Fred Harris, a former U.S. senator from Oklahoma and a populist presidential candidate who advocated for Democratic Party reform during the turbulent 1960s, died Saturday. He was 94 years old.
Harris’ wife, Margaret Elliston, confirmed his death to The Associated Press. He has lived in New Mexico since 1976.
“Fred Harris passed away peacefully this morning of natural causes. He was 94 years old. He was a wonderful and loved man. It is a blessing to remember him,” Elliston said in a text message.
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Harris served in the Senate for eight years, first winning to fill a vacancy in 1964 and running unsuccessfully for president in 1976.
“I am deeply saddened to hear today that my longtime friend Fred Harris passed away,” Democratic New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham wrote on social media. “Harris was a prominent figure in politics and academia, and his work advanced New Mexico and the nation over several decades. He will be greatly missed.”
New Mexico Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich said “New Mexico and our nation have lost a giant,” the statement said, describing him as “a tireless advocate for civil rights, tribal sovereignty, and working families.”
As chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1969 and 1970, Harris was responsible for healing the Democratic Party’s wounds. 1968 Noisy National Convention When protesters and police clashed in Chicago.
He spearheaded rule changes that placed more women and minorities in convention delegates and leadership positions.
“I think it worked wonderfully,” Harris recalled when she attended the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. “This makes choices much more legitimate and democratic.”
“The Democratic Party was not democratic, many of the delegates were often controlled or dominated by superiors, and there was terrible discrimination against African Americans in the South,” he said.
Harris unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, resigning after poor showings in early primaries, including a fourth-place finish in New Hampshire. The more moderate Jimmy Carter was elected president.
Harris moved to New Mexico that year and became a political science professor at the University of New Mexico. He has written and edited more than a dozen books, mainly on politics and parliament. In 1999, he expanded his work with mysteries set in Depression-era Oklahoma.
Throughout her political career, Harris has been a leading liberal voice on civil rights and anti-poverty programs to help minorities and marginalized groups. With his first wife, LaDonna, who was of Comanche descent, he was also active in Native American affairs.
“I’ve always called myself a populist or a progressive,” Harris said in a 1998 interview. “I’m against concentration of power. I don’t like the power of money in politics. I think there should be programs for the middle class and the working class.”
“Today, ‘populism’ is often a dirty word because of the way certain leaders wield power,” Heinrich said in a statement Saturday. “But Fred represented a different brand of populism, one that was by no means mean-spirited or exclusive. Instead, Fred focused his work and attention on ordinary people who were often overlooked by the political class.”
Harris was a member of the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders, the so-called Kerner Commission, appointed by then-President Lyndon Johnson to investigate urban riots in the late 1960s.
The commission’s landmark report in 1968 declared that “our country is moving toward two societies, one black and one white, separate and unequal.”
Thirty years later, Harris co-authored a report concluding that the commission’s “prophecy had come true.”
Harris and Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation President Lynn A. Curtis, who continued the committee’s work, wrote in the report, “The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. “Minorities are suffering disproportionately,” he said.
Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute said Harris stood out in Congress as a “fiery populist.”
“It resonates with people…the concept of the common man standing up to the elite,” Ornstein said. “Fred Harris had a real ability to clearly articulate the concerns of people, especially those who were oppressed.”
In 1968, Harris co-chaired then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign. He and others used the convention to pressure Humphrey to break with Johnson on the Vietnam War. However, Humphrey waited until late in the campaign and narrowly lost to Republican Richard Nixon.
“That was the worst year of my life,” Harris said in 1996. Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered. Senator Robert Kennedy was murdered and a terrible convention took place.
“I left the conference really disheartened by the terrible disorder, the way it was handled and the failure to adopt a new peace platform.”
After taking over as leader of the Democratic Party, Harris appointed a committee to recommend reforms to the process for selecting delegates and presidential candidates. While he praised the greater openness and diversity, he said there were side effects. “That’s a good thing, but the result of that is that today’s convention is ratification of the convention, so it’s hard to make it interesting.”
“I think it should be shortened to a few days, but I think it still has value as a way to adopt a platform, a kind of pep rally, a way to bring people together, 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 border. The house had no electricity, no indoor toilet, or running water.
By the age of five, he was working on a farm and was paid 10 cents a day to drive horses round and round to power hay bales.
He worked part time as a custodian and printing assistant to assist with his education at the University of Oklahoma. He received a bachelor’s degree in political science and history in 1952. He received a law degree from the University of Oklahoma in 1954 and then moved to Lawton to practice law.
In 1956, he was elected to the Oklahoma State Senate and served for eight years. In 1964, he began his national political career in the race to replace Senator Robert S. Kerr, who had died in January 1963.
Harris won the Democratic nomination in a runoff election against J. Howard Edmondson, who left the governor’s office to fill Kerr’s vacancy until the next election. In the general election, Harris defeated Oklahoma sports legend Charles “Bud” Wilkinson. Charles “Bud” Wilkinson has coached OU football for 17 years.
Harris won a six-year term in 1966, but left the Senate in 1972 as doubts grew about whether he could win re-election as a left-leaning Democrat.
Harris married his high school sweetheart, LaDonna Vita Crawford, in 1949, and they had three children, Kathryn, Byron, and Laura. After his divorce, Harris married Margaret Elliston in 1983. A full list of survivors was not immediately released Saturday.
