Frank Orren Lowden was an American lawyer, politician, and agricultural leader. He was a member of the U. S. House of Representatives from Illinois's 13th district from 1906 to 1911. He served as the 25th Governor of Illinois from 1917 to 1921.
Background
Frank Orren Lowden was born on January 26, 1861 near Sunrise City, Minnesota, United States, the third of eleven children of Lorenzo Orren Lowden and Nancy Elizabeth (Bregg) Lowden and the only son and second eldest among their six children who survived infancy. His mother, of English, Dutch, and French ancestry, was a schoolteacher. His father, two of whose English and Scottish forebears had emigrated in 1638 to Massachusetts, was a blacksmith-farmer, who moved in 1868 to Point Pleasant, Iowa, and later (1881) to nearby Hubbard. There he became a lawyer and acquired a reputation as a Granger, Greenbacker, and Democrat.
Education
Young Lowden attended local rural schools and entered the University of Iowa in 1881. He graduated in 1885 as valedictorian. Later he enrolled in evening classes at the Union College of Law and graduated in 1887 (again as valedictorian).
Career
At age fifteen Lowden began to teach in a one room school house in Hubbard, Iowa. In 1885 he taught for one year at the Burlington, Iowa, high school and then went to Chicago, where he clerked for a law firm. Later he established a comfortable practice in Chicago. Around 1897, Lowden managed a number of the "Car King's" enterprises and organized several large manufacturing corporations. In 1902 he moved to "Sinnissippi, " an estate of 600 acres (4, 400 by 1919) fronting the Rock River near Oregon, Illinois, about one hundred miles west of Chicago. He seldom profited financially from his Sinnissippi crops, livestock, and forest. His yield in farming experience and friendships with agricultural leaders was high.
His residence at Sinnissippi, in a rock-ribbed Republican area of Illinois, turned Lowden's interest more strongly toward a political career. Long a Republican, he had helped his party for a decade in local, state, and national campaigns, and he was as favorably regarded by Roosevelt as he had been by McKinley. On his first try for elective office in 1904, Lowden narrowly missed the gubernatorial nomination. Two years later he was chosen to complete the Congressional term of the deceased Robert R. Hitt. His constituency reelected him in 1908, but two years later he declined to run again because of ill health. Yielding to pressure from leaders of his party, Lowden sought the governorship in 1916 and defeated the Democratic incumbent, Edward F. Dunne. He won national acclaim by making the Illinois statehood centennial celebration "a great vehicle for patriotic propaganda".
Lowden's record at Springfield, his cooperation with Roosevelt in reuniting most of the Illinois Progressives with the Republican party, and his ability to voice the needs of both agriculture and industry made him a leading candidate for the presidential nomination in 1920. Yet Lowden had many political liabilities. His Pullman connections and his style of country living repelled many wage earners and small farmers. In addition, sharp differences with Mayor William Hale Thompson of Chicago over patronage, the reform of local governments, and the suppression of antiwar groups denied Lowden the unanimous backing of the Illinois delegation. His chief rival for the nomination was Leonard Wood, popular with the party's progressive wing. Lowden hoped to attract the support of the Republican Old Guard, who were leaning toward Senator Warren Harding; but shortly before the start of the national convention in Chicago, a Senatorial committee accused Lowden's campaign manager of bribing two Missouri delegates. As a result, Lowden's position weakened, and when the convention deadlocked, with neither he nor Wood able to secure a majority, Lowden released his delegates and thereby enabled Harding to win.
After the convention Lowden refused to seek a second term as governor. He also declined, over the next few years, an opportunity to run for the Senate, several important diplomatic posts, including the ambassadorship to Great Britain, and the Republican vice-presidential nomination in 1924. Instead he devoted his energies to the improvement of agriculture and the machinery of government. He worked closely with the National Institute of Public Administration and helped establish the Public Administration Clearing House. Through speeches and articles he urged country folk to unite for their own betterment and city folk to recognize that their welfare was threatened by the economic ills of agriculture. Lowden's early belief that the remedy for these ills lay in federated, single-commodity marketing cooperatives, controlled by farmers, enjoyed the favor of the White House. He lost this support, however, when, from 1926 to 1933, he endorsed the "radical" McNary-Haugen bills.
Hoping to underline his warnings that the rural crisis, in spite of the industrial boom, portended a general depression and thus dwarfed all other national problems, Lowden reluctantly announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 1928. After the party's Kansas City convention upheld all of Coolidge's policies, thus implicitly labeling Lowden a "calamity howler, " he abruptly withdrew his candidacy and refused to aid in Herbert Hoover's election campaign. He remained aloof, as well, from the Hoover administration, rejecting invitations to serve as Secretary of Agriculture and ambassador to Britain.
Lowden's entire political career, in both state and national politics, exemplified a basic problem of his party, its uneasy alliance between industrialists and farmers. Continuously seeking to reconcile the one wing with the other, he was misrepresented by his opponents in 1920 as an ultraconservative businessman and in 1928 as an agrarian radical. When the economic distress of the 1930's and the Democratic victory in 1932 fulfilled his predictions, Lowden became an elder statesman, the "Sage of Sinnissippi, " from whom both Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt asked advice, and to whom Republican candidates came for a blessing.
In his old age Lowden remained active. He served for a decade as one of the court-appointed trustees of the bankrupt Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railway, and vigorously opposed Roosevelt's assault on the Supreme Court, his bid for a third term, and his apparent readiness to have the United States enter World War II. Convinced that country living best nurtured American ideals, he bequeathed one of his two Arkansas cotton plantations to the Farm Foundation as a site for encouraging tenants to become owners of "family-sized farms. "
Achievements
Lowden's most notable achievement was his successful fight to reform and upgrade the State Department's Consular Service. He also established a centralized purchasing agency, a uniform accounting system, and an executive budget. He abolished or united about 125 boards, bureaus, or commissions and grouped the rest among nine departments, each under a director responsible only to the governor. By 1930 fourteen states had adopted similar measures, and the federal Bureau of the Budget, created in 1921, bore a considerable resemblance to the Illinois model.
Politics
Lowden was a member of the Republican Party. While in Washington he centered his efforts upon bills relating to natural resources, agriculture, and tariff administration. In 1912, the last of his eight years on the Republican National Committee, he backed Taft for renomination, even though he admired Roosevelt and thought highly of the Progressives' economic program. During his governorship, he supported President Wilson's measures.
Membership
Lowden was active in many societies concerned with rural life.
Interests
Lowden's hobbies were cards, fishing, golf, and horseback riding.
Connections
On April 29, 1896 Lowden married Florence Pullman, elder daughter of George M. Pullman. They had four children: George Mortimer Pullman, Florence, Harriet Elizabeth, and Frances Orren. His wife's devotion, as well as her wealth and social prominence, largely shaped Lowden's career. The death of Lowden's wife in 1937 was a shock from which he never fully recovered.
