From Battlefield To Senate: How Harold Hughes Reframed Alcoholism As A Treatable Disease

A single life can bend policy, culture, and the fate of families—and Harold E. Hughes is proof. We share how a farm kid from Depression-era Iowa lost his brother, survived war, and slid into alcohol-fueled chaos before a bathtub plea sparked a turnaround. That private shift led to public impact: decades of sobriety, a landslide governorship, and a U.S. Senate career that reframed alcoholism from moral failing to treatable illness.

We walk through the human beats—grief, trauma, court-martial, survivor’s guilt—and the tools that steadied him: community, routine, service, and an AA group he helped start. Then we connect those lived lessons to policy. Hughes chaired landmark hearings with Bill W. and Marty Mann, authored the Comprehensive Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Prevention, Treatment, and Rehabilitation Act, and helped launch the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Those moves unlocked funding, protected confidentiality, and brought addiction care into mainstream healthcare, setting the stage for modern recovery pathways.

Along the way, we bring it back to your kitchen table. If a loved one is struggling, boundaries and support are not opposites—they work together. Coaching, therapy, and peer groups can replace guesswork with a plan. We also share sponsor resources, including BetterHelp for flexible therapy and Intervention on Call for affordable, targeted family coaching plus free weekly Zoom forums. The takeaway is simple and urgent: recovery is possible, help is available, and you are not alone. If this story gave you hope or a next step, share it with someone who needs it, subscribe for more, and leave a review to help us reach the next family.

Chapters

• 0:35 Welcome And Sponsor Introductions
• 2:15 BetterHelp And Therapy Options
• 2:27 Intervention On Call Resources
• 4:02 Why Harold Hughes Matters
• 4:42 Early Life In Depression-Era Iowa
• 7:22 Love, Loss, And The Descent Into Drinking
• 10:09 War, Court-Martial, And Survival
• 13:15 Homecoming, Jail, And Rock Bottom
• 15:35 Spiritual Awakening And Finding AA
• 17:12 From Trucking To Governor
• 19:08 Abolishing Death Penalty And Civil Rights
• 20:28 U.S. Senate And National Recovery Policy

