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Boies Penrose was born in 1860 into an elite Philadelphia family: one ancestor was a shipbuilder invited by William Penn, and his grandfather had been speaker of the state Senate. Nearly expelled from Harvard for poor grades, he turned things around and graduated second in his class in 1881, passed the bar in 1883 and wrote scholarly books on municipal reform. Elected to the Pennsylvania House in 1885, he became the youngest state senator at 26 and president pro tempore at 29, and joined Matthew Quay's Republican machine. His 1895 run for mayor of Philadelphia ended when an opponent obtained a photo of him leaving a brothel at 3 a.m., but in 1897 the legislature sent him to the U.S. Senate over businessman John Wanamaker.

After Quay died in 1904 he ran the state party for 17 years, using squeeze bills: allies drafted legislation damaging to banks or railroads, and the bills died once the industries paid the machine. As Senate Finance chairman he added the oil depletion allowance to the Revenue Act of 1913, and in 1912 he joined Robert La Follette in an investigation of Theodore Roosevelt's past campaign funding. When the 17th Amendment required a direct election in 1914, he defeated A. Mitchell Palmer and Gifford Pinchot. He helped Warren G. Harding win the 1920 nomination, his ally Andrew Mellon became Treasury Secretary, and Penrose died on New Year's Eve 1921 at 61.

• He won a $1,000 bet by eating 50 oysters and drinking a quart of bourbon, sending his opponent to the hospital.
• Standing six foot four, he rode a horse named Senator that needed a custom saddle.
• He had the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel set up privacy screens around his table while he ate.
• He was one of the 100 original members of the Boone and Crockett Club.
• A bronze statue of him stands in Capitol Park in Harrisburg, and Mount Penrose in British Columbia bears his name.

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Robert Foster Bennett was born in 1933 in Salt Lake City, the grandson of Heber J. Grant, seventh president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and son of longtime Senator Wallace F. Bennett. He was student body president at the University of Utah, an army chaplain in the Utah Army National Guard, a congressional press secretary and a J.C. Penney government affairs staffer. In 1971 he left the Nixon administration's Department of Transportation to buy the Robert Mullen Company, a Washington public relations firm whose principal client was Howard Hughes's Summa Corporation and which the CIA used as cover for agents overseas. He also chaired dummy committees that funneled corporate money to Nixon's 1972 campaign, and the firm's CIA ties came out in 1974 during Watergate, though he was never indicted.

In 1984 he became CEO of the Franklin International Institute, maker of Franklin day planners, which as Franklin Quest was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1992. He won an open Senate seat that year, narrowly beating Joseph A. Cannon in the primary with 51 percent, and served 18 years. His conservative record included support for a flat tax and Arctic drilling, but he backed embryonic stem cell research, the 2006 immigration reform bill and the Healthy Americans Act with Democrat Ron Wyden. After his vote for TARP, delegates at the 2010 Utah Republican Convention eliminated him in the second round behind Tim Bridgewater and Mike Lee. In May 2016, dying of pancreatic cancer in Arlington, Virginia, he asked his family to help him apologize to Muslims for the rhetoric of that year's Republican primaries.

• He was one of only three Republican senators to vote against a constitutional ban on flag burning.
• He held a lifetime score of 6 percent from the League of Conservation Voters.
• Mitt Romney endorsed him in 2010, but Utah's convention system put the decision with a few thousand delegates.
• He declined to mount a write-in campaign after losing the nomination.
• Later he joined the Bipartisan Policy Center, taught at the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics and advised the law firm Arent Fox.

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Edward Lewis "Bob" Bartlett, born in Seattle in 1904, graduated from the University of Alaska in 1925 and spent a decade as a newspaper reporter in Fairbanks. After his father's death in 1935 he briefly ran the family mine, which he hated, then moved into government as secretary to the territory's congressional delegate and head of the unemployment commission. In 1939 President Franklin Roosevelt made him Secretary of the Alaska Territory, a post in which he often served as acting governor and sat on the Alaska War Council. Elected Alaska's nonvoting delegate to Congress in 1945, he introduced statehood bills in 1947 and 1950; the 1950 bill passed the House with Harry Truman's backing before dying in the Senate, opposed by Republicans who expected Democratic senators and Southern Democrats wary of civil rights votes.

