Fred Harris, a former U.S. senator from Oklahoma, presidential candidate and populist who pushed for Democratic Party reforms in the turbulent 1960s, died Saturday. He was 94.
Harris’ wife, Margaret Elliston, confirmed his death to The Associated Press. It was not immediately clear where he died, but he had lived in New Mexico since 1976 and was living in Corrales at the time of his death.
“Fred Harris passed away peacefully this morning of natural causes. He was 94. He was a wonderful and beloved man. His memory is a blessing,” Elliston said in a text message.
Harris served in the Senate for eight years, first winning a vacancy in 1964 and making an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1976.
It fell to Harris, who chaired the Democratic National Committee in 1969 and 1970, to lend a hand heal the party’s wounds left by the turbulent 1968 national convention, when protesters and police clashed in Chicago.
He initiated rule changes that resulted in more women and minorities being represented as convention delegates and in leadership positions.
“I think it worked wonderfully,” Harris recalled in 2004, when he was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Boston. “It made the selection much more legitimate and democratic.”
“The Democratic Party was not democratic and many of the delegations were largely controlled or dominated by their bosses. And there was terrible discrimination against African Americans in the South,” he said.
Harris ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, dropping out after indigent performances in the early contests, including a fourth-place finish in New Hampshire. The more moderate Jimmy Carter later won the presidency.
Harris moved to New Mexico that year and became a political science professor at the University of New Mexico. He wrote and edited more than a dozen books, mostly on politics and Congress. In 1999, he expanded his writings to include a crime novel set in Depression-era Oklahoma.
Throughout his political career, Harris has been a leading liberal voice for civil rights and anti-poverty programs to lend a hand minorities and the disadvantaged.
“Democrats around the world will remember Fred for his unparalleled integrity and as a pioneer in establishing progressive core values of justice and opportunity for prosperity as core principles of our party,” the Democratic Party of New Mexico said in a statement.
Together with his first wife, LaDonna, a Comanche, he was also busy in Native American causes.
“I have always considered myself a populist or a progressive,” Harris said in a 1998 interview. “I am against concentrated 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.”
New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham praised his work for their shared state and the nation.
“He was not only a highly accomplished politician and professor, but also a decent, honorable man who treated everyone with warmth, generosity and good humor,” she said in a statement. “Senator. Harris was a lesson in leadership that public officials should emulate now and forever.”
Harris was a member of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, the so-called Kerner Commission, which was commissioned by then-President Lyndon Johnson to investigate urban unrest in the behind schedule 1960s.
The Commission’s groundbreaking 1968 report stated: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, black and white – separate and unequal.”
Thirty years later, Harris co-authored a report that concluded that the commission’s prophecy “has come to pass.”
“The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and minorities are suffering disproportionately,” said the report by Harris and Lynn A. Curtis, president of the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, which continued the commission’s work.
Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute said Harris had become known in Congress as a “fiery populist.”
“That resonates with people … the idea of the average person versus the elite,” Ornstein said. “Fred Harris had a real ability to voice these concerns, particularly those of the oppressed.”
In 1968, Harris served as co-chairman of then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign. He and others urged Humphrey to employ the convention to break with Johnson on the Vietnam War. But Humphrey waited until the end of the campaign and narrowly lost to Republican Richard Nixon.
“That was the worst year of my life, 1968. We have Dr. Have Martin Luther King killed. “We had my Senate colleague Robert Kennedy killed and then we had this terrible Congress,” Harris said in 1996.
“I left Congress really dejected because of the terrible unrest and the way it was handled and the failure to adopt a new peace platform.”
After Harris assumed leadership of the Democratic Party, he appointed commissions that recommended reforms to the procedures for selecting delegates and presidential candidates. While he praised the greater openness and diversity, he said there had been a side effect: “It’s very good.” However, the only result of this is that today’s conventions are ratifying conventions. So it’s complex to make them intriguing.”
“In my opinion they should be shortened to a few days. But they’re still worth it, in my opinion, as a way to create a platform, as a kind of pep rally, as a way to bring people together in a kind 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 house had no electricity, no indoor toilet and no running water.
At age 5, he worked on the farm and was paid 10 cents a day to drive a horse in circles to power a haymaker.
He worked part-time as a janitor and printer’s assistant to support his education at the University of Oklahoma. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1952, majoring in political science and history. He received a law degree from the University of Oklahoma in 1954 and then moved to Lawton to practice law.
In 1956 he won election to the Oklahoma State Senate and served for eight years. In 1964, he began his career in national politics in the race to succeed Senator Robert S. Kerr, who died in January 1963.
Harris won the Democratic nomination in a runoff against J. Howard Edmondson, who left the governorship to fill Kerr’s vacancy until the next election. In the general election, Harris defeated an Oklahoma sports legend – Charles “Bud” Wilkinson, who had coached OU football for 17 years.
Harris won a six-year term in 1966 but left the Senate in 1972 when there were doubts that he could win re-election as a left-leaning Democrat.
Harris married his high school sweetheart, LaDonna Vita Crawford, in 1949 and had three children, Kathryn, Byron and Laura. After the couple’s divorce, Harris married Margaret Elliston in 1983. A full list of survivors was not immediately available Saturday.