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:35

Welcome to the Party Records Podcast. My name is Matt Brown. If this is your first time here, welcome. I'm so glad you found us. If you're back for another listen, thanks for coming back. I'm an addiction interventionist. I work with families who have loved ones who are struggling with addiction or alcoholism who aren't yet willing to get the help that they need. This podcast is intended to help families have better, more hopeful, and productive conversations with those loved ones. I hope you'll get something out of this today. Before we get into our episode, I want to recognize a couple of our sponsors. The first sponsor I want to recognize is better help. Throughout my recovery, therapy has been a really important tool that I've been able to use. Even till today, I continue to work with a therapist and have someone that I can go to and talk to about difficult things and really get some perspective on some of the things that are going on with me throughout my life. The problem sometimes is that finding a therapist can be difficult. And that's where BetterHelp comes in. BetterHelp allows you to have a therapeutic experience in your own home, in your own office, around your schedule. As you sign up for BetterHelp, you're going to go through a questionnaire and they'll ask you questions about yourself, things you might be struggling with, things you might hope to get out of therapy, and they'll pair you with the therapist they feel like is right for you. Now, as you go along, if you feel like you'd like to switch therapists, you can do that at any time without any kind of financial penalty. You can do it for free. For those who are listening who want to try BetterHelp, please feel free to go to the link in the show notes. The link is betterhelp.com/slash partyrecords, and you'll get 10% off of your first month. The second sponsor that I want to recognize is Intervention on Call. You guys have heard me talk about Intervention on Call over and over again. And I'm passionate about this. I happen to be involved with Intervention on Call. I'm one of the providers there. And the idea behind Intervention on Call is that not every family needs to have a professional interventionist come into their living room and facilitate an intervention. When that's necessary, it can be highly effective. But for families who don't need that or who can't afford an interventionist, we offer hour-by-hour coaching sessions for$150 an hour where we can help families not only get their loved ones into treatment, but once they're in treatment, keep them from leaving AMA against medical advice, and help them formulate and follow aftercare plans. So if you have a loved one who's struggling and you need specific help and your family, please feel free to go to interventiononcall.com, choose one of the providers there that you feel like best fits your circumstances and book a session with them. If that's not something that you're able to do, or if you want to dip your toe in the water a little bit first before you do that, five nights a week, we offer free Zoom calls Sunday through Thursday where families can come on, they can ask questions, uh, they can have their cameras off and just listen. It's really up to you. But we want to provide a service for families so that you don't have to continue to suffer the way our families suffered when we were in active addiction. On to the episode. So I wanted to do something a little bit different today. I wanted to go back in history and find someone that had an impact on the recovery movement in our country. You know, I think as we look at this through the lens of the 12 steps, anonymity is sometimes something that's necessarily needed. We we we don't want to go out there and be the poster people for for AA or NA. But there are certain people who recovered a little bit more out loud than others. And so the person that we're going to talk about today is a man by the name of Harold E. Hughes. Now, Harold was born in 1922. He was born into a family of farmers. His dad was Lewis Hughes, and his mom was Etta Kelly. And of course, as you can imagine, 1922, this is the Great Depression. Things are not going well in Iowa. Farmers are not able to make the kind of money that they need to to support their families. And so Harold, along with his older brother Jesse, they were responsible for helping to provide for the family. And so what they would do is they would go out and they would hunt and they would bring meat into the home. They would sell the furs from those animals to help supplement their his their dad's income. And for the better part of Harold's growing up, that's how they were able to survive as a family. Um, it was difficult all the way around. Um, but Harold was a good student. Uh, as he got into high school, of course, he continued to grow. Uh, his he did very well academically, but he particularly excelled in sports. Um, he was a football player, he threw the discus. Uh, he also was quite musically talented from what the story says. And so these talents gave him opportunities to begin developing his leadership abilities and his charisma and made other people want to follow him. Um, the other thing that I should note is that Harold was raised in a very devout Methodist home. And this will be important later in the story, but this is something that really shaped him in his early years. He came up in a family of faith, and both his parents and he and his siblings were were very devout Methodists. Um as he and his brother grew older and got into high school, they were they were very big young men. Uh, they developed the nickname Packaderm, uh, which stood for elephant. The all of their friends called them the Packs, Big Pack and Little Pack. And Harold in particular was six foot three and weighed about 235 pounds, uh, which for someone during the Great Depression to be this tall