Appalachian Figures
When people in Letcher County rattle off the local names that somehow ended up on the national stage, Emery L. Frazier sits in that small company. A Lawrenceburg native who made his career as a young lawyer and mayor in Whitesburg, he eventually became the twentieth Secretary of the United States Senate in 1966. For Appalachia, his story is not only about climbing the ladder in Washington. It is about how a mountain town helped shape the man who guarded the Senate’s memory, saved a historic desk from the scrap heap, and spent his last working years trying to write the Senate’s own history.
Today, the county’s official history page lists him alongside figures like Harry Caudill and Tom Gish, identifying him plainly as “Mayor, state representative, Chief Clerk of the U.S. Senate, Secretary of the U.S. Senate, 1896-1973.” That short line hints at a life that moved between courthouse, coalfields, and Capitol.
From Railey Station to the Kentucky mountains
Emery L. Frazier was born in 1896 at Railey Station in Woodford County, Kentucky. The sources disagree on his exact birth date. The Senate’s official biography gives January 24, 1896, while modern reference works based on the Official Congressional Directory list September 24, 1896. Both agree on the place and the year, and both agree that he came of age in the shadow of the First World War.
He enrolled at the University of Kentucky, broke off his studies in 1917 to enlist in the Army during the war, then returned and graduated in 1920. He was admitted to the Kentucky bar the following year. Before he ever saw Letcher County, Frazier had already taken a first step into politics. In 1922 he won election to the Kentucky House of Representatives from the 45th District as a Democrat, serving a single term in Frankfort and later working as the House’s reading clerk.
Sometime in the early 1920s, he headed east into the mountains. The Letcher County Historical and Genealogical Society’s book list notes that “Emery L. Frazier, a Lawrenceburg native, came to Letcher County in the 1920s as a young lawyer and soon became mayor of the city of Whitesburg.” That brief description matches scattered local newspaper evidence. A Mountain Eagle “Way We Were” column, reprinting an item from October 1925, mentions the law partnership of “Emery L. Frazier and F. G. Fields,” placing the young attorney firmly in Whitesburg’s small legal community.
Whitesburg’s young mayor
Details of Frazier’s mayoral term are still buried in town minutes and local newsprint, but the outline is clear. Within only a few years of arriving in Letcher County he had been entrusted with the mayorship of Whitesburg. For a town that still thought of itself as a remote county seat, putting a twenty something outsider in the mayor’s chair says something about both the man and the place.
Later reminiscences in The Mountain Eagle remembered him with a mixture of local pride and amusement. One “Way We Were” column recalling trips to Bad Branch Falls in the 1930s mentions “Emery Frazier” alongside local men like Ray Logan and J. L. Hays, a reminder that the future Senate official once tramped Letcher County creekbeds like anyone else.
Even after he left the county, Whitesburg did not forget him, and he did not forget Whitesburg. A 2017 “Moments and Memories of WHS” feature in The Mountain Eagle looked back at the 1966 commencement exercises, when U.S. Senate officer and former mayor Emery L. Frazier returned home to deliver the graduation address at Whitesburg High School. The county’s own official history later folded his national titles into its list of notable local residents.
From Letcher County to the national stage
Frazier’s leap from a small-town mayor’s office to the Senate floor ran through another Kentuckian. At the 1932 Democratic National Convention, he served as assistant reading clerk. There he worked closely with Senator Alben W. Barkley, the Paducah Democrat whose booming oratory made him the convention’s keynote speaker. Shortly after the convention, Barkley arranged for his friend’s appointment as the Senate’s legislative clerk.
“I thought I’d go up for a little while,” Frazier later joked. In reality, he stayed as legislative clerk for sixteen years, even surviving the Republican takeover of 1947. Congressional Record pages from those years are studded with his name in the routine formulas of floor procedure. Roll calls and bill readings begin with lines like “The legislative clerk, Emery L. Frazier, called the roll,” the printed trace of a voice most Americans heard but never saw.
