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Rebecca Latimer Felton was born in 1835 in Decatur, Georgia, to a prosperous merchant and planter family. She graduated first in her class from Madison Female College in 1852 at 17 and a year later married Dr. William Harrell Felton, settling on his plantation near Cartersville, where they held enslaved people. Only one of her five children survived childhood, and the Civil War destroyed the plantation, leaving the couple to open a school. She ran her husband's campaigns for the U.S. House and the Georgia House, then built her own platform through the Women's Christian Temperance Union from 1886 and the suffrage movement from about 1900. Her feminism, the episode stresses, was limited to white women.

Felton was also an outspoken white supremacist. In an August 1897 speech on Tybee Island she called for mass lynching, and when the speech was reprinted in 1898, editor Alex Manly's rebuttal was used to incite the Wilmington Massacre. In September 1922 Senator Thomas E. Watson died, and Governor Thomas W. Hardwick appointed the 87 year old Felton to the seat to court women voters. Walter F. George won the special election, and on November 21, 1922, he allowed Felton to be sworn in for a single day. She became the first woman senator, the oldest freshman senator, and the last member of Congress to have owned slaves. She died in 1930 at 94.

• At a 1915 legislative hearing she was allotted 30 minutes to the anti-suffragists' 45, and she spoke 15 minutes longer anyway.
• Georgia used procedural delays to keep women from voting in 1920; they could not cast ballots until 1922.
• She publicly said Alex Manly deserved to be killed and celebrated the 1899 mob killing of Sam Hose.
• In a memoir written in her 80s, she called the war for slavery a mistake and condemned the removal of the Cherokee.
• Fox Movietone News filmed her at home in 1929, at 93, discussing her political career.

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Ernest Gruening was born in New York City in 1887 to a Jewish family; his father Emil, a German-born eye and ear surgeon, had fought in the Civil War and was present at Appomattox. Gruening graduated from Harvard in 1907 and Harvard Medical School in 1912, then immediately left medicine for newspapers, rising from the Boston American to editor roles at the Boston Evening Traveler, the New York Tribune, The Nation from 1920 to 1923, and the New York Post. His 1928 book on Mexico earned him the Order of the Aztec Eagle and a place in the Roosevelt administration running the Division of Territories and Island Possessions. In 1939 he became governor of the Alaska Territory and held the job for 13 and a half years.

As governor he faced a tuberculosis epidemic with as many as 4,000 patients and 289 hospital beds, and the 1942 Japanese attack on Dutch Harbor and occupation of Attu and Kiska. His 1955 keynote, Let Us End American Colonialism, pushed statehood, and in 1959 he and Bob Bartlett became Alaska's first two senators. On August 7, 1964, Gruening and Wayne Morse were the only senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. He lost the 1968 primary to Mike Gravel, retired to a cabin on the Glacier Highway in Juneau, and died in 1974.

• He signed the Alaska Equal Rights Act of 1945, the first anti-discrimination law in the United States.
• He opposed a prewar Interior Department plan to resettle European refugees in Alaska, citing the territory's lack of housing and hospital beds.
• He introduced the congressional resolutions that led to the nationwide 911 emergency number.
• Former POW Isaac Camacho reported that Viet Cong interrogators used Gruening's antiwar speeches as propaganda against American prisoners.
• In 1980 his grandson Clark Gruening defeated Mike Gravel in the Democratic Senate primary.

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Dennis DeConcini was the last Democrat to win a U.S. Senate race in Arizona, in 1988, before Kyrsten Sinema's 2018 victory ended a 30 year drought. Born in Tucson in 1937, he was the son of Evo DeConcini, who served on the Arizona Superior Court, as state attorney general and on the Arizona Supreme Court. Dennis earned his degrees at the University of Arizona, served in the Army Judge Advocate General's Corps, co-founded a law firm with his father in 1968, and was Pima County attorney from 1973 to 1976. Elected to an open Senate seat in 1976, the freshman forced the DeConcini Reservation into the 1977 Panama Canal Treaty, authorizing U.S. military force to keep the canal open, which nearly derailed the handover until the Church Amendment softened it.

His career was shadowed by the Keating Five affair. Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings, then the sixth largest employer in Arizona, was under federal scrutiny, and in April 1987 DeConcini and fellow senators met with regulator Edwin Gray. The Senate Ethics Committee found he broke no law or Senate rule but acted improperly, and he did not seek a fourth term. In his final years he voted to confirm Clarence Thomas and chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee. After leaving in 1995 he served on the Freddie Mac board, the Arizona Board of Regents, and from 2008 to 2014 the board of Corrections Corporation of America, now CoreCivic.

