A member of the Republican Party , he served as chairman and president of American Motors Corporation from to , the 43rd governor of Michigan from to , and 3rd secretary of Housing and Urban Development from to He was the father of Mitt Romney , who served as one of the United States senators from Utah and formerly was a governor of Massachusetts and the Republican presidential nominee ; the husband of U.
Romney was born to American parents living in the polygamist Mormon colonies in Mexico ; events during the Mexican Revolution forced his family to flee back to the United States when he was a child. The family lived in several states and ended up in Salt Lake City, Utah , where they struggled during the Great Depression.
Romney worked in a number of jobs, served as a Mormon missionary in the United Kingdom, and attended several colleges in the U. In , he moved to Detroit and joined the American Automobile Manufacturers Association , where he served as the chief spokesman for the automobile industry during World War II and headed a cooperative arrangement in which companies could share production improvements.
He joined Nash-Kelvinator Corporation in , and became the chief executive of its successor, American Motors, in There he turned around the struggling firm by focusing all efforts on the compact Rambler car. Romney mocked the products of the " Big Three " automakers as "gas-guzzling dinosaurs" and became one of the first high-profile, media-savvy business executives. Having entered politics in by participating in a state constitutional convention to rewrite the Michigan Constitution , Romney was elected Governor of Michigan in Re-elected by increasingly large margins in and , he worked to overhaul the state's financial and revenue structure, greatly expanding the size of state government and introducing Michigan's first state income tax.
Romney was a strong supporter of the American Civil Rights Movement. He briefly represented moderate Republicans against conservative Republican Barry Goldwater during the U. He requested the intervention of federal troops during the Detroit riot. Initially a front runner for the Republican nomination for president of the United States in the election cycle , he proved an ineffective campaigner and fell behind Richard Nixon in polls.
