I was reading about Senator Jon Corzine wanting to buy an NBA team and I have to wonder: who are the least wealthy people currently in the U.S. Senate? Are they still upper-middle class types, or are there any working-class senators? What about the past; are there any good examples from history of somebody like a factory worker winning a Senate seat? And what about the Hosue of Representatives?
Andrew Johnson of Tennesee (later Vice-President, then President) grew up poor, then became a sucessful tailor.
Henry Wilson of Massachusetts (later Vice-President) went from indentured servitude to owning a sucessful shoe factory.
Here’s an article with a list of the richest members of the U.S. Senate:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/06/13/senators.finances/
These people aren’t just upper-middle class, they are just plain rich. If you Google on “Senate” and “financial disclosure” you might find a webpage with the entire list of net worth of the Senators. I don’t believe that there has ever been anyone who was working class at the time of election who was elected to the Senate. Oh, there have been people who were born to a working-class family, but they were at least middle class by the time of their election.
Who was the last US president who was not a millionare when first elected? My guess would be Eisenhower.
Wendell Wagner, thanks for the list. It confirmed my suspecisions. Now I need to find the exact opposite. My line about the upper-middle calss senators was meant to imply that the very poorest senators would still be lawyers with german SUV’s and a three-car garage.
I doubt that Bill Clinton was a millionaire before he was elected.
He was still governor of Arkansas when he was elected and that job didn’t pay much.
Remember that unlike other presidents, the Clintons didn’t own a home of their own. They just lived in the Governor’s Mansion and then they had the White House as their principal residence. Until Hillary’s book deal, they just mooched off friends on vacations or to find places to sleep.
Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) came in to the Senate with a lot of personal wealth, but it was almost all in Real Corp stock options. I think the value of those plummeted.
And I’ll bet he was, especially if you averaged his and Hilary’s assets.
Zell Miller of Gorgia certainly touts a working class background.
Clinton was probably the poorest of the Presidents just before he took office since the 1940’s. Roosevelt, Kennedy, and both Bushes came from rich families. Eisenhower was a general and a college president before becoming President. Johnson had been a Senator for many years (and came from an almost rich family), and Truman and Ford had been in politics for quite a while too. Reagan had been an actor and then a well-paid speaker for many years. Nixon had been vice-president and then had been a highly paid lawyer. Carter’s family owned a large peanut farm and he had been governor for a term. Although Clinton had been governor for a while, Arkansas doesn’t pay its governor very well. Even with Hilary’s work as a lawyer, I suspect that the Clintons were not quite as well off as the Carters, and that all the others were distinctly richer.
None of this is to say that Clinton was remotely poor when he was elected. Everyone who was elected President was already at least middle class and more like upper-middle class or just plain rich at the time of their election. I’ve seen a list of the family backgrounds of the Presidents and the vast majority of them were born into upper-middle-class or rich families. Hardly any came from working-class or poor families.
I believe Patty Murray of Washington might qualify. She was an obscure state senator when she ran - and I believe she’d only been in office for one term when she entered the Democratic primary against Brock Adams. But that campaign also shows why the less-wealthy are rare critters in the senate: she was extremely lucky, and most people entering an arduous campaign don’t like to rely on luck. Brock Adams’s reelection campaign imploded from sexual harrassment charges, resulting in his withdrawal and her winning the primary by default. She then faced a not-terribly-inspiring Republican, Rod Chandler, in what became known as the “Year of the Woman.”
Similarly, the late Paul Wellstone, also not-wealthy (Carleton professors don’t make much), was extremely lucky: his opponent, incumbent Rudy Boschwitz, handed him the 1990 election with a letter to the Jewish community that basically accused Wellstone of being a bad Jew. (For more, click here, scroll down for the story.) (The article notes the extraordinary success of Jewish candidates in Minnesota and Wisconsin.)
Certainly, to the extent there are factory workers in high office, they probably had to start very small and work their way up for a a long time, so they can build connections to get themselves campaign donations. Which means that they really aren’t factory workers by the time they hit the big time: they’re professional politicians.
The thing is, almost anyone who is smart and talented enough to get elected to the senate is certainly smart and talented enough to make a good living before they enter the senate. Yes, there are plenty of smart and talented auto mechanics and waitresses out there. But if you can’t figure out how to use your smarts and talents to make money, you probably aren’t going to use them to get into the senate.
A “working class” person…meaning someone who punches a clock in a factory, or a waitress, or entry level office drone who has the drive, ambition and smarts to become senator is going to be made a foreman or manager very quickly. Then they suddenly aren’t “working class” any more, no matter if they drink Pabst Blue Ribbon instead of Chardonnay.
Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado came from a working class background, and while certainly not poor, was of modest means at best before being elected.
Colorado’s other Senator, Wayne Allard, is a veterinarian, so middle class there, too.
<rant>So, when it’s clear that CO voters prefer “regular people” to represent them, why do the Dem’s keep running millionaire lawyers?</rant>
Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey of California was once on welfare.
It’s my understanding that Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin, has the distinction of being one of the Senate’s poorest members. I couldn’t find a 1-100 ranking of the senators, but this article puts his net worth at $148k. Wisconsin also has the Senate’s second-richest member, Herb Kohl.