• Allegations surfaced in 1979 that he bought land along the Central Arizona Project route and later sold it to the federal government for nearly $1 million.
• Former Panamanian negotiator Carlos Lopez Guevara called the DeConcini Reservation unacceptable, sparking a diplomatic crisis.
• He was one of 11 Democrats who voted for Clarence Thomas in the 52 to 48 confirmation in 1991.
• He chaired the Judiciary Subcommittee on Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks and wrote a memoir titled From the Center of the Aisle.
• Protests over his private prison board seat began around 2010; he denied lobbying for harsher sentencing but spoke in favor of for-profit prisons.

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Dionisio "Dennis" Chavez was born in April 1888 in Los Chavez, in the New Mexico Territory, 24 years before New Mexico became a state. His parents, David and Paz Chavez, moved the family around 1895 to the Barelas neighborhood of Albuquerque so his father could work on the railroad. By seventh grade Chavez had to leave school to deliver groceries for the Highland Grocery Store, while studying engineering and surveying at night through the University of New Mexico. He became an engineer for the city of Albuquerque, edited a weekly paper in Belen, and worked as a court interpreter. In 1916 he served as Spanish interpreter for Andrieus A. Jones's Senate campaign and followed Jones to Washington as an assistant executive clerk.

Without a high school diploma, Chavez passed a special admission exam for Georgetown's law school, studied at night, and graduated in 1920. Back in Albuquerque he built a name defending labor and high profile murder cases, won a state legislative seat in 1922, and in 1930 won New Mexico's at large House seat, later chairing the House Committee on Irrigation and Reclamation. He narrowly lost a 1934 Senate race to Bronson Cutting, then was appointed to the seat after Cutting died in a plane crash in May 1935. Chavez won the 1936 special election and in 1940 became the first person of Hispanic descent elected to a full Senate term, serving until his death on November 18, 1962.

• He gave up a safe House seat to challenge Cutting in 1934 and lost, only to be appointed to that same seat five days after Cutting's fatal crash.
• In 1954 Senate Republicans pushed a resolution to void his 1952 election, which would have let New Mexico's Republican governor appoint a replacement; it failed 36 to 53.
• He chaired the Senate Committee on Public Works and was fourth in Senate seniority when he died at 74.
• Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson traveled to Albuquerque to deliver his eulogy.
• His brother David served on the New Mexico Supreme Court, his daughter Imelda wrote a Washington Evening Star column, and granddaughter Gloria Tristani served on the FCC.

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Dan Quayle, the 44th vice president of the United States, was born James Danforth Quayle in 1947 into the Pulliam publishing family, owners of the Arizona Republic and the Indianapolis Star. He captained the golf team at DePauw University, studied law at Indiana University, served in the Indiana National Guard during the Vietnam era, and married Marilyn Tucker weeks after meeting her in a night law class. At 29 he unseated a Democratic incumbent for a House seat, and at 33 he defeated three term Senator Birch Bayh. In 1988 George H.W. Bush picked the 41 year old Quayle as his running mate, and the New Orleans convention turned into a press ordeal over his Guard service and a Florida golf trip with a lobbyist.

The episode traces how the new 24 hour cable news cycle fixed his image, from Lloyd Bentsen's line "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy" to the 1992 spelling bee in New Jersey. It also covers the less remembered record: diplomatic missions to 47 countries, chairing the National Space Council, early advocacy for asteroid defense, and backing the DC-X Delta Clipper reusable rocket. After losing in 1992 he presided over the certification of his own defeat, wrote the memoir Standing Firm, joined Cerberus Capital Management, and in late 2020 told Mike Pence that the vice president had no power to reject electoral votes.

• In November 1978 a scheduling conflict kept Quayle off the congressional trip to Jonestown, Guyana, where Leo Ryan went instead and was killed on the airstrip.
• Quayle defended his experience by comparing his 12 years in Congress to John F. Kennedy's, prompting Bentsen's famous rebuke in the 1988 debate.
• At a 1992 spelling bee, using a flash card supplied by the school, he told a 12 year old student to add an e to potato.
• His May 1992 speech after the Los Angeles riots criticized the sitcom Murphy Brown and set off a long national debate over family values.
• A 1996 presidential bid was stopped by phlebitis, and a 2000 campaign ended for lack of traction.

