Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,810
By This is the grave of Peter Dominick.
Born in 1915 in Stamford, Connecticut, Dominick grew up in elite east coast world, went to all the right prep schools, then of course was on to Yale. He was in the right clubs at Yale, graduated in 1937, and then went to Yale Law, finishing there in 1940. He got a job at Carter, Ledyard and Milburn, a big New York law firm. In 1942, he diverged from his career to fight in World War II, working in aviation. He left the military as a captain in 1945. He spent most of his time flying over the Hump in Asia. Fun times….
After he left the military, Dominick went back to work in New York but seems to have wanted something new. He moved to Denver and started a law practice there that did quite well, not surprisingly given his connections. Eventually, he got involved in local politics. Dominick was your 100% WASPy New England Republican, which didn’t always play well in the West, but he was able to adapt himself to the style of western Republican around suspicion of government interference in their farms and ranches. So Dominick ran for the Colorado legislature in 1956. He won and served two terms. Then in 1960, he ran for Congress and defeated an incumbent by the name of Byron Johnson. He only stayed in Congress for one term, immediately beginning a run for Senate in 1962. He won that too, again defeating an incumbent named John Carroll, who was a very solid liberal so that was a sad loss.
Mostly, Dominick was a nobody. He is barely remembered today. Even my Colorado history friends take a second to remember him. As a general rule, his positions fit his New England background–liberal of racial issues, supportive of environmentalism, horrible on economics. He voted for all the civil rights legislation, including Thurgood Marshall’s nomination for the Supreme Court. He supported all the environmental legislation in the Johnson and Nixon administrations too, This was far from uncommon at the time–environmentalism was completely bipartisan before the mid 70s and part of the goal of the Sagebrush Rebellion, the original astroturf movement, was to kill off Republicans like Dominick and replace them with a new party that would be Goldwateresque and resent all federal intrusions into public lands and those who made money on them. Of course they found their saint in Ronald Reagan, but by this time Dominick was long gone.
But for the most part, Dominick is a no one and hardly ever appears in the historical literature. He served on the Armed Services and Labor and Public Welfare Committees. One area where I have run across Dominick was in his harsh opposition to including domestic workers under the Fair Labor Standards Act. He thought it was outrageous that people who employed maids and the like would have to engage in record-keeping and that most couples (and he always assumed it would be couples employing maids and nannnies and the like) would simply fire their domestic help and that then would lead to higher unemployment. Nope, better to just keep allowing exploitation. In fact, this is where Dominick most comes up in discussions for labor historians–his overwhelming sexism and disdain for the entire idea of housework as labor.
That was pretty typical of Dominick. By the early 70s he found himself getting into hot water on a number of issues. For one thing, he was super racist toward Africans, whatever he thought about civil rights at home. He famous said, when opposing American involvement in United Nations food programs, that the population of Uganda “would rather eat the people than the food.” He mostly hated the UN generally and was always a solid vote to strip American funding from it. He also was completely supportive of Richard Nixon through Watergate and publicly said that it was an insignificant issue, though by late 73 even he was starting to distance himself from Nixon. Every time that Ted Kennedy would start a Senate committee meeting on health care, Dominick would start by saying, “This committee has no jurisdiction over national health insurance.” And then Kennedy would move on to the business of the day. He was also a big national defense guy, though no one objected to any of that politically.
This all made Dominick a prime target for Democrats in 1974. They ran a young charismatic guy named Gary Hart against him and Hart absolutely obliterated Dominick, defeating the two-term incumbent 57-39. A big part of Hart’s campaign was attacking Dominick for the latter’s time as head of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, when it was accused that Dominick had illegally funneled contributions from the milk industry into Nixon’s campaign chest. I mean, I can’t imagine anything untoward going on in the Nixon campaign in 72, so I was shocked and outraged upon even hearing such malicious accusations! Dominick’s response was a TV campaign that portrayed Hart as a crazy liberal (hilarious; even though Hart had worked closely with George McGovern, as a senator, he was one of the biggest neoliberals in the body and was extremely anti-union), but it failed, obviously.
Gerald Ford was definitely going to take care of Dominick and so he gave him a sweet gig–ambassador to Switzerland. The problem was that Dominick also was started to suffer from multiple sclerosis. So he only stayed for three months before retiring. He moved to Florida and died there in 1981, at the age of 65.
Anyway, if you want to sit and contemplate Peter Dominick’s career, he’s provided you a seat to do so. For context on how little known he is, if you type his name into a search engine, there’s a comedian and an architect that come up first.
Peter Dominick is buried in Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado.
If you would like this series to visit other senators elected in 1962, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. The loathsome Everett Dirksen is in Pekin, Illinois and the utterly forgettable Olin Johnston is in Honea Path, South Carolina. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.