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George Hearst was born in 1820 in Sullivan, Missouri, where his father William ran a store and three heavily mortgaged farms. With little schooling, George learned geology from books lent by the family doctor, Silas Reed, and by watching local lead mines. His father died in 1846, leaving him the family debts. In 1850 he left for California with a group of 16, failed at placer mining near Sutter's Mill on the American River, and in 1851 moved to Grass Valley to prospect and deal in quartz mines, spending a decade in Nevada County before his break.

In 1859 he recognized that the blue mud other miners discarded in the Washoe district was silver ore and bought a one sixth interest in the Ophir mine on the Comstock Lode. He and his partners hauled 38 tons of ore by mule over the Sierra Nevada to San Francisco for a $91,000 profit. His firm, Hearst, Haggin, Tevis and Company, became the largest private mining firm in the country, with the Ontario silver mine in Utah, Marcus Daly's Anaconda copper mine in Montana, and the Homestake gold mine in South Dakota, which ran until 2001. He lost the 1882 governor's race, entered the U.S. Senate by appointment in 1886 and election in 1887, and died in office in 1891.

• The Ontario mine yielded $17 million over a decade and carried him through the Panic of 1873.
• In 1862, at 42, he married Phoebe Apperson, and their only child was William Randolph Hearst.
• He acquired the San Francisco Examiner to settle a gambling debt, using it as a Democratic Party tool before his son took it over.
• His Senate career centered on fighting the Central Pacific Railroad, which controlled freight rates on his ore.
• Phoebe funded libraries in Lead, South Dakota, and Anaconda, Montana, and the Hearst Memorial Mining Building at UC Berkeley.

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George David Aiken was born in 1892 in Dummerston, Vermont, and grew up in Putney, where his father farmed and served on the school board, select board and in the legislature. In 1912 Aiken borrowed $100 to plant raspberries and built it into a 500 acre operation with a nursery and a pioneering wildflower business, writing Pioneering with Wildflowers in 1933. After 17 years on the school board and a lost 1922 race, he entered the Vermont House in 1930 and became Speaker in 1933 against the party establishment, passing a poor debtor law to halt Depression-era collections. As lieutenant governor he put the Senate's seven Democrats on nearly every committee, and as governor from 1937 he backed rural electric cooperatives against utility monopolies.

After a failed 1940 presidential bid built on attacks on the Republican National Committee, Aiken appointed Ernest W. Gibson Jr. as a caretaker for his late father's Senate seat, then won the special election and arrived in Washington in 1941. His 1945 food allotment bill laid groundwork for food stamps. He opposed the anti-union Case Bill but voted for Taft-Hartley in 1947, and voted for the 1957, 1964 and 1968 Civil Rights Acts and the Voting Rights Act while frustrating the NAACP with amendments. He retired in 1975 as dean of the Senate after 34 years, succeeded by Patrick Leahy.

• His final reelection campaign cost a total of $17.09.
• In 1950 he was one of seven Republican senators to sign the Declaration of Conscience against Joseph McCarthy's tactics.
• The press called him an owl on Vietnam, neither hawk nor dove.
• He never said "declare victory and go home"; his 1966 proposal was to declare U.S. military objectives achieved and shift to diplomacy.
• Aiken and Leahy held the same Vermont Senate seat for more than 81 years combined.

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Gaylord Nelson was born in 1916 in Clear Lake, Wisconsin, to a nurse and a country doctor. He earned a law degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1942, served in the Army in the Okinawa campaign, and rose to first lieutenant. Joining Wisconsin's minority Democrats in 1948, he helped bring in remnants of the Progressive Party, and in 1958 became the first Democrat elected governor of Wisconsin since 1932. After two terms he won a U.S. Senate seat in 1962 and served three terms, persuading President John F. Kennedy in 1963 to make a national speaking tour on conservation.