Photographs from the 1930s and 1940s help fill in the picture. A 1937 Harris and Ewing news photo titled “Will run Senate machine while Vice President Garner is absent” shows the Senate’s officers, including legislative clerk Emery Frazier, gathered around the presiding officer’s desk. Later images from the Truman Library capture Vice President Harry S. Truman presiding in the Senate with Frazier at his post on the floor. Another photograph from 1950, preserved in the “Members behind the desks” collection at the University of Mississippi, pictures senators crowded around the desks of the Vice President and Secretary of the Senate. Its caption identifies “Emery L. Frazier, Chief Clerk” among the officers gathered on the rostrum.
In 1948, as Barkley prepared to leave the majority leader’s desk for the vice presidency, Frazier moved up as well. He became chief clerk of the Senate, the top officer responsible for the day to day management of the chamber’s paperwork and proceedings. He would hold that job for seventeen years. At the same time he served as chief reading clerk for Democratic National Conventions from 1936 through 1964, his baritone voice calling the roll to radio listeners and, later, television audiences.
A 1961 profile titled “Senateside Scene,” originally printed in a Washington newsletter and entered into the Congressional Record, painted him as a quiet man with a resonant voice who relaxed by working with fine woods. It is a detail that makes sense when you look at the rest of his life. Frazier was not just a clerk of the moment. He was a keeper of the furniture, the books, and the stories that gave the Senate a past.
Saving the Senate’s presiding officer’s desk
The episode that links Emery Frazier most directly to Kentucky historical memory began not in Frankfort or Whitesburg but in the steel and glass above the Senate Chamber. In 1938 a structural engineer examined the chamber’s eighty year old ceiling and declared it unsafe. World War II delayed any drastic action, but after the war the Senate finally agreed to tear out the old Victorian chamber and remodel it in the simplified neoclassical style that exists today.
The remodeling came in two stages in 1949 and 1950. During each phase the Senate decamped to its old pre Civil War chamber down the hall. In this temporary space the ninety six senators sat in chairs instead of at their individual desks. One piece of furniture in particular did not fit the new design. The large walnut presiding officer’s desk designed by architect Thomas U. Walter in 1858 had anchored the south end of the old chamber for nearly a century. In the new scheme there was no place for it.
For many officials this would have been just another surplus fixture. For Chief Clerk Emery Frazier it was an opportunity. The Senate’s own account of the episode notes that Frazier, a “student of the Senate’s history” and a “proud Kentuckian,” proposed a solution. The old desk should not simply be stored or scrapped. It should be presented to its last occupant, Vice President and former majority leader Alben Barkley, by then perhaps the most famous Kentuckian in national politics. Frazier also pointed out that the desk’s first occupant, Vice President John C. Breckinridge, had been a Kentucky senator.
On September 22, 1950, the Senate unanimously agreed to Frazier’s idea and voted to present the desk to Barkley “as an expression of high appreciation.” The desk eventually made its way to the University of Kentucky in Lexington, where it still stands as a tangible link between Washington and the Commonwealth.
Behind that neat institutional story sits a paper trail that runs straight back to Kentucky. An honors thesis by Olivia Bowers on the clerk’s desk cites a July 18, 1951 letter from Chief Clerk Emery L. Frazier to Kentucky Historical Society secretary Bayless E. Hardin in the Society’s deaccession file, discussing the transfer of the presiding officer’s desk to the Alben Barkley Library at the University of Kentucky. A note in The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, summarizing the same story for Kentucky readers, remarks that the desk had been “saved from oblivion by Emery L. Frazier.”
Taken together, these sources show Frazier not just as an efficient administrator, but as a Kentuckian who leveraged his office to make sure a piece of Senate material culture would live out its days in his home state.
Books, objects, and a clerk of memory
The trail of objects associated with Emery and Mary F. Frazier reinforces that picture. The Kentucky Historical Society’s online catalog lists a “Mary F. Frazier and Emery L. Frazier Collection” that includes items such as a figurine and a cash register tied to their household. PastPerfect entries identify some pieces as having belonged to the Fraziers before their donation, suggesting that at least part of their domestic world made its way into the state’s collections.
