Joseph Mark Trice

After briefly practicing law, Trice returned to the Senate in 1932 as deputy sergeant at arms.^[1] When David S. Barry was dismissed in early 1933 he served briefly as acting sergeant at arms and helped organize Franklin D. Roosevelt's first inauguration; he later directed Capitol Hill arrangements for the Eisenhower and Nixon inaugurations.^[1][3]

In November 1942 Trice was sent to the Mayflower Hotel under a Senate arrest order to bring Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee to the Capitol for a quorum vote called to break a southern filibuster. Senate press aide Richard L. Riedel recounted the episode in his 1969 memoir Halls of the Mighty.^[4][5]

After the 1946 elections returned the Senate to Republican control, Trice succeeded Carl Loeffler as Republican party secretary.^[1] He was elected Secretary of the Senate when the Republicans took the majority in the 83rd Congress, taking office on January 3, 1953.^[2] Senator Barry Goldwater, a freshman that month, recalled in his memoirs that Trice "came to me like a life ring comes to a drowning man" during his first days in Washington.^[6]

When the Democrats regained the majority after the 1954 elections, Trice's term as Secretary ended on January 5, 1955, and he returned to the Republican party secretaryship until his retirement in December 1973.^[1][7] In 1975 he was appointed to the Commission on the Operation of the Senate.^[1] He turned down an invitation to take part in the Senate Historical Office's oral history program, a refusal the office regards as a notable gap in the documentary record of the twentieth-century Senate.^[1]

• J. Mark Trice biography at the United States Senate Historical Office