Clarence Dickinson Long served as a Democratic congressman from Maryland's 2nd District for twenty-two years (1963-1985). He was born December 11, 1908 in South Bend, Indiana and graduated in 1932 from Washington and Jefferson College. He received the Ph.D. from Princeton in 1938 and was often addressed as "Doc Long" by friends and colleagues. At Princeton, Long was a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. He taught at Wesleyan University in Connecticut during the late 1930s and married the former Susanna Larter in 1937. After service as a Navy lieutenant during the Second World War, the Longs moved to Baltimore where he became a professor of economics at The Johns Hopkins University in 1946. He remained at Hopkins until he was elected to Congress in 1963. While teaching at Hopkins he was invited to Washington in 1948 to become a member of the first Hoover Commission to Reorganize Government. He served during the mid-1950s on President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers, a tribute to his scholarly reputation, since he had chaired the Baltimore County Volunteers for Adlai E. Stevenson's Democratic presidential campaign in 1952. Long was the author of seven books and many articles on labor force, unemployment, statistics, and other economic subjects. Among those are Building Cycles and the Theory of Investment (1940) and The Labor Force under Changing Income and Employment (1958). In an interview in The Baltimore Sun (December 27. 1984) the then 76-year old Clarence Long called his career in Congress "fun" but remembered wistfully his tenure as a Johns Hopkins economics professor.

Long's advisory work during the Eisenhower administration may have inspired his interest in politics. After losing a senate primary race in 1958, he became active in party circles rising to acting chairman of the Democratic State Central committee in late 1961. He won his first race for Congress in 1963. Maryland's Second Congressional District was redefined before the 93rd Congress in 1973 and again before the 99th Congress in 1984. The Second Congressional District served by Clarence D. Long during most of his service in Congress was located largely in Baltimore County, surrounding the City of Baltimore to the east, north, and slightly west, and including a part into northwest Baltimore City. Major religions and ethnic groups were represented, and the District included most of the Jewish Community of the metropolitan Baltimore area. A redrawing of congressional district lines before the 1984 election resulted in the loss of the northwest area of the county and city and the addition of a portion of Republican-leaning Harford County.

In Congress, Long rose through seniority to become chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations - the committee that controlled foreign aid spending - a post he held from 1977 until his defeat before the 99th Congress. Between 1968-1970, the Long-Conte amendments were passed that reduced aid to countries which diverted U.S. aid to the purchase of weapon systems. In 1978, he introduced a resolution to veto a $4.8 billion arms sales package to the Middle East as disruptive of peace negotiations. During the war in Southeast Asia, Long distinguished himself by sponsoring the first anti-war amendment (May 10, 1973) which prohibited any Defense Department funds in a supplemental appropriations bill from being used to finance combat activity in Cambodia. His major work in the House of Representatives centered on his commitment to seek a firm U.S. policy to halt the spread of nuclear weapons and on a reform in the foreign aid program.

In 1985, Long returned to Johns Hopkins University as a professor emeritus of economics. He did not return to teaching but rather to begin drafting his memoirs. Clarence D. Long died in Towson, MD September 18, 1994.