The Case of Congressman Stringfellow

In 1952, Republicans made numerous gains in Congress. One of these was Utah’s 1st district, with Douglas Stringfellow trouncing the Democratic nominee in a seat that had been held by the Democratic Party for twenty years. Stringfellow had campaigned as a war hero with a deeply compelling story: that he had been an agent of the OSS who had parachuted into Germany to rescue a German nuclear scientist Otto Hahn and bring him to Britain, been captured by the SS, and tortured in the Belsen concentration camp, resulting in him being a paraplegic. Stringfellow was rescued by the anti-Nazi resistance and had been awarded the Silver Star for his service. More compelling yet, he was the only survivor of his team.
During his term, he voted as a conservative, siding with the liberal Americans for Democratic Action 21% of the time and having a DW-Nominate score of 0.429, placing him on the more conservative end of Republicans. Stringfellow’s record on domestic issues was strongly conservative but he supported foreign aid as well as increasing the admittance of refugees in 1953. His career seemed to have nowhere to move but up, and in fall 1954 he appeared on the TV show This Is Your Life, where he told his fantastic story to a national audience. This attention resulted in Hollywood directors bidding for the film rights to his story, but…