Staggers, Harley Orrin

(b. 3 August 1907 near Keyser, West Virginia; d. 20 August 1991 in Cumberland, Maryland), sixteen-term member of the House of Representatives who from 1966 to 1980 served as the chairman of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce.

Literally born in a log cabin, Staggers was the fifth of twelve children of Jacob Kinsley Staggers and Frances Winona Cumberledge. His father engaged in various businesses, but none were very successful in supporting his large family. Staggers attended Keyser High School of Mineral County, West Virginia. Because of the family’s financial straits, Staggers worked as a child in an area silk mill. His love of football took him to Emory and Henry College in Emory, Virginia, where he played fullback. He was also active in student government. To finish his education, he worked for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, eventually becoming a brakeman. Summer employment found him in the wheat fields of Kansas and Oklahoma and for one year he worked in a rubber factory in Akron, Ohio. After graduating with a B.A. degree in 1931, Staggers spent two years as a teacher and coach at Norton High School, deep in the mountains of western Virginia. Returning to Mineral County, he served as the head football coach at Potomac State College from 1933 to 1935. He then did a year of graduate study at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, and later took courses at Northwestern, in Chicago.

From 1937 until 1941 Staggers served as the sheriff of Mineral County. He then secured an appointment as right-of-way agent for the West Virginia Road Commission in 1941 and 1942. In the latter year he became the state director of the federal Office of Government Reports (which later became the Office of War Information).

Enlisting in the U.S. Navy in World War II, Staggers was commissioned an officer and served as a navigator in the Naval Air Service in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters. During his Pacific duties he sustained injuries when his plane crashed on landing. He left the navy as a lieutenant commander in 1946. Just before leaving for overseas duty, Staggers married Mary Veronica Casey on 4 October 1943. They eventually became the parents of six children.

Staggers moved into national politics in 1948 when he defeated the one-term congressman Melvin C. Snyder to represent the Second District of West Virginia. As the cold war heated up Staggers became a consistent hawk in foreign affairs and a foe of domestic communists. Early in his career the Democratic party elected him as an assistant majority whip, and he proved efficient in marshaling votes on key issues. He was a member of the Veterans Affairs Committee and the Post Office and Civil Service Committee. He also chaired the Transportation and Aeronautics Subcommittee of the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee. As a staunch anticommunist, in January 1954 Staggers introduced H.R. 6943, which requested the president to appoint a blue-chip commission to find a way to outlaw the Communist party and to make membership in that party a crime.

In February 1962 his H.R. 10019 would have facilitated “action where action is needed most to apprehend members of the Communist conspiracy in this country.” The penalty was a fine of $10,000 and a five-year prison term. Among other provisions, this law would deny passports to members of groups identified as communist and disallow tax exemptions for such groups. It would have barred members of such groups from representing workers and making use of the facilities of the National Labor Relations Board. Finally, it would have required such persons to testify under oath and provide documentation demonstrating their innocence, removing their privilege against self-incrimination. The dubious constitutionality of some of these requirements stemmed from Staggers’s lack of training in law. Yet in earlier years he had opposed what he perceived to be the excesses of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

In 1966 his colleagues elevated Staggers to chair the powerful Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, and he continued in that post until his retirement. The committee’s responsibilities were extremely broad. In addition to trade matters, it held responsibility for communications, transportation, energy production, consumer protection, auto safety, public health, and pollution abatement. Among his accomplishments were actions to remove unsafe toys from the market, the introduction of safety devices in autos, federal funding for cancer research, and a truth-in-packaging law. During the Arab oil embargo, and in the service of his West Virginia constituents, Staggers pushed coal as an alternate energy source. The most publicized activity of his tenure was when he challenged CBS for supposedly fabricating news on hunger in America and Vietnam, as well its general coverage of Vietnam, a war he supported. The charges of contempt of Congress that his committee initiated against Frank Stanton, the head of CBS, were not sustained by the whole House of Representatives.

Staggers was responsible for the legislation that allowed railroads to divest themselves of unprofitable passenger traffic in 1971. But the legislation also created the federally subsidized Amtrak, which guaranteed that both the Baltimore and Ohio and the Chesapeake and Ohio would continue to run through West Virginia. In 1976 Conrail legislation gave further assistance to America’s declining rail system. Finally, the Staggers Rail Act of 1980 partly deregulated railroads. As a result several megasystems were created while smaller and weaker companies went out of business.

In some respects Staggers’s career seems paradoxical. Willing to strip communists of their rights, he was a supporter of the civil rights movement and voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of the following year. He supported the Equal Rights Amendment and the amendment that extended voting rights to eighteen-year-olds. He felt that both the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico should become states. At the same time he continued to support U.S. involvement in Vietnam and agreed with the National Rifle Association on gun legislation. The year after he sought to outlaw the Communist party, he recommended creation of a cabinet-level position called Secretary of Peace. These inconsistencies arose from the fact that Staggers was an old-time West Virginia politician who supported the interests and wishes of his constituents, policies that sometimes brought criticism from his colleagues. He was a tough and skilled fighter in Congress who generally used his power on behalf of the underdog. To the end of his career Staggers was an advocate for consumers and minorities. He was a joiner and among his many memberships (Moose, Lions, Elks, Knights of Pythias) his service in World War II took precedence; he belonged to the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Disabled American Veterans, and AMVETS. A lifelong Methodist, Staggers was also active as a Sunday-school teacher.

In 1980 Staggers chose not to run for reelection, having served thirty-two years in the House, a longevity record in West Virginia. His son, Harley O. Staggers, Jr., was defeated by Republican Cleve Benedict in the election year that brought Ronald Reagan to the White House. In August 1991, shortly after reaching his eighty-fourth birthday, Staggers fell from a ladder while working on his home. A few days later he drove himself to the hospital in nearby Cumberland. There, complications from the fall led to his death from cardiac and respiratory failure. Staggers is buried in his family’s plot in Keyser.

The apparent contradictions in Staggers’s political views and service grew out of his personal life experiences and from his consistent support of his West Virginia constituents. His long years of service in the seat of power neither corrupted him nor gave him an inflated sense of his own importance. Perhaps, as Rudyard Kipling said in his poem “If,” Staggers could “walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch.”

The Staggers papers are in the West Virginia Collection of the West Virginia University Library in Morgantown. An obituary is in the New York, Times (21 Aug. 1991).

Art Barbeau