Born on April 4, 1866, in Záboří, Austrian Empire (now Czech Republic). He was one of the eleven children of Joachim and Barbara Eissenschimmel Sabath. Sabath's father, a butcher, was the head of the only Jewish family in the village of about 400 people, which was also the seat of a Catholic diocese.
Adolph Sabath attended the parochial school until he was thirteen. Having graduated from Bryant and Stratton Business College in 1885, he decided to go to law school (primarily to avoid paying abstract fees to lawyers) and entered the Chicago College of Law. Transferring to Lake Forest University, he received the LL. B. degree in 1891.
After school he became an apprentice clerk in a drygoods store. Two years later, in 1881, he traveled in steerage to the United States, arriving in Baltimore with barely enough money to take him to Chicago, where a cousin lived. Sabath first worked in a planing mill, then sold shoes in a store on Halsted Street, of which he was made manager within five years.
When he was twenty-one Sabath became a naturalized citizen and went into the real estate business, purchasing tracts of land that he then subdivided and sold to the Bohemian and other immigrants who were gravitating toward the Pilsen district on the southwest side of Chicago. As his business prospered, Sabath sent for other members of his family and furthered his education.
In 1891 he was admitted to the bar, and started to practice in 1893. He was quickly involved in local politics, and it was at this time that he took a middle initial from his father's name to distinguish himself from a cousin, another Adolph Sabath who was also a lawyer. During the 1880's and 1890's the Germans and Irish who lived in the close-in wards of the west side of Chicago, adjoining the central business district, were being displaced by Russian Jews, Poles, Bohemians, and other eastern and central European immigrants. Sabath chose to ally himself with Billy Loeffler, the first Jewish political leader in Chicago, who in turn was a key figure in the Democratic machine created by Mayor Carter Henry Harrison and maintained by Harrison's son and namesake.
Sabath served as a ward leader until 1895, when he was named a justice of the peace. Two years later Carter Henry Harrison, Jr. , then mayor, appointed Sabath magistrate for the Maxwell Street police station, a post in which he helped to abolish the fee system and to establish a juvenile court and a parole system for first offenders. In 1906 the office of police magistrate was abolished, and Sabath was nominated for the newly created post of municipal judge, which he declined after having won, in the first direct primary held in Illinois, the Democratic congressional nomination from Chicago's Fifth District.
Sabath was easily elected to the Sixtieth Congress. He served continuously in the House of Representatives for forty-five years, from Mar. 4, 1907, until his death, having been reelected twenty-three times. He became dean of the House in 1934 and dean of Congress in 1943. His Chicago district, one of the smallest in the nation, was a veritable Balkans, containing seventeen nationalities of immigrants and their descendants.
His first speech in the House was in support of a bill to enlarge the Philadelphia immigrant station; in it, Sabath stressed the achievements of immigrants in American life.
In the same year, as a result of the reaction following World War I, he experienced the closest race of his congressional career, being reelected by the narrow margin of 14, 374 to 14, 076 votes. In 1928 he vigorously supported Alfred E. Smith, and during the Great Depression he criticized Herbert Hoover's policies caustically.
By 1936 Sabath was chairman of the House Steering Committee, which consisted of the Democratic members of the Ways and Means Committee and was responsible for party policy in the House of Representatives. In 1939 he became chairman of the powerful Rules Committee, succeeding John J. O'Connor, the lone victim of the 1938 presidential "purge. " He retained this chairmanship continuously - with the exception of the years of the Eightieth Congress, 1947 to 1949 - for the rest of his life.
In 1938 Sabath voted to establish the House Un-American Activities Committee, but he soon had misgivings and thereafter opposed the committee. During World War II Sabath called for a national lottery as a means of partially financing United States participation. He was also ardent in his opposition to British restrictions of Jewish immigration into Palestine and for a time in 1946 withheld support for a loan to Britain favored by the Truman administration. After the independent state of Israel was created in 1948, Sabath was lavish in his praise of the Truman administration and the Congress for their efforts in behalf of the new nation.
Truman and Sabath worked together closely on legislative matters, particularly after the President's election to a full term in 1948. Sabath urged Truman (as he had urged Roosevelt) to seek reelection. When Truman did not do so, Sabath supported Adlai Stevenson.
Hospitalized at the Bethesda, Md. , Naval Hospital prior to the 1952 election, Sabath drafted foreign-language newspaper advertisements on Stevenson's behalf. He himself was reelected during his illness to a twenty-fourth term in the House of Representatives. He died two days later.
Throughout his career Sabath served his constituency by seeking greater representation for ethnic groups, both within the Democratic party in Cook County and on the party ticket. Sabath called for workmens' compensation (1908), old-age pensions (1909), and a wages-and-hours law (1912). His assignment to the Immigration and Naturalization Committee offered him a platform from which he spoke in behalf of the immigrant, and he ardently opposed all efforts to restrict entry, including the educational and, especially, the quota system established by Congress in the 1920's. He was the first Congressman to recommend federal aid for highways and, as a member of the Alcoholic Liquor Traffic Committee, spoke out strongly against the prohibition amendment to the Constitution.
Sabath opposed Woodrow Wilson's presidential nomination because he considered him unfriendly to immigrants and labor and favorable to prohibition. He changed his mind after meeting the candidate, however, and came to be both an admirer and friend of the President.
Although he consistently supported Wilson in both peace and war, Sabath in 1918 declared his opposition to a separate peace treaty with Austria-Hungary, primarily because he favored the creation of Czechoslovakia from a portion of the Hapsburg Empire. Sabath was delighted when the President, on Sept. 3, 1918, recognized Czechoslovakia as an independent nation. Sabath emerged from the Wilson years as a dedicated internationalist. He backed the League of Nations and in 1920 introduced a resolution calling for the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.
He endorsed Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and, from Roosevelt's inauguration until his own death twenty years later, was a devoted supporter of the domestic and foreign policies of both Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman.
Quotations: "In Franklin Roosevelt, " Sabath said in 1946, "I found a true leader of the people and I fought with all my strength for his ideals and for his legislative recommendations. "
During his years in Congress Sabath was a loner, usually eating by himself and never attending cocktail parties. He suffered from arthritis in his later years but throughout his life he exercised regularly, smoked up to a dozen cigars a day, and enjoyed Bohemian cooking. He spoke with a heavy accent, mixing his v's and w's. Under stress he would break into Czech, while his balding head would become red.
Although expert in legislative maneuvering, Sabath seldom entered debate on the floor of the House of Representatives, since he was a poor speaker, and easily needled.
Sabath was always considerate, fair, and honest.
Quotes from others about the person
Harry S. Truman observed that "in him the forgotten man always found a champion. "
"He strove, " as John M. Allswang has observed, "to create a Democratic party that was a home for the ethnics. "
He was survived by his wife, Mae Ruth Fuerst, whom he had married in 1917. He was childless.