In 1956 Alaskans held a constitutional convention and sent a shadow delegation of William Egan, Ernest Gruening and Ralph Rivers to Washington, while Interior Department official Ted Stevens quietly helped. Bartlett won over Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, and in 1958, with help from the Library of Congress, his allies found an unused statehood rule giving every House member an hour of debate, a potential 435 hours that made opponents fold. Speaker Sam Rayburn credited Bartlett with statehood. As senator he passed the Bartlett Act on accessibility in federally funded buildings. He endorsed Mike Gravel over Gruening's 1968 write-in bid, died in December 1968 after heart surgery, and Governor Walter Hickel appointed Ted Stevens to his seat.

• The Library of Congress estimates he shepherded more bills into law than any other member of Congress.
• He missed his own ovation when the Senate passed statehood, spending the night calling people in Alaska.
• He and Gruening flipped a coin for senior senator, and Bartlett, who won, called Gruening "Junior" for the rest of his life.
• After the 1964 earthquake he flew into the disaster zone on Air Force One and helped secure federal relief.
• Before surgery he warned his surgeon that a change in Alaska's succession law would let the Republican governor replace him.

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Benjamin Wade was born in Massachusetts in 1800 and dug the Erie Canal before studying law and practicing in Ohio with antislavery advocate Joshua Giddings. He served as a prosecutor, state senator and judge, was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Whig in 1851 and became a founding member of the Republican Party. His agenda went beyond abolition: he opposed debtors' prisons and special privileges for corporations and backed women's suffrage and trade unions. In July 1861 he rode out to watch the First Battle of Bull Run, was nearly captured and used his carriage to block the road during the retreat, then chaired the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.

He clashed often with Abraham Lincoln, and in 1864 he and Henry Winter Davis wrote the Wade-Davis Bill, requiring 50 percent of a state's white men to take an ironclad oath, which Lincoln killed with a pocket veto. As president pro tempore in 1868, with the vice presidency vacant, Wade stood next in line when the Senate tried Andrew Johnson, who was acquitted by one vote as moderates balked at Wade's support for high tariffs, unions and paper greenbacks. He lost his seat when Democrats won the Ohio legislature, was passed over for vice president in favor of Schuyler Colfax, who married Wade's niece, and died in March 1878 after the Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction.

• As head of the Senate Committee on Territories he pushed through the 1862 law abolishing slavery in federal territories.
• He backed the Homestead Act and the Morrill Land Grant Act.
• He and Davis publicly accused Lincoln of acting like a dictator after the pocket veto.
• Johnson's veto of a bill expanding the Freedmen's Bureau turned Wade against the new president.
• After leaving the Senate he practiced law and lobbied for the Northern Pacific Railroad.

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Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president, was the grandson of President William Henry Harrison and great grandson of Declaration signer Benjamin Harrison V, yet started his Indianapolis law career as a court crier earning $2.50 a day. A Miami University graduate married to Caroline Scott, he raised the 70th Indiana Infantry in the Civil War, led a hand to hand assault on a Confederate battery at Resaca, brewed coffee for freezing pickets near Nashville and was made a brevet brigadier general by Abraham Lincoln. He represented the federal government in the civil suit that followed Ex parte Milligan, entered the Senate in 1881, backed veterans' pensions, opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and lost his seat after Democrats gerrymandered the Indiana legislature.

In 1888 he ran a front porch campaign, lost the popular vote to Grover Cleveland by about 90,000 votes and won the Electoral College, amid the blocks of five bribery scandal tied to supporter William Wade Dudley, whom he cut off after the election. His administration and the Billion Dollar Congress produced the Dependent and Disability Pension Act, the McKinley Tariff, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the Sherman Antitrust Act. He pushed the Lodge federal elections bill to protect Black voting rights, which failed, and built a modern steel navy from a fleet of two commissioned warships. Cleveland beat him in 1892, and in 1898 he argued Venezuela's boundary case against Britain in Paris for over 25 hours before dying in Indianapolis in 1901.

• He and his wife were so afraid of the new White House electric lights that they left them on all night rather than touch the switches.
• In 1889 he became the earliest president whose voice survives, on a Bettini wax cylinder.
• Under the Land Revision Act of 1891 he created the first federal forest reserves, covering 22 million acres.
• He signed the law creating Sequoia National Park and protected the Casa Grande ruin in Arizona.
• After leaving office he opposed tariffs on Puerto Rico, calling government by absolute executive power un-American.

