By James Kelly, The Clock/Granite State News Collaborative
Three former executive councilors are vying for higher office in the Sept. 10 Democratic primary in New Hampshire. 1st District Congressman Chris Pappas, who sat on the Executive Council for six years before his current job, is running for reelection. Colin Van Ostern, who sat on the Executive Council for four years, is running to replace Annie Kuster in the 2nd Congressional District. And Cinde Warmington, who is finishing her fourth year representing the 2nd District on the Executive Council, is running for the party’s gubernatorial nomination to replace Gov. Chris Sununu, who himself served for six years on the Executive Council.
That is all to say, the Executive Council creates, or at least can propel to prominence, many of New Hampshire’s movers and shakers.
When King Charles II of England created the Executive Council (then the “President’s Council”) in 1679, it served in a similar capacity to the modern state Senate. The council was an upper-house counterpart to the House of Representatives and served as advisors to the governor, according to a paper, “A Brief History of the Governor’s Council,” on file at the NH State Library. Members appointed to the council were men of prominence, handpicked by the king.
After the colonies won their independence from England, New Hampshire retained that council, and while executive councilors have not carried the same royal endorsement that they did 350 years ago, a number of them have since been elected to the U.S. Senate, U.S. House and governor’s office.
Among them was Charles Miller Floyd. Born to “pinching poverty” in Derry in 1861, Floyd built a substantial business and political career, including election to the Executive Council. As a boy, Floyd worked as a farmhand and in a shoe factory, according to an article in a 1902 edition of The Granite Monthly magazine. After clerking for a hardware store, Floyd found success in 1893 with his purchase of the Manchester One Price Clothing Company. Floyd was elected to the state Senate in 1899, and the Executive Council in 1905, according to the NH Division of Historical Resources. He was elected governor in 1907.
Another shoemaker, Francis Parnell Murphy, was born in Winchester, in 1877. His father was an Irish immigrant, Civil War veteran and tannery worker. Murphy took up the family trade and found a job nailing together packing cases for shoes, and, after migrating between shoe factories in New Hampshire, eventually founded the J.F. McElwain Company, a shoe manufacturer. Murphy was elected as a state representative. in 1931, and then to the Executive Council in 1933. He was elected governor in 1937. Still in the midst of the Great Depression, Murphy initiated public works projects like the Hampton Beach Bathhouse and the Cannon Mountain Tramway. He also established the State Police. While serving his second term as governor, Murphy founded a radio station. Adopting the first three letters of his name as the station’s call sign, Murphy’s WMUR aired for the first time on Oct. 2, 1940. In 1953, Murphy won the rights to Manchester’s television Channel 9, and WMUR-TV debuted on March 28, 1954.
A Minnesota native, Charles Milby Dale was stationed at Fort Constitution in Portsmouth with the U.S. Army Artillery Coast Corps during World War I. After the war, Dale practiced law in Portsmouth, at one point representing Mary and Josephine Prescott and contesting the will of their brother, Charles W. Prescott. Dale won the case, and the Prescott sisters used the money – somewhere in the range of $2.5 million – to buy land on the Portsmouth waterfront. The project was completed in 1939, and Prescott Park was opened. Dale was then elected Portsmouth city solicitor, then mayor, state senator and then Senate president. In 1937, Dale was elected to the Executive Council, and in 1944, he defeated incumbent Gov. Robert Blood in the Republican primary and won the general election.
Young New Hampshire voters may recognize Judd Gregg – or at least his name – from their college campuses. Plymouth State University hosts the Judd Gregg Meteorology Institute. UNH runs the Judd Gregg Marine Research Complex. And at St. Anselm College, Gregg was instrumental in establishing the New Hampshire Institute of Politics. Before he was a name on a building, however, Gregg was an executive councilor. Born in Nashua to a politically prominent family – when he was 5, Gregg’s father, Hugh Gregg, was elected governor of New Hampshire Judd Gregg studied at Phillips Exeter Academy, then Columbia University and earned a law degree at Boston University in 1972. In 1978, Gregg was elected to the Executive Council. He won a seat in the U.S. House in 1980, and the governor’s office in 1988. Gregg was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992 and served three terms.
So remember: When you vote for an executive councilor, you also might be paving the way for a future congressman, U.S. senator or governor.
The Know Your Vote, youth voter guide project was designed, reported and produced by student and young professional journalists from The Clock,The Concord Monitor, The Equinox, Granite State News Collaborative, Keene State College, The Laconia Daily Sun, The Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, Nashua Ink Link and The Presidency and the Press program at Franklin Pierce University. See the full guide at www.collaborativenh.org/know-your-vote.