Since 1913, when the Seventeenth Amendment took the selection of senatorism out of the hands of the state legislatures, gave it to the voters, and allowed governors to fill unexpected vacancies, a hundred and eighty senators have attained their seats by appointment. As I suggest in this week’s Comment, most of them have been even less remarkable than their elected colleagues. But a few have been of interest. Some appointees (Arthur Vandenberg, of Michigan; Sam Ervin, of North Carolina; William Knowland, of California; Walter Mondale, of Minnesota; Howard Metzenbaum, of Ohio; George Mitchell, of Maine) achieved distinction in the Senate; others (James O. Eastland, of Mississippi, and the two Harry Byrds, Sr. and Jr., of Virginia) just made themselves notorious. John Foster Dulles, the future Cold War Secretary of State, and Pierre Salinger, J.F.K.’s bouncy press secretary, flitted briefly through the Capitol as senators by appointment. (The voters quickly showed them the door.) At least two—Frank Graham, of North Carolina, and Harris Wofford, of Pennsylvania, both former college presidents—were genuine creative intellectuals. Graham, a heroic specimen of that admiral breed, the southern white liberal, was appointed in 1949. He was defeated almost two years later by a filthy, racist campaign engineered by the youthful Jesse Helms, but his protégé—Allard Lowenstein most prominent among them—changed American politics. Harris Wofford may still be best known as the man who not only arranged Martin Luther King’s trip to India to study Gandhian methods but also persuaded J.F.K. to call the imprisoned King on the eve of the 1960 election, thereby clinching Kennedy’s hairbreadth win. In 1991, Governor Bob Casey appointed him to the Senate. Running in his own right later that same year on a platform of healthcare for all, he handily upset Richard Thornburgh, a popular ex-governor. Three years later, he lost narrowly to the egregious Rick Santorum (who, poetically, was routed, in 2006, by Casey’s son, Bob, Jr.). But that didn’t stop Wofford from running and saving Americorps during and after the Clinton Administration. Still going strong at eighty-two, he campaigned tirelessly for Obama. On the other hand there was Senator Rebecca Felton. In 1922, Thomas Hardwick, the governor of Georgia, hoping to ingratiate himself with newly enfranchised women voters (he was in the doghouse for having opposed the Nineteenth Amendment), made gimmicky history by appointing a woman, the first ever, to the world’s supposedly most exclusive club. Mrs. Felton, an eighty-seven-year-old suffragist and prohibitionist, spent one day in the job before being displaced by an elected successor. If she is not remembered today as a feminist heroine, perhaps it has something to do with her bloodcurdling enthusiasm for murder as the surest remedy for interracial relationships of the sort that gave us our soon-to-be President. As she said on August 11, 1897, “When there is not enough religion in the pulpit to organize a crusade against sin; nor justice in the court house to promptly punish crime; nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering arm about innocence and virtue—if it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from drunken, ravening beasts—then I say lynch a thousand a week.” I guess she’d have been a PUMA.