and this big uh was unusual. So this certainly stood out in the group that he was in high school with. Um he actually went ended up going on from high school. He attended the University of Iowa on a football scholarship in 1940. Now, during this time that he was in college, he met Eva Mercer. Now, Eva was a young lady who was also a student at the University of Iowa. They fell in love, and within the year they decided to get married. Now, about this time the Great Depression had ended, the economy was beginning to recover. Harold and Eva wanted to start a family, and so they decided that Harold would leave school, stop playing football, go back to work, and they would start a family. Uh, throughout their life, they ended up having three daughters. Um, we're not quite sure when the first daughter was born, but Harold was married to Eva, and on June 1st, in 1942, something extremely tragic happened in Harold's life. His big brother and his best friend was killed in a car accident. Jesse and Jesse's friend Leroy Conrad and their two girlfriends, they died in a car accident as their car hit a bridge abutment during a thunderstorm. And they plunged into a flooded stream near Storm Lake, near their town in Iowa, um, where they all four of them were killed. Um Jesse and his friend Leroy were due to be inducted into the army just a few days from that moment. And so they they were killed just prior to their going into the army and beginning their service uh as, well, I guess World War II hadn't quite kicked off yet, but that would have happened uh throughout their time in the military. The one of the other tragic things that surrounded Jesse's death is the way they learned that he died. Uh that evening, uh a funeral director called their home thinking that the sheriff had already notified the family of Jesse's passing. And he had asked Jess uh Harold and Jesse's mother, Etta, when she'd like to come and pick up the body. And of course, at this point, she didn't know that Jesse had died. And so, of course, upon learning this, she became despondent. And and of course, this this news was very difficult for Harold to take as well. It was at this time that Harold really plunged into despair. He began to drink extremely heavily. Uh, he renounced his Methodist faith, decided that that's it, I want nothing more to do with God. And this really started the beginnings that uh history recalls his drinking in an alcoholic way. Um, of course, it continued to get worse, but this was really the event that set it all off. To add insult to injury, like many young men at this point in history, Harold was drafted into the army just a few months later in 1942. So not only did his brother die right before he was inducted into the army, Harold got drafted and was sent into the army, he became a Browning automatic rifleman, B A R BAR rifleman with the 16th Infantry, Infantry 1st Division. And this division was primarily deployed throughout Africa and Italy. And he was attached to the American Rangers in Sicily, the British commandos in Italy. Uh he saw service down in Africa. A lot of the things that happened, of course, throughout war, he he had to witness his friends die. He saw many of his friends killed by shrapnel and mortar fire on Sicilian beaches, and and these horrific experiences only deepened his loneliness and caused his drinking to become worse. Now, another problem was is that Harold was known for fighting when he was drunk. He would get drunk and he would intentionally start fights. Uh, he was an angry, angry drunk. And at one point, he actually assaulted an officer. And because of this, he was court-martialed. And he was found guilty. But rather than be put in prison because of the demands of the war, although he was found guilty, he was sent right back to the front lines in Sicily in 1943. Uh, this was just really reflecting the needs of the war. Uh, had there not been a war going on, he would have been imprisoned, and of course, life would have ended up much differently for him at that point. As he was back in Sicily, the the conditions that they were in caused an incredible infestation of mosquitoes. And of course, with mosquitoes comes malaria. And as as they're in trenches that had poor drainage, and you know, the how do I describe this tactfully? The sanitation was not good. I guess let's just say it that way. You know, because the the trenches had poor drainage and and the camps that they were in had poor sanitation, this mosquito population exploded, and many of the soldiers got malaria. Now, malaria ended up saving his life. On January 26, 1945, he was supposed to be on a landing craft that was going into a Sicilian beach. Now, because he was sick, he was not on that landing craft. As that landing craft approached the beach, it hit a German mine, which resulted in a massive explosion and fireball that killed 300 soldiers. Now, these landing craft that he was on, these were designed to carry armor. They would hold Sherman tanks, they would hold, you know, large numbers of soldiers. So these were not the small landing craft that you see at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, where there's just, you know, maybe a dozen or two soldiers getting off these landing crafts. These were massive ships that held you know large numbers of tanks and armor and and and soldiers. And so as this landing craft approached the beach, it hit this German mine, it exploded, and 300 of the troops that were on board died. And and he was intended to be there. Now, as the malaria worsened, he developed jaundice, and the army decided that he would be discharged on a medical discharge, and he was sent back home. So now, not only does he have the experience of losing his brother, losing the his his friends and brothers on the battlefield, their survivor's guilt because he was he survived where many of the men that he served with were killed on this on this landing