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Senate Years of Service: 1945-1965 Party: Democrat
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JOHNSTON, Olin DeWitt Talmadge, (father of Elizabeth J. Patterson),
a Senator from South Carolina; born near Honea Path, Anderson County, S.C.,
November 18, 1896; attended the public schools; graduated from Textile Industrial Institute,
Spartanburg, S.C., in 1915; attended Wofford College, Spartanburg, S.C., until 1917 when he
enlisted in the United States Army, serving eighteen months overseas, and becoming a sergeant;
reentered Wofford College and graduated in 1921; received a graduate degree from the University of
South Carolina at Columbia in 1923 and graduated from that universitys law department in 1924;
admitted to the bar the same year and commenced practice in Spartanburg, S.C.; member, State
house of representatives 1923-1924, 1927-1930; unsuccessful Democratic candidate for gubernatorial
nomination in 1930; Governor of South Carolina 1935-1939, and from 1943 until his resignation on
January 3, 1945; unsuccessful Democratic candidate for the United States Senate in 1938 and 1941;
elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate in 1944, 1950, 1956, and again in 1962, and
served from January 3, 1945, until his death in Columbia, S.C., April 18, 1965; chairman, Committee
on Post Office and Civil Service (Eighty-first and Eighty-second Congresses, and Eighty-fourth
through Eighty-ninth Congresses), co-chairman, Joint Committee on Postal Service (Eighty-second
Congress); interment in Barkers Creek Baptist Church Cemetery, Honea Path, S.C.
Bibliography Dictionary of American Biography;
Huss, John. Senator for the South: A Biography of Olin D. Johnston. Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961.
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