Hoey (HOO-ee) was born to Captain Samuel Alberta Hoey, a
Confederate States Army officer, and Mary Charlotte Roark. He attended school until age eleven. He worked on his family's farm and bought a weekly newspaper when he was 16. He was elected to the state legislature when he was twenty. He served as a state representative and then as a state senator. He served from 1919 to 1921. He was the
59th governor of the
U.S. state of
North Carolina from 1937 to 1941. In his inaugural address as governor, Hoey delivered what one historian described as “an extended ode to the New Deal.” During his time as governor, Hoey advocated progressive measures such as the provision of free school textbooks and new labor legislation. In July 1937, he pardoned
Luke Lea, a Tennessee politician and former U.S. senator, who had been paroled a year earlier. His appointment of a black man to the board of trustees of a black college set a precedent. Following the 1938
Gaines Supreme Court decision on racial segregation in higher education, he asked the North Carolina legislature to provide for segregated higher education for blacks. Though opposed to integrated education, he said that the people of the state "do believe in equality of opportunity in their respective fields of service" and that "the white race cannot afford to do less than simple justice to the Negro." Nevertheless, during a speech to the
United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization that his wife was a member of, he affirmed his support for segregation."Niggers are not entitled to civil rights and will never get them. There were no niggers on the Mayflower."In
1940, Hoey quietly opposed a third term for FDR. When he believed that President
Franklin D. Roosevelt would not seek a third term, Hoey rejected the
favorite son role for which the state legislature had recommended him and supported the presidential candidacy of Secretary of State
Cordell Hull. Hoey won election to the U.S. Senate in
1944. He served from 1945 until his death in 1954. Hoey's politics were arguably those of a conservative Democrat. He opposed
Harry S. Truman's attempt to make the
Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) permanent. He promised to filibuster the effort as an attack on "the rights of every businessman in America." He supported the President's threats against striking railroad workers in December 1946. In the
1948 election, he supported Truman over the alternative,
Strom Thurmond. He supported President Truman's refusal to allow Congress access to records of government employees' loyalty investigations. In 1950, Hoey opposed statehood for
Hawaii because he thought it "inconceivable" to allow a territory with "only a small percentage of white people" to become a state. He advocated independence for Hawaii and cited U.S. treatment of Cuba and the Philippines as precedents. From 1949 to 1952 he headed the Investigations Subcommittee of the
Committee on Expenditures in Executive Departments. He conducted hearings into the role of "five percenters", government influence peddlers. In 1950 he chaired an investigation that resulted in a report, known as the Hoey Report, released in December of that year that said all of the government's intelligence agencies "are in complete agreement that sex perverts [meaning, primarily, gay men] in Government constitute security risks." Douglas Charles characterizes Hoey's involvement in the committee as reluctant, due to fears that the issue could become hyperbolic, leaving chief counsel Francis Flanagan as the actual driving force behind the Hoey Report. The 1957
Crittenden Report, a review by the U.S. Navy, criticized it: "No intelligence agency, as far as can be learned, adduced any factual data before that committee with which to support these opinions." Hoey married
Bessie Gardner, sister of North Carolina Governor
O. Max Gardner. They had three children. His wife died in 1942. He was also a member of the
Freemasons,
Odd Fellows,
Woodmen of the World, and the
Knights of Pythias. Hoey died at his desk in his Washington, D.C., office.
Sam Ervin was appointed to his seat in June 1954. ==Legacy==