John R. Schmidhauser

Who is John R. Schmidhauser?

John Richard Schmidhauser is a retired American politician. He served one term as a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from southeastern Iowa, defeating incumbent Republican Fred Schwengel in 1964 but losing to Schwengel two years later in 1966, and again in 1968. He is currently a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Southern California.

Born in the Bronx, New York, Schmidhauser served in the United States Navy from 1941 to 1945. After the end of World War II, he enrolled in the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware, receiving a bachelor of arts degree in 1949. He received a masters degree from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1952, then received a Ph.D from the same university in 1954.

In 1954, he joined the faculty of the Political Science Department of the University of Iowa, in Iowa City, Iowa. There, he wrote what is now considered a "landmark series of studies on the backgrounds of Supreme Court justices."