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Ben Nighthorse Campbell was born Benny Campbell in 1933 in Auburn, California, to Mary, a Portuguese immigrant whose family came through Ellis Island, and Albert, a World War I veteran of primarily Northern Cheyenne descent. His parents met while both were institutionalized, she for tuberculosis and he for alcoholism, and he and his sister spent long stretches in Catholic orphanages. He dropped out of high school in 1951, served as an air policeman in Korea, earned his GED, graduated from San Jose State in 1957 while training under judo coach Yosh Uchida and spent four years at Meiji University in Tokyo. He won three U.S. national titles and 1963 Pan American gold, and in 1964 became the first Native American on the U.S. Olympic judo team, where an ankle injury ended his medal hopes.

He worked as a Sacramento County deputy sheriff, teacher and judo coach, and won more than 200 awards for jewelry that blended Southwestern techniques with Japanese sword making methods. After moving to a Colorado ranch, he served in the state legislature from 1982 and the U.S. House from 1986, then won a Senate seat in 1992, the first Native American senator since Charles Curtis. In March 1995 he left the Democrats for the Republican Party after the defeat of a balanced budget amendment, and in 1998 he won reelection by what was then the largest statewide margin in Colorado history. He retired in 2005 and died at his Colorado ranch in December 2025 at 92.

• As a boy he flattened silver dollars on train tracks and hammered them into jewelry.
• He authored the 1989 law establishing the National Museum of the American Indian.
• He was the first Native American to chair the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and passed more public laws than any other senator in the 106th Congress.
• In 2004 he was one of six Republicans to vote against the Federal Marriage Amendment, calling marriage a state issue.
• In 2016 he said he regretted his vote to authorize the Iraq War.

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Barack Obama was born in Honolulu in 1961, making him the only U.S. president born outside the contiguous United States. His parents met in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii: Ann Dunham, an 18 year old from Kansas, and Barack Obama Sr., a 27 year old Luo scholarship student from Kenya. They divorced by 1964, and his father visited him only once, in 1971, before dying in a car crash in 1982. After his mother married Indonesian student Lolo Soetoro, the family moved to Jakarta in the late 1960s. He graduated from Columbia in 1983, worked as a community organizer in Chicago, became the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago from 1992 to 2004.

Elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996, he lost badly to Representative Bobby Rush in a 2000 House race, then won a U.S. Senate seat in 2004. He launched his presidential campaign in 2007 at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, defeated Hillary Clinton in the primaries and, with running mate Joe Biden, beat John McCain in 2008. His presidency brought the Recovery Act, Dodd-Frank, the Affordable Care Act, repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the Paris agreement and the Iran nuclear deal, alongside expanded drone strikes and the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Historians point to a paradox: he won two popular majorities while Democrats lost both chambers of Congress and nearly a thousand state legislative seats.

• Genealogical research linked his mother's ancestry to John Punch, an enslaved African in 17th century Virginia.
• In the 2000 House race, critics cast him as too academic and aloof compared with Rush.
• He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.
• He appointed Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court and became the first sitting president to publicly support same-sex marriage.
• His campaign organization, Obama for America and later Organizing for Action, operated largely outside the Democratic National Committee.

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Carter Glass, born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1858, lost his mother at age two, was raised largely by his teenage sister and earned the nickname Pluck for fighting back against bullies. His father was the local postmaster and a newspaper publisher, and a rival publisher died in a duel with his father's editor over postal access. Glass became a printer's apprentice at 13, clerked in a railroad auditor's office, became a reporter at 22, borrowed $100 for a down payment on his own paper and eventually became Lynchburg's sole newspaper publisher. Elected to the Virginia Senate in 1899, he was a leading delegate to the 1901 to 1902 Virginia Constitutional Convention, where he helped create the State Corporation Commission to regulate railroads and pushed a $1.50 poll tax and literacy tests that he openly said were meant to eliminate Black voters.

In the U.S. House from 1902, he chaired the Banking and Currency Committee from 1913 and worked with President Woodrow Wilson to pass the Federal Reserve Act, creating a system of regional reserve banks. Wilson named him Secretary of the Treasury in 1918, and he entered the Senate in 1920, later chairing Appropriations and cosponsoring the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment and commercial banking and created the FDIC despite his dislike of deposit insurance. With fellow Virginia Senator Harry Byrd he opposed much of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. From 1942 he was confined to his apartment at the Mayflower Hotel, yet he kept his seat and chairmanship until his death in 1946.