craft, and he was sent home. Waiting for him at home was his wife Eva and their first daughter. Uh, he he started driving trucks, and that was really the only work that he could find at this point. His drinking continued, and it really started to take a toll on his marriage. In 1946, Eva sought his commitment as an inebriate, and this ended up leading to some jail time for him. He continued to drink in and out of jail, bar room fights, you know, just your typical angry drunk. And of course, along with this, back then they called it shell shock, but certainly some PTSD that was going untreated. This man was in a lot of pain. And in 1945, he got into a bathtub with a shotgun and he intended to take his own life. And in that moment, as he's crying to God, something happened. And he had what we call a spiritual awakening. He cried out to God asking for help, and in that moment, something shifted for him. It began with a renewal of faith, ended up going to Bible study, and struggled with his drinking, but was shortly thereafter introduced to Alcoholics Anonymous. As he began to stay sober and found such help in AA, he actually started an AA group in Ida Grove in 1955. And he ended up staying sober for 43 years. He continued to work in the trucking industry. And as a trucking manager, he fought the Commerce Commission in Iowa. There were some biases and some mistreatment of the truckers there. Uh, he battled them and was elected to the Iowa Better Trucking Bureau in 1945. Or excuse me, 1958. In 1962, he ran for governor in Iowa and he actually defeated the the incumbent governor, Norman Erb. And in subsequent elections in 1964 and in 1966, he won by landslides. So he was a very popular governor in Iowa. And his recovery contributed to all of this. All along, he continued active attendance and Alcoholics Anonymous, which was really the only avenue that people had at that point, other than being hospitalized, you know, like his wife tried to do as an inebriate, you know, to be put into institutions and dried out, basically medically detoxed. There was really no other treatment available for alcoholism at this time. So as he continued to go to AA, he served as governor of Iowa. Things that he's noted for is abolishing the death penalty in Iowa. He built community college and was really a front runner of civil rights protections in 1966, 64 and 66 while he was serving as the governor in Iowa. Now in 1969, he uh he ran for senator and he was elected. And from 1969 to 1975, he served as the U.S. Senator for Iowa in Washington, D.C. And during that time was really when his advocacy for addiction recovery, alcoholism recovery really began to take on a national role. Uh during his time in the Senate, he chaired hearings featuring AAAs Bill W. and Marty Mann. And then in 1970, he actually drafted a piece of legislation called the Comprehensive Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Prevention Act. And then later the Treatment and Rehabilitation Act, which was named the Hughes Act after him. He founded the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the NIAA. He developed state funding programs for the treatment of alcoholism, hospital incentives, confidentiality to treat alcoholism as an illness and not a moral failing. So this is kind of the beginnings as we begin to adopt this idea that alcoholism is a disease, at least on a national level. And he really advocated for people to have their lives saved and to actually get treatment rather than to look at this as a weakness of character or a moral failing. This saved countless lives. It reduced crime and it aided the recovery for millions and millions of America, Americans. He founded the Society of Americans for Recovery, SOAR, after his time in the Senate. And despite the fact that he ended up with a considerable amount of debt in his later years, he actually built treatment centers and then retired in 1975 to be more of a clergyman and a minister. In 1996, on October 23rd, Harold Hughes passed away in Glendale, Arizona. He was 74 years old. And he was taking a nap following a picnic, and he'd passed peacefully in his sleep. He was buried in Ida Grove back in Iowa, where he was born. And his legacy continues today with all of the advocacy and legislation that he wrote during his time as a U.S. senator. I wanted to highlight men and women like this in history because I think it's important to note that the struggle has been going on for a lot longer than a lot of families realize. A lot of times we look at this. As something that we're experiencing right here, right now. And it's hard to see that there are other people, many, many other people that have experienced exactly what we're going through. That your loved ones who are struggling struggled in many of the same ways that this man struggled in. And that you as a family are struggling in many of the same ways that other families struggle in. And I say this because I want you to remember that you're not alone. This is a problem that has been going on for so long. And the solution is more available now than it ever has been at any point in history. There is no reason that families or individuals need to continue to suffer from this fatal disease. It's treatable. It's something that we can find relief and recovery from. I hope you guys have found this to be valuable. I hope you got something out of it. If you did, please share it with people that you know and love. Um, getting the word out certainly helps spread the message of recovery. It helps the podcast. And the more people we can reach, the more people we can help. I want everyone to remember that enabling is the oxygen that fuels the fire of addiction. So remember not to enable your addicted loved ones. If you need help, reach out. Feel free to join us for our free Zoom meetings at Intervention on Call. And until then, I hope your loved ones get sober and stay sober. Have a wonderful day.