Fred R. Harris, the maverick Oklahoma Democrat who served eight years in the Senate and lost a race for his party’s 1976 presidential nomination in a populist campaign that challenged politics as usual and proposed radical changes for America, died on Saturday. He was 94.
His death was confirmed by Margaret Elliston, his wife. She said he had died of natural causes at a hospital in Albuquerque, N.M.
In a meteoric rise and fall, Mr. Harris was a state legislator who went to Washington in 1964 to fill the unexpired term of Senator Robert S. Kerr, who had died of a heart attack. He supported American involvement in the Vietnam War, was a favorite of President Lyndon B. Johnson, whose Great Society programs he backed, and nearly became Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey’s running mate for the White House in 1968. When he left the Senate, he flirted with a run for president in 1972, seemingly destined for greater things.
But in a tumultuous, divisive era, as the nation confronted war, the civil rights movement, urban riots and the assassination of leaders, Mr. Harris underwent a dramatic passage from moderate-conservative to liberal ideas, and then to a “new populism” addressing issues that had been virtually taboo: racial equality, class struggle, the exploitation of workers, and a national redistribution of economic and political power. He reversed his stand on the Vietnam War, calling for troop reductions and then a withdrawal from military operations in Southeast Asia.
Mr. Harris had always forged his own path. Born to sharecroppers in the Red River Valley, he caught catfish in a creek and drove a combine in wheat harvests. He was also a Phi Beta Kappa intellectual who defended human rights and quoted Shakespeare, Shaw and Bacon from memory.
As his populism matured ahead of his run for the presidency in 1976, he proposed higher taxes for the rich and lower ones for everyone else, tighter controls over big business, abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency and a “moral” foreign policy that would end American support for dictators.
He supported federal aid to cities, abortion rights, busing to racially integrate schools and community control of police forces. He had a strong record on civil rights. As Democratic national chairman in 1969, he had opened doors to racial minorities, and as a member of the Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders, he had shaped its 1968 conclusion that entrenched racism had been the root cause of urban riots the previous year.
“The issue is privilege,” Mr. Harris told The New York Times in 1975. “The fundamental problem is that too few people have all the money and power, and everybody else has too little of either. The widespread diffusion of economic and political power ought to be the express goal — the stated goal — of government.”
Opponents scoffed at many of his ideas, calling them impractical or misguided, perhaps bordering on Marxism. But defenders said they echoed the themes of earlier populists like William Jennings Bryan and Robert M. La Follette Sr.
Mr. Harris insisted that his message was an appeal to voters to unite across racial, regional and narrow self-interested lines, and an attack on “the superrich, giant corporations” and what he saw as the cherished illusion that there is equal opportunity in the United States.
The provocative language was also an effort to distinguish himself in a crowded field of Democratic candidates, including former Govs. Jimmy Carter of Georgia and Milton Shapp of Pennsylvania; Senators Birch Bayh of Indiana, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Henry M. Jackson of Washington; Representative Morris K. Udall of Arizona; and R. Sargent Shriver, the founding director of the Peace Corps.
Mr. Harris campaigned on a shoestring. He collected an army of volunteers and small contributions in ice-cream buckets, traveled in a camper and carried his own luggage. He sought a coalition of disaffected Black and poor white people, blue-collar workers, farmers, and families burdened by unemployment, inflation and taxes.
“Those in the coalition don’t have to love one another,” he said. “All they have to do is recognize that they are commonly exploited, and that if they get themselves together they are a popular majority and can take back the government.”
The Harris campaign attracted a wide following but faltered in the primaries. Mr. Carter won the nomination and the presidency, narrowly defeating President Gerald R. Ford in the 1976 election.
Mr. Harris left Washington, became a professor of political science at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, began writing books and settled into a bucolic life raising chickens on a cottonwood-shaded farm in Corrales, N.M.
“I’ve got 28 chickens, some calves and a garden,” he told The New York Times in 1977. “We’ve got a lot of black-eyed peas, onions, radishes, a lot of spinach. No, I’ll never go back into politics. I haven’t the slightest interest.”
Fred Roy Harris was born in a two-room farmhouse near Walters, Okla., on Nov. 13, 1930, to Fred Byron and Eunice (Person) Harris. At 5, he made a dime a day driving a horse in circles to power a hay baler. He graduated from Walters High School with honors in 1948.
In 1949, he married LaDonna Crawford, a Comanche active in Native American affairs who campaigned with him and in 1980 ran for vice president on the Citizens Party ticket. They had three children, Kathryn, Byron and Laura, and were divorced in 1981. In 1982, he married Margaret S. Elliston.
Information on his survivors was not immediately available late Saturday.
He worked his way through the University of Oklahoma, earning a political science degree in 1952 and a law degree in 1954. After two years of civil law practice in Lawton, Okla., he was elected in 1956 as the youngest member of the Oklahoma Senate. He wrote legislation that established the Oklahoma Human Rights Commission, and in 1962 ran unsuccessfully for governor.
In 1964, after the death of Senator Kerr, he won a runoff against an interim appointee, former Gov. J. Howard Edmondson, and the general election against a popular Republican, Bud Wilkinson, the former football coach of the University of Oklahoma Sooners.
He was re-elected in 1966 to a full six-year term. In 1968, as antiwar protests disrupted the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Mr. Humphrey considered him for a running mate, but instead chose Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine. They lost the election to the Republicans, Richard M. Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew.
Mr. Harris wrote nearly a score of books, mostly on politics, including “The New Populism” (1973) and “America’s Democracy: The Ideal and the Reality” (1986). He also wrote several novels and two memoirs, “Does People Do It?” (2008) and “Potomac Fever” (1977), which suggested: “People should, like snakes, shed their skin every now and then.”
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