Beyond official donations, surviving volumes from Frazier’s personal library occasionally surface in the antiquarian book trade. Dealers have described copies of Thomas Marshall Green’s The Spanish Conspiracy bearing Emery L. Frazier’s bookplate. Some of these volumes also carry inscriptions from former governor J. C. W. Beckham. Those traces hint at a reading life steeped in nineteenth century Kentucky political history and at networks that connected a young lawyer and legislator to an older generation of Democratic leaders.
Within the Senate, co workers remembered Frazier as a kind of unofficial historian long before he had that title. The Senate biography notes that he spent much of his off the floor time as chief clerk researching institutional history, soliciting photographs and biographical sketches of past secretaries, and promising to produce a detailed study of the Senate desks.
Even small stories fit the pattern. In a 1992 Senate oral history, longtime staffer Dorothye G. Scott recalled that Chief Clerk Frazier kept a special volume in which senators would sign their names after taking part in the annual reading of George Washington’s Farewell Address, a ritual he helped to choreograph. That habit of commemorating each year’s reading in a book is very much what you might expect from someone who had already saved the presiding officer’s desk for posterity.
Secretary of the Senate, 1966
By the mid 1960s, Emery Frazier had spent more than three decades on the Senate floor. When Secretary of the Senate Felton Johnston announced his retirement in 1965, many senior senators put Frazier forward as the obvious successor. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, however, wanted to elevate party secretary Francis R. Valeo. The compromise Mansfield worked out says a lot about how highly Frazier was regarded.
Under a resolution adopted on August 20, 1965, the Senate elected Frazier to serve as Secretary beginning January 1, 1966, with his term to end on September 30 of that year, shortly after his seventieth birthday. Valeo would then take over the office. To avoid any gap in the chain of authority, the Senate Journal records that Frazier was sworn in on October 22, 1965, just before adjournment, even though his formal term would not begin until the first of the year.
Reference works like the Congressional Research Service study Secretary of the Senate: Legislative and Administrative Duties and the official list of secretaries on the Senate website list his service precisely: January 1 through September 30, 1966. Declassified staff rosters from agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, compiled for internal directories in that same period, likewise identify “Emery L. Frazier” as Secretary of the Senate, providing an independent government cross check on the dates.
In those nine months, Frazier occupied the formal pinnacle of the Senate’s staff structure. Yet even as Secretary he resisted giving up his old work. According to the Senate biography, he loved calling the roll and did not gladly surrender that task to his successor as chief clerk.
On September 30, 1966, he stepped down in accordance with the arrangement. The Congressional Record for that day records tributes by senators who praised his decades of service and notes that the Senate appointed him to continue working on a history of the institution.
Teacher of historians, adopted son of Letcher County
Frazier’s postretirement work took place in a cramped room off the Senate Library. The Senate biography opens with a story about future Senate historian Richard Baker, then a young acting curator, following a set of instructions to Room S 411 in the Capitol only to discover that it already had an occupant. The “retired” secretary of the Senate was using the space as his private office, surrounded by files, books, and relics from his years in the chamber. Baker soon realized that he had found a living encyclopedia of Senate lore.
Those informal tutorials lasted until 1970, when declining health forced Frazier to give up his trips to the Capitol. He returned to Kentucky without having completed the history he had once envisioned about Senate desks, and he died there on April 24, 1973. The Congressional Record marked his passing that spring with warm reminiscences of a man who had started as a small town lawyer and ended up as the Senate’s institutional memory.
Back in the mountains, he remained part of the story locals told about themselves. Letcher County’s official history page, Letcher County reference works for younger readers, and articles in The Mountain Eagle all present him as a kind of adopted son of the county: the former mayor of Whitesburg who went to Washington, served as chief clerk and Secretary of the Senate, and then came home to rest in Kentucky soil.
Why Frazier still matters
Emery L. Frazier’s life helps us see how Appalachian places shaped the national government in the twentieth century. He was not a senator or a cabinet officer. He did not draft the New Deal or declare war. Instead he occupied the clerk’s table, the one spot on the Senate floor where every bill, resolution, and roll call passed in front of him.
