July 23, 1962: Death of Duluthian Henry C. Dworshack, U.S. Senator

On this day in 1962, Duluth native Henry C. Dworshack Jr. died in Washington, D.C.  Dworshack  was born in Duluth on August 29, 1894, and grew up on the East Hillside. His grandfather Joseph published the Duluth Volkesfreund, the first German newspaper published north of St. Paul. His father was a printer and later a supervisor for the Duluth Herald—and a union activist. Henry Jr. began working for his father around age 15 and didn’t graduate from high school. Henry married Georgia B. Lowe in 1917 and they raised their children on McCullough Street while he worked as associate editor of Labor World and managed Duluth’s Northwest Printers’ Supply Co. in Duluth. In 1924 the family moved to Burley, Idaho, where he became owner and publisher of the Burley Bulletin. In 1938, Henry was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican and served four terms. He was known as a champion of conservation, reclamation, and government economy. He resigned in 1946 to run for U.S. Senate and while he won the seat he was not re-elected in 1948. In 1949 he was appointed to fill the Senate seat vacated by the death of Sen. Bert H. Miller; he then won the 1950 election to complete Miller’s term and was re-elected in 1954 and in 1960. As a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, he strongly opposed what he called “Socialist spending.” A year after his death, Congress passed legislation renaming a dam in Idaho the Dworshak Dam and Reservoir.

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