Nelson founded Earth Day on April 22, 1970, borrowing the teach-in model from the antiwar movement and letting local groups organize their own events, drawing about 20 million people. The same year his hearings on the birth control pill led to required patient inserts listing side effects, and during the Clean Air Act debate he proposed phasing out the internal combustion engine. He argued that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. He lost his seat in 1980, became a counselor at the Wilderness Society, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, and died on July 3, 2005, at 89.

• In 1968 he turned Vince Lombardi's banquet praise, calling him the nation's number one conservationist, into a campaign ad, angering Lombardi and his wife Marie.
• A 1975 memo showed Americans spent $34 million in 1974 on the sleep aids Sominex and Compoz, which studies found no better than placebos.
• In 1973 he was one of three senators to oppose Gerald Ford's nomination as vice president.
• As chair of the Senate Small Business Committee he created Small Business Development Centers and pushed the Regulatory Flexibility Act.
• The Gaylord Nelson Wilderness covers more than 80 percent of the land in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.

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Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1942. After his father's business setbacks, the family lived with his maternal grandparents before moving to Delaware, where his father sold used cars. Biden gave up alcohol for life after seeing its effects in his family and worked through a severe stutter by reciting Emerson and Yeats in front of a mirror. At Syracuse law school he failed a course over a plagiarism incident. In 1972, at 29, he challenged Republican J. Caleb Boggs from 30 points behind, with his sister Valerie running the campaign, and won by about 3,000 votes to become the seventh youngest senator in U.S. history.

Weeks later his wife Neilia and daughter Naomi were killed in a car crash, and sons Beau and Hunter were injured. Persuaded by Mike Mansfield to stay, he commuted daily by train for 36 years. As Judiciary chair he oversaw the Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings, and he wrote both the 1994 crime bill and the Violence Against Women Act. After failed runs in 1988 and 2008 he served as Barack Obama's vice president, won the presidency in 2020, and signed the American Rescue Plan, the infrastructure law, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. He became the first president to turn 80 in office and withdrew from the 2024 race after a widely criticized debate.

• His 1988 campaign ended amid a speech plagiarism controversy, followed by two brain aneurysms serious enough that he received last rites.
• He later expressed regret to Anita Hill for how she was treated in the 1991 Thomas hearings.
• He negotiated the 2012 fiscal cliff deal with Mitch McConnell and endorsed same-sex marriage on Meet the Press that year.
• His son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015 at 46, and Biden sat out the 2016 race.
• After promising not to intervene, he issued a sweeping pardon for Hunter Biden in late 2024.

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Rufus King grew up in Scarborough, Massachusetts, in present day Maine, the son of Richard King, a wealthy merchant, sea captain and lumberman loyal to the Crown. In 1765 a mob ransacked the family home and destroyed his father's papers, and a year later returned to burn the barn; John Adams wrote to Abigail that the family's suffering would melt a heart of stone. Rufus and his brothers sided with the Patriots anyway. He studied at Harvard, served as an aide to General John Sullivan at the Battle of Rhode Island, and rose through the Massachusetts General Court and the Confederation Congress to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, where he never missed a session and served on the Committee of Style and Arrangement.

King arrived in Philadelphia defending the Articles of Confederation and left a leading nationalist. At Alexander Hamilton's urging he moved to New York, entered the U.S. Senate in 1789, and served as minister to Great Britain under Washington, staying on under Jefferson. He was the Federalist vice presidential nominee in 1804 and 1808 and lost the 1816 presidential race to James Monroe. Though his party collapsed, he won reelection to the Senate in 1819, and in 1820 gave his most important speech, opposing Missouri's admission as a slave state.

• He co-wrote newspaper essays with Hamilton under the pen name Camillus defending the Jay Treaty.
• As minister in London he opposed letting refugees from the 1798 Irish Rebellion settle in America, fearing radical ideas.
• Once a slaveholder himself, he wrote antislavery expansion provisions into the 1787 Northwest Ordinance.
• In 1821 he fought a New York constitutional clause restricting voting rights by race.
• His library of more than 2,200 books survives at the New-York Historical Society.

