Rufus Holman was born in Portland, Oregon, on October 14, 1877. There he received his education in the public schools and became a teacher in 1896. After leaving teaching in 1898, he worked in various fields from farming and operating a steamboat, to pursuits related to the accounting field until 1910. That year Holman began making record keeping books and paper boxes in Portland. He then worked in the cold storage business and was active in civic affairs.
Political career
Holman won his first election to political office in 1914, when he was elected to the MultnomahCounty Board of Commissioners, where he served two four-year terms During the middle 1920s, Holman was an active member of the Ku Klux Klan in Oregon, serving as an officer in that organization. In 1931, Oregon Governor Julius L. Meier appointed him as state Treasurer after Thomas B. Kay died in office. He began in office on May 1, 1931, winning election to a full four-year term in 1932, and winning re-election in 1936. He resigned from the office in 1938, leaving on December 27, 1938. Holman was strongly concerned about the environment. In 1937, he garnered publicity when he demonstrated the polluted state of the Willamette River by briefly holding a cage of salmon in the water, then quickly pulling them out dying to a shocked audience. In 1938, he was elected to the United States Senate. As Senator, Holman was critical of the foreign policy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, taking a strongly isolationist position which placed him on the right wing of Oregon politics. As a Senator Holman was a staunch opponent of liberalizing immigration laws to allow easier immigration by Jews and other persecuted Europeans, a position which was deeply resented by Oregon's small but politically potent Jewish population, who quickly came to view the former KKK member Holman as anti-semitic and who sought his electoral defeat. While attenuating his isolationism after the December 1941Attack on Pearl Harbor, coming to support the war effort, Holman's name remained indissolubly tied with the now politically unpopular isolationist position and he faced a high profile challenge in the May 1944 Republican primary from progressive Wayne Morse. During his 1944 re-election bid, Holman publicly charged that Morse was a stalking horse for the Democrats, who, facing a severe deficit in party registrations in Oregon, needed a fissure in the Republican camp to capture the Senate seat in November. When this conspiratorial theory did not gain traction, Holman proffered a new theory detailing an alleged plot involving the Portland shipyards of Henry J. Kaiser were being systematically used to stack the Republican primary against him. Newspaper editors around Oregon made hay over the conspiratorially-minded Senator, with one declaring that "like the ants, he has misplaced the center of the universe." While the incumbent Holman won a majority of Oregon's counties, taking 20 to Morse's 16, it was Morse who dominated in populous Multnomah and Lane counties, winning the primary by a plurality of 10,000 votes out of more than 143,000 votes cast in a three-cornered race.
Later life, death, and legacy
After his 1944 defeat, Holman returned to private life and never sought public office again. Holman returned to managing the Portland Paper Box Company in Portland, before retiring to his farm near Molalla, Oregon. Holman died on November 27, 1959, in his home town of Portland. He was buried at River View Cemetery in Portland. Holman's great-nephew, Ralph M. Holman, was a justice of the Oregon Supreme Court.
