Jamie Whitten

In 1941, Whitten was elected as a Democrat to the United States House of Representatives in a special election to represent the state's 2nd District, in the northern part of the state. The seat had come open as a result of incumbent Congressman Wall Doxey's election to the United States Senate. He was elected to a full term in 1942 and was re-elected 25 more times.

In 1966, Whitten faced a challenge from Seelig Wise, a cotton and soybean farmer from Coahoma County, the first Republican to be elected to the Mississippi State Senate since Reconstruction. Whitten won easily, and Wise was defeated for reelection to the state Senate in 1967, as the second Rubel Phillips gubernatorial campaign went down to crushing defeat statewide.[1]

Whitten's district was renumbered as the 1st District after the 1970 Census.

His service from November 4, 1941, to January 3, 1995 set a record for length of service in the House, which remained unbroken until February 11, 2009, when Michigan Congressman John Dingell surpassed it. Whitten is also the 5th longest-serving Congressman (House and/or Senate) behind Daniel Inouye, Carl T. Hayden, Robert Byrd and John Dingell.

Whitten was originally a segregationist, as were many of his colleagues from Mississippi and the rest of the South. He signed the Southern Manifesto condemning the U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown vs. Board of Education, which desegregated public schools. Along with virtually the entire Mississippi congressional delegation, he voted against the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964, 1965 and 1968. Whitten later apologized for these votes, calling them a "mistake" caused by severe misjudgment. He voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1991.

As a champion for industrial agriculture, he fought against the FDA's early 1970s recommendation of restricting the use of antibiotics in livestock. The FDA was under pressure to enact reforms similar to those in the United Kingdom to restrict antibiotics used as growth promoters. It has been well-established that sub-therapeutic levels of antibiotics in livestock cause the evolution of antibiotic resistance in dangerous food-borne pathogens like Salmonella. Whitten threatened to pull budgets if the FDA attempted to enact restrictions.[2] He continued to hold the FDA budget hostage, requiring that scientists prove the danger of antibiotic use to his personal satisfaction. This continued until his retirement, and the United States has yet to implement strict regulation of antibiotic use in agriculture.[3]

He supported a number of liberal issues and later in his career frequently clashed with the Reagan administration on policy matters. He voted against Reagan's economic plans, tax cuts, increased defense spending, balanced budget initiative, tort reform, welfare reform, abortion restrictions, missile defense system, and the Persian Gulf War. Although Whitten represented a district that grew increasingly suburban and Republican from the 1970s onward, his opposition to Reagan's program did not affect him at the ballot box. Indeed, his seniority and popularity resulted in his facing only "sacrificial lamb" opponents on the occasions he faced any opposition at all, even in years when Republican presidential candidates carried the district in landslides. Nonetheless, it was taken for granted that he would be succeeded by a Republican when he retired.

Declining to run for reelection to a historic 28th term in 1994, Whitten retired from the House as America's longest-serving Congressman (53 years and two months). He retired to his home in Oxford, Mississippi and died there on September 9, 1995, aged 85, eight months after he was indeed succeeded by a Republican, Roger Wicker. Proving just how Republican this district had become, Whitten's replacement as Democratic candidate only won 36.9 percent of the vote. The Democrats would not tally even 40 percent of the vote in the district again until Travis Childers won it in a 2008 special election. Childers was defeated in 2010, and since then no Democrat has crossed the 40 percent mark.

Throughout most of his tenure in the House, Whitten served on the Appropriations Committee, ultimately serving as Chairman from the 1979 retirement of George H. Mahon until newly-elected Democrats in the House Democratic Caucus removed him in favor of William Huston Natcher after the 1992 election. Whitten has been criticized for using his position to advance the interests of his peers—rich white cotton farmers—while holding back poor blacks: "Whitten’s power and influence allowed his district to receive $23.5 million dollars in individual federal farm subsidies to reduce acreage in cotton production, which only went [to] .3 percent of the population, while constituents who lived below the poverty threshold, approximately 59 percent, received only $4 million dollars in federal food relief aid. Such imbalances perpetuated poverty, food insecurity, hunger, and malnutrition, and infuriated civil rights activists who understood the centrality of federal food relief to the diets of Whitten’s impoverished constituents—mostly displaced Black farmers, sharecroppers, or day-laborers. Moreover, Whitten’s maneuverings also killed a federal program designed to teach displaced Black sharecroppers and farmworkers how to drive tractors during Orville Freeman’s tenure as the US Secretary of Agriculture."(Mississippi's War Against the War on Poverty)

In 1985, when then-junior Appropriations Committee member Dick Durbin spoke with Chairman Whitten about possibly sitting on the Budget Committee, Whitten told him, "Well, if you want to be on that committee, you can be on that committee, but I want you to remember one thing, the Budget Committee deals in hallucinations and the Appropriations Committee deals in facts."[4] While on the floor of the Senate on March 21, 2018, now Senator Durbin referred to that quote from Whitten as "Whitten's Law," which implies that the Budget Committee is a political branch that makes budget promises while the Appropriations Committee is obliged to either make or break those promises during the budget-making process.