• After the convention, the number of qualified Black voters in Virginia fell from 147,000 to 21,000.
• He believed a commoner like Shakespeare could not have written the plays credited to him.
• In 1930 he sought a Senate resolution banning dial telephones from the chamber and was defeated.
• His signature appeared on the 1914 series of Federal Reserve notes.
• Harvard Business School removed his name from a campus building in 2020, citing his work to disenfranchise Black citizens.

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Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican U.S. Senator from Michigan, went from one of the Senate's most entrenched isolationists to a builder of postwar American foreign policy. Born in Grand Rapids in 1884 to a family with Dutch American roots, he graduated first in his class at Central High School in 1900 and was publishing the Grand Rapids Herald in his early 20s, a paper owned by Senator William Alden Smith. He mocked Henry Ford's 1915 Peace Ship as a "loonship" and, as a widower with three young children after his first wife died in 1917, spoke at hundreds of Liberty bond rallies. Governor Fred W. Green appointed him to the Senate in 1928, and he won the full term that year with over 70 percent of the vote.

He piloted the 1929 Reapportionment Act that fixed the House at 435 seats and wrote the amendment to the 1933 Banking Act that created the FDIC, but later fought the Wagner Act and Franklin Roosevelt's court packing plan. The Nye Committee hearings on the munitions industry turned him toward strict neutrality laws. On December 7, 1941 he wrote in his diary that Pearl Harbor had ended isolationism for any realist, and on January 10, 1945 he announced his conversion on the Senate floor. He was a delegate to the San Francisco conference that produced the United Nations Charter, and as Foreign Relations chairman from 1947 worked with the Truman administration on the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and the Vandenberg Resolution that led to NATO.

• A 1939 resolution he introduced to force new treaty talks with Japan gave Roosevelt and Cordell Hull cover to cancel the 1911 commercial treaty instead.
• In a confidential 1943 assessment, Isaiah Berlin called him a capable, ambitious political manipulator who preferred the label nationalist.
• He coined the maxim that politics stops at the water's edge.
• He announced in 1950 that he had cancer and died on April 18, 1951, at 67.
• In 2000 the Senate added his portrait to the Senate reception room alongside Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun.

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Albert B. Fall, Secretary of the Interior under President Warren G. Harding, became the first U.S. cabinet member sentenced to prison, over the Teapot Dome scandal. The story starts with the Navy's switch from coal to oil and President William Howard Taft's creation of Naval Petroleum Reserves at Elk Hills and Buena Vista in California and Teapot Dome in Wyoming. In 1921 Fall persuaded Harding to sign an executive order moving the reserves from the Navy to Interior, then pressed Navy Secretary Edwin Denby until he completed the transfer in 1922. Fall leased Teapot Dome to Harry F. Sinclair of Mammoth Oil and Elk Hills to Edward L. Doheny of Pan American Petroleum without competitive bidding, which the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 allowed, while keeping the deals secret and citing drainage and national defense.

Doheny's son carried $100,000 in cash in a black satchel to Washington in November 1921, and Sinclair routed about $90,000 in Liberty bonds to Fall through the Canadian Continental Trading Company. Fall suddenly paid a decade of back taxes on his Tularosa Basin ranch in New Mexico, drawing the attention of Albuquerque journalist Carl Magee. After Wyoming Senator John B. Kendrick demanded an inquiry, Montana Senator Thomas J. Walsh pushed the investigation for two years against resistance from Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty's Justice Department. Fall was convicted of accepting a bribe in 1929, yet Doheny was acquitted in 1930 of paying that same bribe, and his company later foreclosed on Fall's ranch to collect what it called a loan.

• The Supreme Court invalidated the Elk Hills and Teapot Dome leases in 1927 and returned the reserves to the Navy.
• Sinclair served jail time for jury tampering and contempt of Congress, not bribery.
• Senator Robert M. La Follette's Senate office was broken into and ransacked during the inquiry.
• The Revenue Act of 1924 gave certain congressional committees authority to obtain any citizen's tax records.
• McGrain v. Daugherty in 1927 upheld Congress's power to compel testimony after the Senate had bank president Mally Daugherty arrested.