Powell Jr. (D–NY) and John E. Rankin (D–MS), Brown forced a rule change from then-Speaker Joseph W. Martin Jr. (R–MA) to prohibit racially offensive language from being used on the House floor. Brown twice ran for governor of Ohio: in 1932, he lost the primary; in 1934, he won the Republican nomination but lost the general election. Brown was a delegate to the Republican National Conventions in 1936, 1940, 1944 and 1948 and a member of the Republican National Committee beginning in 1944. Brown was elected in 1938 as a Republican to the Seventy-sixth and to the thirteen succeeding Congresses, serving from January 3, 1939 until his death in 1965. While in Congress, he was chairman of the Select Committee on Newsprint in the Eightieth Congress; he was a personal friend of Democrat Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn of Texas. In the 1930s and 1940s, Brown staunchly opposed President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies to expand the federal bureaucracy. He also opposed expanding U.S. foreign military entanglements until the attack on Pearl Harbor. However, in March 1941 he voted in favor of providing increased military aid to the United Kingdom during that country's war against Nazi Germany. Following World War II, Brown warned against the continuation and expansion of foreign aid programs that were meant to be temporary. When Harry S. Truman became president, Brown opposed his Fair Deal, viewing it as corrupt cronyism through the expansion of federal bureaucracy. Brown cosponsored legislation to create the Hoover Commission to study and reform the federal government and served on the commission, formally the Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of Government. By the 1950s, Brown was the ranking minority member of the important Rules Committee in Congress. In the 1960s, he worked with its chairman, Democrat Howard W. Smith of Virginia, to block expansive federal legislation sought by presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Smith was a senior member of the Southern Bloc, established by white Democrats at the turn of the 20th century, when the former Confederate states disfranchised blacks. However, near the end of his life, Brown convinced the segregationist Smith to allow landmark civil rights legislation to reach the House floor for a vote. He checked out of the hospital to help shepherd the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through Smith's Rules Committee, and he contributed to the achievements of the Civil