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Daniel Ray Coats was born in 1943 in Jackson, Michigan, served in the Army Corps of Engineers from 1966 to 1968 and earned a law degree from Indiana University. A Chicago Cubs fan who took his bride to a game on their wedding day, he became a staffer for Representative Dan Quayle, won Quayle's House seat in 1980 and was appointed to Quayle's Senate seat when Quayle became vice president. In the Senate he helped write Don't Ask, Don't Tell in 1993, voted for the Brady Act and the Feinstein amendment, cosponsored the 1996 Line Item Veto Act that the Supreme Court struck down, and questioned the timing of Bill Clinton's 1998 strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan. He left in 1998, and as ambassador to Germany from 2001 pressed Gerhard Schroeder's government over Iraq while building ties with Angela Merkel.

As a lobbyist he worked for Cooper Industries, which had moved its headquarters to Bermuda, and in 2005 he shepherded Harriet Miers's failed Supreme Court nomination. He returned to the Senate in 2010 after Evan Bayh retired, joined the Intelligence Committee, and pushed sanctions after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, prompting Russia to ban him from the country. Confirmed 85 to 12 as Director of National Intelligence in 2017, he issued a statement the day after the July 2018 Helsinki summit reaffirming that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. His 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment listed climate change as a security threat. In July 2019 President Trump announced he would step down and nominated John Ratcliffe.

• He won the 2010 general election by 15 points.
• He opposed the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and cosponsored the Taylor Force Act.
• In 2013 he voted against expanded background checks.
• He publicly denied writing the anonymous 2018 New York Times resistance op-ed, later revealed to be the work of Miles Taylor.
• He appointed Shelby Pierson as the intelligence community's first election security czar.

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Clair Engle was born in Bakersfield, California, in 1911, named for the aunt who helped deliver him, and grew up in rural Shasta and Tehama counties, becoming student body president at Red Bluff High School. After Chico State Teachers College and a law degree from UC Hastings in 1933, he eloped with his first wife, Hazel, opened a practice in Corning and was elected Tehama County district attorney in 1934 at age 23. During a few months in the California State Senate in 1943 he passed a law turning empty county fairgrounds into housing for migrant farm workers. He won a House seat in an August 1943 special election, representing an 18 county district he covered by flying his own plane, which earned him the nicknames the flying congressman and Congressman Fireball.

He chaired the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, expanded the Central Valley Project and backed the Taft-Hartley Act, and under California's cross filing system he was at times nominated by both parties. In 1958 he defeated Governor Goodwin Knight for the Senate, the first Democrat elected to that seat in the 20th century, and worked with Republican Thomas Kuchel on the San Luis project and Point Reyes National Seashore. A brain tumor diagnosed in August 1963 left him partially paralyzed, and in April 1964 he stood unable to speak while a colleague read his resolution against a Bodega Bay nuclear plant. On June 10, 1964 he pointed to his eye to vote aye as the Senate broke the civil rights filibuster 71 to 29, and he died on July 30, 1964, at 52.

• His district was second in area only to Nevada's at-large district.
• He once flew solo from Alexandria, Virginia, back to California.
• As he fought his illness, the state party demanded his medical records, and Alan Cranston and Pierre Salinger launched campaigns for his seat.
• About 3,000 mourners, including Chief Justice Earl Warren, attended his funeral in Red Bluff.
• A Trinity County reservoir was temporarily renamed Clair Engle Lake before reverting to Trinity Lake.

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Charles H. Percy was born in Pensacola, Florida, in 1919 and raised in Chicago, where his Sunday school teacher, Joseph McNabb, was president of camera maker Bell & Howell. Percy joined the company as a trainee in 1938, graduated from the University of Chicago in economics in 1941, joined the board within a year, served three years in the Navy and became president in 1949 at about 30. Under him revenues rose 32 fold and the workforce 12 fold, the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and it moved into microfilm. A Rockefeller Republican whom Dwight Eisenhower recruited to help draft long range party goals, he lost the 1964 Illinois governor's race after reluctantly endorsing Barry Goldwater, then ran for the Senate in 1966 against his former economics professor, Paul Douglas.