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Thomas J. Dodd was born in 1907 in Connecticut to a political family of Irish descent. He joined the FBI in 1933 and took part in the raid on the Little Bohemia Lodge in Wisconsin aimed at John Dillinger. As a federal prosecutor under five attorneys general, he pursued Ku Klux Klan cases and in 1942 convicted a clergyman under the Espionage Act for serving as a link in a German spy network. Justice Robert H. Jackson brought him to Nuremberg, where he spent 15 months, rose to acting chief of counsel, and cross-examined Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Rosenberg.

At Nuremberg Dodd showed how the Reichsbank under Walther Funk stored gold teeth taken from camp victims, and he pushed to have organizations like the SS and Gestapo declared criminal. In 1949 he refused Poland's Officer's Cross. Before joining the Senate he was paid $50,000 a year to lobby for Guatemala's Carlos Castillo Armas. As a senator he sought to prosecute Martin Luther King Jr. under the Logan Act, held hearings with Timothy Leary on LSD, and introduced the Gun Control Act of 1968. In 1967 the Senate censured him for converting campaign funds to personal use. He lost his 1970 race to Lowell Weicker and died in 1971 at 64.

• He presented a shrunken human head from Buchenwald that the camp commandant had used as a paperweight.
• He described the Nuremberg trials as an autopsy on history's most horrible catalog of human crime.
• After a 1955 visit to Guatemala, he pushed the House to approve $15 million in U.S. aid.
• Disgruntled staff copied his financial records and gave them to columnist Drew Pearson; Dodd's libel suit failed on appeal.
• The University of Connecticut's Thomas J. Dodd Research Center and the Dodd Prize in International Justice and Human Rights carry his name.

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Alben W. Barkley was born in 1877 in a log house in rural Kentucky to tenant farmers who grew tobacco and wheat. Named Willie Alben at birth, he later reversed it to Alben William. With no money for tuition, he worked as a janitor at a small Methodist college in exchange for classes, then clerked in Paducah to read law. Elected county attorney in 1905 after touring the county by horse and buggy, he audited the books, prosecuted corrupt magistrates, and replaced forced road labor with contracts. He entered the U.S. House in 1912, backed child labor bans and rural roads, and co-sponsored the Sheppard-Barkley Act banning alcohol sales in Washington, D.C.

His only lost election came in the 1923 Kentucky governor's primary, where speeches up to 16 a day earned him the name Iron Man. He won a Senate seat in 1926, became majority leader in 1937 by one vote after FDR's "My dear Alben" letter, and guided New Deal and Lend-Lease legislation. In 1948 Harry Truman made him vice president at 71, and he sat in cabinet and National Security Council meetings. Labor leaders called him too old to run for president in 1952, but in 1954, at 76, he won a Senate seat again. He died in 1956 after speaking at a mock convention at Washington and Lee University.

• His 1932 keynote suggested letting voters decide on repealing Prohibition, setting off a 45 minute demonstration.
• When Happy Chandler hinted in 1938 that his water had been poisoned, Barkley mockingly inspected and refused a water glass at every rally.
• Abuses by both campaigns in that 1938 primary led to the Hatch Act of 1939.
• To pay for his wife Dorothy's heart care, he gave paid lectures and sold their Washington house.
• He married Jane Rucker Hadley while in office, the only vice president to marry during his term.

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Rose McConnell Long was born on April 8, 1892, in Greensburg, Indiana. She met Huey Long by winning a cake baking contest he had organized to promote a product he was selling. After a two and a half year courtship they married in 1913, and a year later Huey turned to law and passed the bar. They had three children, Russell, Palmer Reed and Rose Lolita, as Huey rose to governor of Louisiana in 1928 and U.S. senator in 1930, building a highly centralized political machine. His assassination in 1935 left that machine without a clear successor and the state in political crisis.

