The Heroic and the Notorious: U.S. Senators from Illinois

17. Ending an Illinois Tradition?

182 ★ ENDING AN ILLINOIS TRADITION? 17 ★Ending an Illinois Tradition? Perhaps the nearest thing Illinois has had to a “royal family” in politics has been the participation, for more than a century, of the Stevenson family in the public life of the state. The tradition began with the first Adlai Ewing Stevenson, who was state’s attorney of Woodford County during the Civil War. By 1874, he had moved back to Bloomington and was elected to Congress as a candidate of the Greenback Party. Its single plank was an expansion of the currency by means of printing paper dollars. He was elected to Congress again in 1878, as a Democrat as well as a Greenbacker. Along the way, he lost at the polls three times. When Democrat Grover Cleveland was elected president in 1884, he appointed former Congressman Stevenson first assistant postmaster general, with the specific assignment of firing forty thousand Republican post office employees. His performance in that task earned him the label “the Headsman!” He must have carried out that duty effectively, for when Cleveland ran again in 1892, Stevenson was his running mate. In his role as the “headsman,” he had acted pleasantly, giving a minimum of offense to those who lost their jobs. The Democratic ticket carried the day, and Stevenson brought the same affable personality to the 183 ★ office of vice president. As was often the case with vice presidents, his four years in that office were an exercise in obscurity. Stevenson ran again for vice president in 1900, this time with William Jennings Bryan at the head of the ticket. The two were defeated by William McKinley, elected president for a second term, and Theodore Roosevelt, soon to become president following McKinley’s assassination. Stevenson was his party’s candidate for governor in 1908 and lost by only 23,164 votes to the Republican incumbent, Charles S. Deneen. That was his “last hurrah” in seeking public office. He died in 1914. Stevenson’s son Lewis married into the family that owned Bloomington ’s principal newspaper, the Pantagraph. A friend of William Randolph Hearst, he worked for one of the Hearst papers in California and managed Hearst-owned copper mines in Arizona. Returning to Illinois, he followed his father into politics. He had been his father’s secretary during the time he was vice president. According to John Bartlow Martin, a Stevenson biographer, Lewis “never really amounted to much” (32). He attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire but did not go to college. He resented Bloomington, and there is evidence that Bloomington resented him. After his time in the West, he managed farms in the area, most of them owned by members of his family. Lewis Stevenson was appointed state pardons board chairman by Governor Dunne and, in 1913, was appointed secretary of state to fill a vacancy due to the death of the elected incumbent. He ran for that office on the Democratic ticket in 1916, unsuccessfully. That was the end of his career in elective politics. He hung on at the fringes of politics for a time. He died in 1929 and was buried in Bloomington beside his father. Before he died, Lewis Stevenson advised his son, Adlai Ewing, “never to go into politics—it was an ungrateful business” (Martin 93). That advice went unheeded, for the second Adlai E. Stevenson was to become governor of Illinois in 1949 and twice the candidate of the Democratic Party for president of the United States. Born in Los Angeles in 1900, the future governor spent most of his boyhood in Bloomington and attended the university high school there for three years. Then he was sent to Choate Preparatory School in Connecticut and from Choate, after two years, to Princeton. The atmosphere at Princeton can be suggested by the fact ENDING AN ILLINOIS TRADITION? 184 ★ ENDING AN ILLINOIS TRADITION? that F. Scott Fitzgerald and Richard Halliburton were students at about the same time. In many ways, it was a carefree, country club sort of life. Adlai’s greatest distinction was becoming managing editor of the university’s daily newspaper in his senior year. An oddity of his college years was that his mother and sister Buffie came to live in the village of Princeton. That fact reminds one that such famous persons as Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt , and Douglas MacArthur also suffered much attention from their mothers during their higher educations. Adlai...