In September 1966 his 21 year old daughter Valerie was murdered in her bed at the family home in Kenilworth, Illinois. Police conducted over 14,000 interviews and pursued more than 1,300 leads, focusing on a burglary gang, though nothing was stolen and no physical evidence tied anyone to the scene, and the case remains unsolved. Percy won with 56 percent. In the Senate he voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1968, made the 55 mph speed limit permanent in 1974, co-founded the Alliance to Save Energy with Hubert Humphrey and became Foreign Relations chairman after Republicans took the Senate in 1980. He survived a close 1978 race against Alex Seith after a tearful "I got your message" plea, lost to Paul Simon in 1984 and died in 2011.

• Percy and Douglas both suspended their campaigns for two weeks after the murder.
• The widow of a physician who responded that morning later said he believed the scene had been cleaned before he arrived.
• In 1970 he urged every white person to read the autobiography of Malcolm X.
• His merit-based commission for federal judges in Chicago led to John Paul Stevens's nomination to the federal bench.
• In 1981 three staffers from one of his subcommittees formed the satire troupe the Capitol Steps.

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Carl Schurz was born in Prussia in 1829 and left school a year early because of his family's financial ruin, then passed a special exam to enter the University of Bonn, where he studied under Professor Gottfried Kinkel. In the revolutions of 1848 he took up arms for a democratic constitution, and in 1849 he escaped the besieged fortress of Rastatt through a sewer drain and crossed into Switzerland. He then slipped back into Prussia under a false name, bribed a guard at Spandau prison and freed Kinkel, who was lowered from the roof and smuggled by carriage to the coast before they fled to London. There he married Margarethe Meyer, who later helped establish the American kindergarten system, and in 1852 they settled in Watertown, Wisconsin.

Schurz organized German American voters for the Republicans, campaigned for Abraham Lincoln and became minister to Spain in 1861, then returned to serve as a major general whose 11th Corps units were routed at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and blamed in the press. His postwar survey of the South for President Andrew Johnson warned that without federal control freed people would face violence and de facto slavery through black codes. Elected from Missouri in 1869 as the first German born U.S. senator, he broke with Ulysses S. Grant, opposed the Enforcement Acts and lost his seat in 1874. As Rutherford B. Hayes's Secretary of the Interior he introduced competitive exams, kept Indian affairs under civilian control and oversaw removals onto poor reservation land.

• His 1859 Boston speech, True Americanism, argued that immigrants were as loyal as the native born.
• As a newspaper editor in St. Louis he hired a young reporter named Joseph Pulitzer.
• He prosecuted land thieves who were clear-cutting public forests.
• He led the Mugwump bolt against James Blaine in 1884 and later joined the American Anti-Imperialist League.
• In the Senate in 1872 he said: "My country, right or wrong, if right to be kept right, and if wrong to be set right."

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Burton K. Wheeler, a Massachusetts born lawyer fresh from the University of Michigan, was bound for Seattle in 1905 when he lost everything in a poker game in Butte, Montana, and stayed. Elected to the state legislature in 1910, he took on the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which owned the state's major newspapers. As U.S. attorney for Montana during World War I he refused to use the Sedition Act of 1918 against labor organizers and defended socialist editor William F. Dunn, and pressure forced his resignation in October 1918. He lost the 1920 governor's race, won a U.S. Senate seat as a Democrat in 1922 and led the investigation that forced out Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty. The Justice Department then had Wheeler indicted on fabricated charges, and a Montana jury acquitted him in 10 minutes.

In 1924 he ran for vice president on Robert La Follette's Progressive ticket, drawing nearly five million votes, and that year he also voted for the Immigration Act of 1924. He backed early New Deal relief but led the Senate fight that killed Franklin Roosevelt's 1937 court packing plan. Before Pearl Harbor he was a leading noninterventionist who spoke for the America First Committee, launched a probe of Hollywood studios criticized for antisemitic undertones, and leaked the classified Victory Program. After December 7, 1941 he backed the war, while protesting Japanese American internment and the 1944 sedition trials. He lost the 1946 Democratic primary and argued in his 1962 autobiography, Yankee from the West, that he had never changed.

• His 1920 ticket for governor included an African American candidate and a Blackfoot candidate.
• His 1938 resolution capping AM stations at 50,000 watts is still enforced by the FCC.
• He said Lend-Lease would "plow under every fourth American boy," and Roosevelt called it the most dastardly unpatriotic thing said in public life in his generation.
• Wendell Willkie, representing the studios, likened the Hollywood probe to censorship in Nazi Germany.
• In 1950 he represented Max Lowenthal before the House Un-American Activities Committee.