Robert F. Broussard

Career

Broussard attended Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., from 1879 to 1882. He was a night inspector of customs in New Orleans from 1885 to 1888, when he was appointed assistant weigher and statistician. He held that position in 1888–89. He graduated from the Tulane University Law School in 1889. He was admitted to the bar the same year and launched his practice in New Iberia. He was elected prosecuting attorney of the Nineteenth Judicial District and held that office from 1892 to 1897.

Broussard was elected as a Democrat to the Fifty-fifth and to the eight succeeding Congresses (March 4, 1897 – March 4, 1915). While in the House of Representative, he was chairman of the Committee on Expenditures in the Department of Justice (Sixty-third Congress); he did not seek renomination in 1914, having become a candidate for Senator. He was elected to the Senate already on 21 May 1912 and served from March 4, 1915, until his death three years later in New Iberia. In the Senate he was chairman of the Committee on National Banks (Sixty-fourth and Sixty-fifth Congresses).

Broussard introduced the "American Hippo Bill", H.R. 23261, in 1910. This bill proposed $250,000 in funding from the federal government to import the hippopotamus from Africa in order to solve two problems at once: the meat shortage in the United States and the invasive plant-species called the Water Hyacinth invading Louisiana's waterways. He was a member of The Boston Club of New Orleans.

References

• Robert F. Broussard, late a senator from Louisiana, Memorial addresses delivered in the House of Representatives and Senate frontispiece 1919

References

1. (9 November 1903). "S. Doc. 58-1 - Fifty-eighth Congress. (Extraordinary session -- beginning November 9, 1903.) Official Congressional Directory for the use of the United States Congress. Compiled under the direction of the Joint Committee on Printing by A.J. Halford. Special edition. Corrections made to November 5, 1903". U.S. Government Printing Office.
2. "History of Bills and Resolutions - Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 45 (1910)".
3. "Louisiana's Bizarre Hippo History To Be Recounted in Movie 'American Hippopotamus'". [[The Times-Picayune]].
4. "History of the Boston club, organized in 1841, by Stuart O. Landry".