Cordell Hull

Biography

Cordell Hull was born in 1871 in a log cabin in Olympus, in what is now Pickett County, Tennessee. He studied at National Normal University in Ohio in 1889-90, took a law degree at Cumberland University's law school in 1891 and practised law. He sat in the Tennessee House of Representatives from 1893 to 1897 and served in Cuba during the Spanish-American War as a captain of Tennessee volunteer infantry, without seeing action.

Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1906, he served there from 1907 to 1921 and again from 1923 to 1931. On the Ways and Means Committee he argued for low tariffs and wrote the federal income tax law of 1913, meant to replace the revenue lost to tariff cuts. Between his House terms he chaired the Democratic National Committee, and in 1930 he was elected to the Senate.

Franklin D. Roosevelt made him Secretary of State in 1933 and sent him to lead the U.S. delegation to the London Economic Conference, which collapsed after Roosevelt rejected its main plans. Hull became a principal architect of the Good Neighbor policy toward Latin America and pushed through the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 to lower tariffs, though Roosevelt often bypassed him on relations with the great powers. On 26 November 1941 he delivered the Hull note to Japan, the last American proposal before Pearl Harbor, and in 1943 he was the U.S. delegate to the Moscow Conference.

Hull resigned in November 1944 because of failing health, having held the post longer than any other U.S. secretary of state. For his part in founding the United Nations he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945. He died in Washington, D.C., in 1955.