The habits he learned in Kentucky law offices and in the rough and tumble of local politics carried over to that work. He valued procedure, continuity, and the things that make an institution feel like itself: a well worn desk, a roll call carefully read, a book in which each senator signs after taking part in a yearly ritual. When he had the chance, he used his influence to steer some of that history back to Kentucky, arranging for the old presiding officer’s desk to end up at the University of Kentucky and depositing his own papers and objects with the Kentucky Historical Society.
For Whitesburg and Letcher County, remembering Frazier is a way of remembering that the road between the North Fork of the Kentucky River and the Senate floor has never been entirely one way. The young lawyer who came over Pine Mountain in the 1920s carried the mountains with him into the chamber. In the end, he brought some of the chamber back to the mountains.
Sources & Further Reading
Official Congressional Directory, multiple editions, especially 89th Congress, 2nd Session (1966). Government Printing Office. Biographical entries for “Emery L. Frazier” as legislative clerk, chief clerk, and secretary of the Senate.
Congressional Record (various years). Routine floor proceedings identify Frazier’s roles as legislative clerk and chief clerk; the Extensions of Remarks for July 14, 1961 include the “Senateside Scene” profile entered into the Record. GovInfo+1
Congressional Record, September 30, 1966 and April 30, 1973. Senate tributes on Frazier’s retirement as Secretary and later on his death. GovInfo+1
“Emery L. Frazier” official portrait, U.S. Senate Historical Office.
“Senate Donates Historic Desk,” Historical Highlights, U.S. Senate, September 22, 1950. Narrative of the chamber renovation and Frazier’s role in arranging the donation of the presiding officer’s desk to Alben Barkley and the University of Kentucky.
200 Notable Days: Senate Stories, 1787–2002 (Government Printing Office). Entry on the presiding officer’s desk that credits Frazier with devising the plan to send the desk to Barkley and notes its current location at the University of Kentucky.
“Members of the Senate behind the desks of the Vice President and Secretary of the Senate,” 1950 photograph, George F. Mobley / National Geographic, eGrove, University of Mississippi, identifying “Emery L. Frazier, Chief Clerk.” eGrove
Kentucky Legislative Research Commission, Kentucky General Assembly Membership, 1900–2005, entry for “Frazier, Emery L.” (House, District 45).
Kentucky Historical Society, deaccession file 1951.35, including Chief Clerk Emery L. Frazier’s July 18, 1951 letter to KHS secretary Bayless E. Hardin regarding the presiding officer’s desk. TopScholar
The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, report of the secretary treasurer noting that the presiding officer’s desk was “saved from oblivion by Emery L. Frazier.”
The Mountain Eagle (Whitesburg), various issues and “Way We Were” / “Moments and Memories of WHS” retrospectives documenting Frazier’s law practice, mayorship, 1966 commencement address, and 1973 obituary.
“About the Secretary of the Senate | Emery L. Frazier, 1966,” Senate Historical Office biography. U.S. Senate
“Emery L. Frazier,” Wikipedia entry (consulted for quick reference and cross checking against official sources, especially on disputed birth dates).
“Secretaries of the Senate,” Senate Historical Office chronological list. U.S. Senate+1
Olivia Bowers, “The History of the United States Senate Clerk’s Desk” and “A Historical Analysis and Online Exhibit of the U.S. Senate Clerk’s Desk,” Western Kentucky University (for analysis of Frazier’s correspondence and his role in preserving the desk). TopScholar
Secretary of the Senate: Legislative and Administrative Duties, Congressional Research Service, for institutional context and the list of secretaries. Every CRS Report
Letcher County Government, “History – Letcher County,” listing Frazier among notable residents. letchercounty.ky.gov
“Letcher County, Kentucky” and “Whitesburg, Kentucky” entries in general reference works and children’s encyclopedias that identify Frazier as former mayor and Secretary of the Senate. Kiddle+1