William Henry King (June 3, 1863 – November 27, 1949) was an American lawyer, politician, and jurist from Salt Lake City, Utah. As a Democrat, King represented Utah in the United States Senate from 1917 until 1941.
After holding local offices and serving two terms in the territorial legislature, he graduated from the law department of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He later joined the Utah bar and practiced law. He held other territorial offices and was appointed as an associate justice of the Utah Supreme Court, serving between 1894 and 1896.
After Utah became a state in 1896, King was elected to the United States House of Representatives and served in the 55th Congress from March 4, 1897 to March 3, 1899. He was not nominated for a second term, but when his replacement, B. H. Roberts, was denied his seat because he was a polygamist, King was elected to complete Roberts's term. He served from April 2, 1900 to March 3, 1901. He ran for the same position in 1900 and again in 1902, but lost both times.
King was elected to the United States Senate four times, serving between March 4, 1917 and January 3, 1941. In 1918 and 1919, he served on the Overman Committee, which investigated seditious pro-German activity during World War I and Bolshevik-inspired anti-Americanism in the months following the war's end.
Though a Democrat, King was somewhat independent of the popular Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt; he was re-elected in 1934 on the strength of support for Roosevelt's New Deal, but he opposed the proposal to expand the Supreme Court as well as FDR's candidacy for an unprecedented third presidential term. When he ran for re-election in 1940, he lost the Democratic nomination to Congressman Abe Murdock, a "100% New Dealer" who strongly supported Roosevelt.[2]
King remained in Washington, D.C., where he practiced law until April 1947. He returned to Utah and died there in 1949. He was buried at Salt Lake City Cemetery.
King was married twice, first to Louisa Ann "Annie" Lyman, to whom he wed in 1889, and remained with her to her death on April 16, 1906.[3][4] He was then married to Vera B. Sjodahl, a daughter of Janne M. Sjödahl, from 1912 to his own death in 1949.[5] One of his sons by Vera, David S. King, served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and was a United States Ambassador to both the Malagasy Republic and Mauritius. One of his granddaughters, Jody Olsen, has served as Director of the Peace Corps since 2018. His paternal first cousin, Culbert Olson, was a Governor of California.
^Edmund Rice (1638) Association, 2007. Descendants of Edmund Rice: The First Nine Generations.
^"Thomas Rice King". Early Latter Day Saints; Mormon Trail Database. Retrieved September 21, 2010.
Further reading
(1994) "King, William H." article in the Utah History Encyclopedia. The article was written by John Sillitoe and the Encyclopedia was published by the University of Utah Press. ISBN 9780874804256. Archived from the original on March 21, 2024 and retrieved on June 12, 2024.