Wayne Lyman Morse (October 20, 1900 – July 22, 1974) was an American attorney and United States Senator from Oregon. Morse is well known for opposing the Democratic Party’s leadership and for his opposition to the Vietnam War on constitutional grounds.
Born in Madison, Wisconsin, and educated at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Minnesota Law School, Morse moved to Oregon in 1930 and began teaching at the University of Oregon School of Law. During World War II, he was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Republican; he became an Independent after Dwight D. Eisenhower's election to the presidency in 1952. While an independent, he set a record for performing the fourth-longest one-person filibuster in the history of the Senate. Morse joined the Democratic Party in February 1955, and was reelected twice while a member of that party.
Morse made a brief run for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 1960. In 1964, Morse was one of two senators to oppose the later-to-become-controversial Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. It authorized the president to take military action in Vietnam without a declaration of war. He continued to speak out against the war in the ensuing years, and lost his 1968 bid for reelection to Bob Packwood, who criticized his strong opposition to the war. Morse made two more bids for reelection to the Senate before his death in 1974.
Morse was born on October 20, 1900, in Madison, Wisconsin, home of his maternal grandparents, Myron and Flora White. Morse's parents, Wilbur F. Morse and Jessie Elnora Morse, farmed a 320-acre (130 ha) plot near Verona, a small community 11 miles (18 km) west-southwest of Madison. Morse grew up on this farm, where the family raised Devon cattle for beef, Percheron and Hackney horses, dairy cows, hogs, sheep, poultry, and feed crops for the animals. The family eventually included five children: Mabel, seven years older than Morse; twin brothers Harry and Grant, four years older; Morse; and Caryl, fourteen years younger.
Encouraged by Jessie, the Morse family held relatively formal nightly discussions about crops, animals, education, religion, and most frequently about politics. Like many of their neighbors, the family was progressive and discussed ideas championed by Robert M. La Follette, Sr., a leader of the progressive movement who served as Wisconsin's governor from 1900 to 1906 and thereafter as a member of the U.S. Senate. During these family discussions, Morse developed debating skills and strong opinions about political corruption, corporate domination, labor rights, women's suffrage, education, and, on a personal level, hard work and sobriety.
Morse and his siblings began their education in a one-room school near Verona. However, the Morse parents, particularly Jessie, shared the Progressive belief that improvement of self and society came through good education, and they admired the schools in Madison. After Morse finished second grade, his parents enrolled him in Longfellow School in Madison, to which Morse commuted 22 miles (35 km) round-trip daily by riding relay on three of the family's smaller horses. After eighth grade, Morse attended Madison High School, where he became class president and debating club president, and placed academically among the top 10 in his graduating class. In high school, he developed his relationship with Mildred "Midge" Downie, whom he had known since third grade, and who was class valedictorian and class vice-president the same year Morse was president.
Morse received his Bachelor of Philosophy degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1923 and his Master of Arts degree in speech from Wisconsin the next year. He married Downie in the same year. For several years, he taught speech at the University of Minnesota Law School, and he earned his LLB degree there in 1928. He held a reserve commission as second lieutenant, Field Artillery, U.S. Army, from 1923 to 1929, and was a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity.
Morse became an assistant professor of law at the University of Oregon School of Law in 1929. Within nine months, he was promoted to associate professor and then dean of the law school. At age 31, this made him the youngest dean of any law school accredited by the American Bar Association.
After becoming a full professor of law in 1931, he completed his SJD (a research doctorate in law equivalent to the PhD) at Columbia Law School in 1932. He served on many government commissions and boards, including: member, Oregon Crime Commission; administrative director, United States Attorney General's Survey of Release Procedures (1936–1939); Pacific Coast arbitrator for the United States Department of Labor (maritime industry) (1938–1942); chairman, Railway Emergency Board (1941); alternate public member of the National Defense Mediation Board (1941); and public member of the National War Labor Board (1942–1944).
In 1944, Morse won the Republican primary election for senator, unseating incumbent Rufus C. Holman, and then the general election that November. To secure the support of the ultra-conservative wing of the Oregon Republicans in 1944, Morse had presented himself as being more right-wing than he really was, criticizing the New Deal in vitriolic terms though he also praised the wartime foreign policy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Once in Washington, D.C., he revealed his progressive roots, to the consternation of his more conservative Republican peers. Morse had intended to pull the Republican Party leftwards on the issue of union rights, a stance that put him at odds with many of the more right-wing Republicans. Morse's political heroes were other progressive Republicans such as Theodore Roosevelt and Robert La Follette, and despite being a Republican admitted that he had voted in the 1944 presidential election for Franklin D. Roosevelt against the Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey. He was greatly influenced by the "one world" philosophy of Wendell Willkie, making it clear from the onset he was an internationalist, which caused much tension with the Republican Senate Minority Leader, Robert A. Taft who favored a quasi-isolationist foreign policy.
Morse believed that World War II had been partly caused by American isolationism and in one of his first speeches before the Senate, in February 1945, called on the United States to join the planned organization that would replace the League of Nations, namely the United Nations (UN). As a former law professor, Morse believed very strongly in international law, and in the same speech called upon the United Nations to be an "international police organization" with such powers as to enforce via military means international law against any nation that might break it and to be given the power to prevent rich nations from economically exploiting poor nations. In another speech in March 1945, he called upon the two militarily strongest members of the "Big Three" alliance, namely the Soviet Union and the United States to work together after the war to preserve the peace and end poverty all over the world. In a speech in November 1945, he declared his concern as he "watched some of the nations of the world taking a toboggan ride down the slopes of national aggrandizement and into the abyss of blind nationalism." In the same speech, he deplored the "rattling of swords and manufacturing of atomic bombs" as he called the nations of the world to stop dividing themselves into "power blocs", to take their disputes to the World Court and for the UN to have control of nuclear weapons, which he maintained were too dangerous to be entrusted to any nation.
In January 1946, after President Truman delivered an address criticizing Congress and defending his proposals, Morse referred to President Truman's speech as a "sad confession of the Democratic majority in Congress under the President's leadership" and called for the election of liberal Republicans in the midterm elections that year. Also in January 1946, Morse called on Congress to vote on President Truman's pending legislation, citing continued delay would produce "a great economic uncertainty" and add to "reconversion slow-up". He asserted that Americans were entitled to Congress being held accountable for the passage of bills. In 1946, Morse cosponsored legislation proposing a full Senate investigation into labor dispute causes, saying in March, "I think we've got to find out whether certain segments of industry are out to wreck unions." He was outspoken in his opposition to the Taft–Hartley Act of 1947, which concerned labor relations.