Rose was appointed to fill her husband's Senate seat, then won the special election on April 21, 1936, to finish the term. She became only the third woman to serve in the Senate and the first to represent Louisiana, and with Arkansas Democrat Hattie Caraway already seated, it was the first time two women served in the Senate at once. She chose not to run for a full term, left in 1937, and later moved to Boulder, Colorado, near her daughter. She died on May 27, 1970, at 78, while her son Russell B. Long was serving as a U.S. senator from Louisiana.

• The contest where she met Huey was his own promotional stunt, and she took the grand prize.
• The episode questions the label widow's succession, noting she won an election rather than simply holding an appointment.
• Her decision not to seek a six year term kept the Long name intact for her son's later Senate career.
• Ann Dowd portrayed her in the 1995 TV movie Kingfish: A Story of Huey P. Long.
• On February 1, 2014, she was inducted into the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in Winnfield.

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Franklin Pierce, the 14th president, was born in 1804 in a New Hampshire log cabin to Benjamin Pierce, a Revolutionary War veteran who became governor. At 12 he walked 12 miles home from school in a thunderstorm, and his father drove him partway back and made him walk the rest. He rose from last to fifth in his class at Bowdoin, befriended Nathaniel Hawthorne, and at 32 was the youngest member of the U.S. Senate. He married Jane Means Appleton of a Whig family in 1834; she disliked politics, their first two sons died young, and he resigned from the Senate in 1842. In the Mexican-American War his horse fell on him at Contreras, and rumors of cowardice followed him despite Ulysses S. Grant's defense.

Nominated as a dark horse on the 49th ballot in 1852, Pierce beat Winfield Scott. Weeks before his inauguration, in January 1853, his 11 year old son Benny was killed in a train derailment in Massachusetts. Pierce delivered his inaugural address from memory, affirming his oath on a law book. His presidency brought the Gadsden Purchase, the leaked Ostend Manifesto on Cuba, and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise ban and led to Bleeding Kansas. His party passed him over for James Buchanan in 1856.

• Jane Pierce believed Benny's death was divine punishment for her husband's ambition and wrote a letter asking her dead son's forgiveness.
• Pierce named Jefferson Davis secretary of war and is the only president to keep his original cabinet for a full term.
• During the Civil War he criticized Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus.
• Union troops found his prewar letters to Davis on Davis's Mississippi plantation, and their publication wrecked his standing in the North.
• Jane died in 1863, Hawthorne died in 1864 while traveling with Pierce, and Pierce died of cirrhosis in 1869.

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Frank Murkowski was born in Seattle in 1933 to a family of Polish descent, graduated from Ketchikan High School in 1951, and earned an economics degree from Seattle University in 1955. He served in the Coast Guard aboard the cutters Sorrel and Thistle, and his daughter Lisa was born in 1957. He rose fast in banking, becoming Alaska's commissioner of economic development at 33 in 1966 and president of the Alaska National Bank of the North by 1971. After losing a 1970 House race to Nick Begich, he won a Senate seat in 1980 over Clark Gruening, then won three more times, including 75 percent of the vote in 1998, and chaired the Energy and Natural Resources Committee from 1995 to 2001.

In 2002 he ran for governor and beat Fran Ulmer with nearly 56 percent, then used his power to appoint Lisa Murkowski to his vacated Senate seat, a move widely condemned as nepotism. His term brought a legislative lawsuit over his attempt to sign a natural gas pipeline deal without approval, a $2.7 million state jet purchase, and federal charges against his former chief of staff over a VECO Corp. funded poll. In the 2006 Republican primary he finished third with 19 percent behind John Binkley and Sarah Palin, the worst primary result for an incumbent Republican governor in U.S. history.

• In 1993 he opposed lifting the ban on gay service members by citing projected costs to the Veterans Administration.
• Lisa Murkowski later voted to repeal that ban and endorsed same-sex marriage while holding his old seat.
• Despite opposition from the legislature, he bought a Westwind II jet in 2005, and Palin campaigned on selling it on eBay.
• His former chief of staff Jim Clark was charged with honest services fraud over a $10,000 poll paid for by VECO; the charges were later voided.
• He considered a comeback run for governor in 2018 but decided against it.