Cecil M. Harden

Despite her father's ties to the Democratic Party, Harden became active in the local Republican Party. She first became interested in local politics in 1931, when President Herbert Hoover appointed her husband as Covington's postmaster. Harden became even more active in Republican politics in 1933, after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office and appointed a Democrat to replace her husband as the Covington postmaster.[3][4]

Hardin entered politics in 1932 as the Republican precinct vice chairman, a position she retained until 1940. Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, Harden was active in Indiana politics. In 1938, she became vice chairman of the Fountain County Republican Party, a position she held until 1950, and served as the vice chair of an Indiana congressional district.[2][3]

Harden joined the Republican National Speakers Bureay in 1940. She was elected Indiana's Republican National committeewoman in 1944, serving until 1959, and again from 1964 to 1972. Harden also served as a delegate-at-large to the Republican National Conventions in 1948, 1952, 1956, and 1968.[1][4]

In 1948, when Indiana Republican Noble J. Johnson resigned from the U.S. Congress to accept a federal judgeship, Harden won the Republican Party's nomination to run for his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in the general election in the fall. In her first bid for elective office, Harden narrowly defeated Democrat Jack J. O'Grady by a margin of only 483 votes out of a total of 132,000 votes cast in the race.[3][4] O'Grady, a native of Terre Haute, Indiana,[2] was a U.S. Army veteran who had represented Vigo County, Indiana, in both houses of the Indiana legislature. Harden was elected to the 81st Congress and the four succeeding Congresses, serving from January 3, 1949 to January 3, 1959,[5] a total of five consecutive terms in the U.S. House as a representative of Indiana's 6th congressional district.[3] Harden voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1957.[8]

In her first term in Congress in 1949, Harden was initially assigned to the Veterans' Affairs Committee, but the next term she transferred to the House Committee on Expenditures in Executive Departments (later called Government Operations). During the 83rd Congress, Harden chaired the Inter-Governmental Relations subcommittee of Government Operations. She also served six years (1953–59) on the Committee on the Post Office and Civil Service. While serving on these congressional committees, Harden toured military installations to evaluate and looking for ways to improve the military's procurement procedures. In an effort to cut government costs under the Eisenhower administration, she also urged military and other government offices to consider using private companies to perform some of their work.[4]

Harden, an advocate for women's rights, joined with Maine's U.S. Senator, Margaret Chase Smith, and Ohio's U.S. Representative, Frances Bolton, to urge the Republican Party to adopt platform planks of interest to women. In 1957, Harden and New Jersey's U.S. Representative, Florence Dwyer, offered "a bill to provide equal pay for women."[2]

Harden served her Indiana constituents by promoting flood control in the Wabash River valley, helping to secure federal funding for flood control projects in her state. She was also critical of U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's plan in 1956 to close its heavy water plant in Dana, Indiana, which was within her congressional district. Harden claimed that 900 workers would become unemployed as a result of the closure.[3][4]

Harden, who aligned her political interests with the Eisenhower administration, lost her bid for a sixth term in the U.S. House to Democrat Fred Wampler, a Terre Haute high school football coach, in 1958 by slightly more than a two-percent margin.[2][9] Harden was one of Indiana's seven Republican congressional members who were defeated in the 1958 election (and one of the forty-seven seats in the U.S. House that the Republicans lost in the election). Her defeat was blamed, in part, on a recession that negatively affected industrial employment in Terre Haute.[4]

Although her final congressional term ended in January 1959, Harden remained in Washington, D.C. Two months later, March 1959, she was appointed to serve as special assistant for women's affairs to U.S. Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield. Harden remained at this post until President John F. Kennedy's Democratic administration replaced Eisenhower's Republican administration in March 1961.[1][4] Harden also continued to serve as a Republican national committeewoman for Indiana from 1964 until 1972, and as a delegate-at-large for the Republican National Conventions in 1968 and in 1972.[5] In 1970, President Richard M. Nixon appointed Hardin to the National Advisory Committee for the White House Conference on Aging, where she served in 1972–73.[3][4]