Edward E. Cox

Who was Edward E. Cox?

Edward Eugene "Eugene" or "Goober" Cox served as a U.S. Representative from Georgia for nearly twenty-eight years. A conservative Democrat who supported segregation and opposed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "New Deal," Cox became the most senior Democrat on the House Committee on Rules. Two special investigative committees that he chaired were heavily criticized as result-oriented persecutions of those Cox did not like. A failed attempt to create another such committee would turn out to have far-reaching consequences: in 1941, with American entry into World War II seeming inevitable, Cox proposed an investigative committee, similar to the Civil War-era Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, to deal with matters of national defense. When Roosevelt learned of Cox's intentions, he pre-empted them by agreeing to a similar proposal from Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman; the Truman Committee would come to be seen as a significant asset to the war effort, and its chairman - a little-known "backbencher" at the time of its founding - would become Roosevelt's Vice President and, after his death in 1945, President of the United States.