21 Facts About Styles Bridges

Henry Styles Bridges was an American teacher, editor, and Republican Party politician from Concord, New Hampshire.

Styles Bridges served one term as the 63rd governor of New Hampshire before a twenty-four-year career in the United States Senate.

Styles Bridges attended the University of Maine at Orono until 1918.

Styles Bridges was an instructor at Sanderson Academy, Ashfield, Massachusetts, from 1918 to 1919.

Styles Bridges was a member of the extension staff of the University of New Hampshire at Durham from 1921 until 1922.

Styles Bridges was the secretary of the New Hampshire Farm Bureau Federation from 1922 until 1923, and the editor of the Granite Monthly Magazine from 1924 until 1926.

Styles Bridges was then a member of the New Hampshire Public Service Commission from 1930 until 1934.

Styles Bridges ran for governor of New Hampshire in 1934, and won, becoming the nation's youngest governor at the time, according to John Gunther's Inside USA.

Styles Bridges was elected to the United States Senate in 1936, and would serve until his death in 1961.

That same year, Bridges received two delegates for the Republican vice presidential nomination, which eventually went to Charles L McNary.

Styles Bridges broke his hip on New Year's Eve 1941, and missed several months of the next Senate session.

Styles Bridges was reelected to four subsequent terms in 1942,1948,1954, and 1960, but he did not complete his final term due to 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.

Styles 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 Styles Bridges offered Johnson a free hand in running the committee in return for employing two subcommittee staff members who would in fact augment Styles Bridges' staff.

Styles Bridges was a staunch defender of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, and was one of only 22 senators, all Republicans, who voted against the censure of McCarthy for his "red scare" communist investigations, and for his so-called "lavender scare" tactics aimed at homosexuals in 1954.

Styles Bridges threatened that if he did not immediately retire from the Senate and agree not to seek reelection, Styles Bridges would see that Hunt's son, Lester Hunt Jr.

Styles Bridges threatened Inspector Roy Blick of the Morals Division of the Washington Police Department with the loss of his job for failing to prosecute Hunt Jr.

Styles Bridges died of a heart attack on November 26,1961, in East Concord and, after a service attended by a thousand people at the State House in Concord, was buried in Pine Grove Cemetery.

Styles Bridges was one of the poorest men ever elected governor and still of modest means when elected to the Senate, yet his widow Doloris told then Vice President Lyndon Johnson that her husband had left her "a million dollars in cash".

Styles Bridges willed his East Concord home to the state to serve as a residence for New Hampshire's governors.