C. Wesley Roberts Explained

Office:Chair of the Republican National Committee
Term Start:January 17, 1953
Term End:March 27, 1953
Predecessor:Arthur Summerfield
Successor:Leonard W. Hall
Birth Name:Charles Wesley Roberts
Birth Date:14 December 1902
Birth Place:Oskaloosa, Kansas, U.S.
Death Place:Oskaloosa, Kansas, U.S.
Party:Republican
Spouse:Ruth Patrick
Children:Pat (son)

Charles Wesley Roberts (December 14, 1902 – April 9, 1976) was a Kansas businessman who was Chairman of the Republican National Committee for four months in 1953 under Dwight D. Eisenhower.

C. Wesley Roberts (or Wes Roberts) was born in Oskaloosa, Kansas, where he died, the son of Daisy Marian (née Needham) and Francis Henry "Frank" Roberts.[1] The Roberts family published the smalltown weekly Oskaloosa Independent for more than a century. Davis Publications currently owns The Oskaloosa Independent.[2]

He was the father of U.S. Senator Pat Roberts.

Alvin Scott McCoy of The Kansas City Star won a Pulitzer Prize in 1954 for local reporting for a series of articles that drove Roberts to resign his RNC chairmanship.[3] Roberts was accused of collecting a $10,000 commission on the sale of a hospital to the State of Kansas which the state already owned.[4]

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Charles Patrick "Pat" Roberts, at rootsweb, an ancestry.com community . April 5, 2007 . September 5, 2008 . https://web.archive.org/web/20080905222626/http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~battle/senators/roberts.htm . dead .
  2. Web site: Contact Us – JeffCountyNews.com . 2022-09-27 . en-US.
  3. http://www.pulitzer.org/awards/1954 1954 Winners, Awards, The Pulitzer Prizes website
  4. News: Republicans: Storm in Kansas . https://web.archive.org/web/20081222105221/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,818019,00.html . dead . December 22, 2008 . March 30, 1953 . Time. March 12, 2009.