture, and one made by an artist's own hands, then look at how a database's string matching pushes a near contemporary to the margins simply because his surname is different.

• The 1825 naming of Bouvet Island is credited to the master of the Sprightly.
• Liberty ships were mass produced cargo vessels built by the hundreds to supply the Allied war effort.
• The Nebraska house preserves the private domestic setting of the politician's life as a National Historic Landmark.
• George A. Norris is remembered for sculpture he made himself, the most personal footprint on the page.
• George Norris Williams appears only as a cross reference despite living through the same decades as George W. Norris.