Fred Harris, former Democratic U.S. senator and presidential candidate, dies at 94 | Global News Avenue

Fred Harris, a former U.S. senator from Oklahoma, presidential candidate and populist who championed Democratic reform during the turbulent 1960s, died Saturday. He is 94 years old.

Harris’ wife, Margaret Elliston, confirmed Harris’ death to The Associated Press. He has lived in New Mexico since 1976.

Elliston said in a text message: “Fred Harris passed away peacefully early this morning of natural causes. He was 94. He was a wonderful, well-loved man. His memory is a blessing. “

Harris served in the Senate for eight years, first winning to fill a vacancy in 1964 and running unsuccessfully for president in 1976.

“I was deeply saddened to learn today of the passing of my long-time friend Fred Harris,” New Mexico Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said. Wrote in posts on social media. “Harris was a towering figure in politics and academia whose decades of work improved New Mexico and the nation. He will be greatly missed.”

Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico explain “New Mexico and our nation have lost a giant,” in a statement describing him as a “tireless defender of civil rights, tribal sovereignty and working families.”

Harris, who chaired the Democratic National Committee in 1969 and 1970, had the burden of helping heal the Democratic Party’s wounds from the economic crisis. The chaotic 1968 National Congress When protesters and police clashed in Chicago.

He brought about rule changes that led to more women and minorities serving as convention delegates and in leadership positions.

“I thought it was very effective,” Harris recalled in 2004, when he was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Boston. “This makes the election more legitimate and democratic.”

“The Democratic Party is not democratic, and many delegations are almost controlled or dominated by bosses. In the South, there was horrific discrimination against African Americans,” he said.

Harris ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, dropping out after poor performance in the early campaign, including a fourth-place finish in New Hampshire. The more moderate Jimmy Carter eventually won the presidency.

Harris moved to New Mexico that year and became a political science professor at the University of New Mexico. He has written and edited more than a dozen books, mostly on politics and Congress. In 1999, he expanded the scope of his writing, set in Depression-era Oklahoma.

Throughout his political career, Harris has been a leading liberal voice for civil rights and anti-poverty programs to help minorities and disadvantaged groups. Along with his first wife, LaDonna, a Comanche, he was active in Native American issues.

“I’ve always called myself a populist or a progressive,” Harris said in a 1998 interview. “I’m against concentration of power. I don’t like the power of money in politics. I think we should have programs for the middle class and the working class.”

“‘Populism’ is often a dirty word these days because of the way some leaders wield power,” Heinrich said in a statement on Saturday. “But Fred represents a different kind of populism. — a populism that is never mean-spirited or exclusive. Instead, Fred focuses his work and attention on ordinary people who are often ignored by the political class.”

Harris was a member of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disturbance, known as the Kerner Commission, which was appointed by then-President Lyndon Johnson to investigate urban riots in the late 1960s.

The commission’s seminal 1968 report declared, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black and one white—separate and unequal.”

Thirty years later, Harris co-authored a report concluding that the commission’s “prophecies had been fulfilled.”

“The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and minorities are suffering disproportionately,” Lynn A. Curtis, president of the Harris and Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, said in the report. The foundation continued the work of the committee.

Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute said Harris emerged as a “fervent populist” in Congress.

“It resonates with people…the idea of ​​ordinary people versus elites,” Ornstein said. “Fred Harris really had the ability to express these concerns, especially concerns about the oppressed.”

In 1968, Harris served as co-chairman of then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign. He and others urged Humphrey to use the convention to break with Johnson over the Vietnam War. But Humphrey did not do so until late in the campaign, and narrowly lost to Republican Richard Nixon.

“That was the worst year of my life, ’68. We had Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. killed. We had my Senate seatmate Robert F. Kennedy killed, and then we had this horrific convention, ” Harris said in 1996.

“I left the convention – really frustrated because of the gross confusion and the way it was handled and the failure to adopt a new peace platform.”

After assuming leadership of the Democratic Party, Harris appointed committees that recommended reforms to the selection process for delegates and presidential candidates. While praising greater openness and diversity, he said this also had a side effect: “There are a lot of benefits to that. But one of the consequences of that is that today’s conventions are ratifying conventions. So it’s hard to make them interesting.”

“My own thought is that they should be shortened to just a few days. But I think they’re still worth having as a way of adopting a platform, as an agitation rally, as a way of bringing people together in some way. form of coalition building,” he said.

Harris was born on November 13, 1930, in a two-room farmhouse near Walters in southwestern Oklahoma, about 15 miles from the Texas line. The home has no electricity, indoor toilet or running water.

At age 5, he was working on a farm, earning 10 cents a day driving horses around to power hay barrels.

He worked part-time as a janitor and printing assistant to help with his studies at the University of Oklahoma. In 1952, he received his bachelor’s degree, majoring in political science and history. He earned his law degree from the University of Oklahoma in 1954 and then went to practice law in Lawton.

In 1956, he was elected to the Oklahoma Senate and served for eight years. He began his national political career in 1964 in the race to succeed Senator Robert S. Kerr, who died in January 1963.

Harris defeated Howard Edmondson in the runoff to win the Democratic nomination. Edmondson resigned as governor, filling Kerr’s vacancy until the next election. In the general election, Harris defeated Oklahoma sports legend Charles “Bud” Wilkinson, who coached the Oklahoma State football team for 17 years.

Harris won a six-year term in 1966 but left the Senate in 1972 amid doubts that he could win re-election as a left-leaning Democrat.

In 1949, Harris married his high school sweetheart, LaDonna Vita Crawford, and they had three children: Kathryn, Byron, and Laura. After the couple divorced, Harris married Margaret Elliston in 1983. A full list of survivors was not immediately available Saturday.