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Henry Styles Bridges (September 9, 1898November 26, 1961) was an American teacher, editor, and Republican Party politician from Concord, New Hampshire. He served one term as the 63rd governor of New Hampshire before a twenty-four-year career in the United States Senate.
Republican presidential nominee Alf Landon considered Bridges as his running mate for the 1936 United States presidential election, but aides pointed out that Democrats could use "Landon Bridges falling down" as a campaign slogan. Bridges was elected to the United States Senate in 1936, and would serve until his death in 1961. In 1937, he retired from the Army Reserve Corps, in which he had served as a lieutenant since 1925. In 1940, he attempted to win the Republican nomination for President; the nomination was eventually won by Wendell Willkie. That same year, Bridges also received two delegates for the Republican vice presidential nomination, which eventually went to Charles L. McNary. Bridges broke his hip on New Year's Eve 1941, and missed several months of the next Senate session.
Bridges was reelected to four subsequent terms in 1942, 1948, 1954, and 1960, but died in office a year into his final term. He became the highest-ranking Republican senator, serving as chairman of the Joint Committee on Foreign Economic Cooperation when the Republicans had control of the Senate from 1947 until 1949, Senate Minority Leader from 1952 until 1953, President pro tempore of the United States Senate when the Republicans had control of it from 1953 until 1955, chairman of the Joint Committee on Inaugural Arrangements for both of the inaugurations of President Dwight Eisenhower, Chairman of the Committee on Appropriations when the Republicans had control of the Senate from 1947 to 1949 and 1953–1955, and Chairman of the Republican Policy Committee from 1954 until his death.
In 1946, Bridges was part of a five-member committee which investigated racist, violent voter suppression in Mississippi incited by the state's demagogic senator Theodore G. Bilbo. The Election Case of Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi (1947). United States Senate. Retrieved September 13, 2021. The committee, being composed of three Democrats and two Republicans, voted to exonerate Bilbo along party lines. Bridges and his fellow conservative colleague on the committee, Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa, dissented from the decision on the grounds that Bilbo's actions violated federal laws and abused the First Amendment.Fleegler, Robert L. Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947 . Mississippi Historical Society. Retrieved September 13, 2021.
Bridges was on the first Senate Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee under the chairmanship of Lyndon Johnson. Johnson's biographer Robert Caro argues that Bridges offered Johnson a free hand in running the committee in return for employing two subcommittee staff members who would in fact augment Bridges' staff.
In the Senate, John Gunther wrote, Bridges was "an aggressive reactionary on most issues...and he is pertinaciously engaged in a continual running fight with the CIO, the Roosevelt family and the Soviet Union."John Gunther, Inside U.S.A., p. 471 Bridges voted present on the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
After WWII, when the U.S. government was recruiting Nazi scientists, engineers, and doctors, and Jewish members of the U.S. State Department obstructed the naturalization and political rehabilitation of those individuals, Bridges said on the floor of the Senate on July 18, 1950, that the State Department needed a "first-class cyanide Fumigation" to eliminate resistance to the program, part of an extended "house cleaning" metaphor referencing the common use of cyanide as a fumigant.Senator Bridges on July 18, 1950, 81st Congress, 1st session, Congressional Record 96, part 8: 10490-10492. .
Alex Ross in The New Yorker wrote in 2012 of an event "loosely dramatized in the novel and film Advise & Consent in Senator Lester Hunt, of Wyoming, killed himself after ... Bridges ... threatened to expose Hunt's son as a homosexual".Ross, Alex, "Love on the March", The New Yorker, November 12, 2012. Retrieved November 6, 2012.
He was one of the poorest men ever elected governor and still of modest means when elected to the Senate, yet his widow Doloris Bridges told then Vice President Lyndon Johnson that her husband had left her "a million dollars in cash".Kiepper, Yankee Senator, 189 Bridges willed his East Concord home to the state to serve as a residence for New Hampshire's governors. The New Hampshire Governor's Mansion is known as "Bridges House".Kiepper, Yankee Senator, 240
The "Styles Bridges Room" in the U.S. Capitol was named in his memory on March 12, 1981.Kiepper, Yankee Senator, 242-3
Interstate 93 in New Hampshire, from Concord north to the Vermont state line, is named the Styles Bridges Highway. In December 2012, the Boston Globe called for the state to examine Bridges' role in Senator Lester Hunt's death and reconsider whether the state should continue to honor Bridges, or rename the highway.
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