History Of Illinois Republicanism: Embracing A History Of The Republican Party In The State To The Present Time (1900)
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
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Ira Clifton Copley was an American public utility executive, newspaper publisher, and congressman.
Background
Ira Clifton Copley was born on October 25, 1864 in Knox County, Illinois, United States. He was the third of five surviving children and younger of two sons of Ira Birdsall Copley, a farmer, and Ellen Madeline (Whiting) Copley. His mother had moved west from Connecticut; his father, a descendant of colonial Massachusetts settlers, had migrated to Illinois in 1854 from his native New York state. When young Ira was blinded at the age of two by scarlet fever, his parents moved to Aurora, Illinois to be near an eye specialist. There the elder Copley became part owner and manager of the moribund Aurora Gas Light Company. The son regained some vision after four years of treatment, but it remained impaired for the rest of his life.
Education
After graduating from West Aurora High School (1881) and attending the town's Jennings Seminary (1881 - 1883), he entered Yale University, from which he received the Bachelor's degree in 1887. He then studied at the Union College of Law in Chicago, supporting himself by tutoring in history and mathematics, and was awarded the Bachelor of Laws degree in 1889.
Career
Although admitted to the Illinois bar, Copley never practiced law. Shortly before graduation he was called home to help run his father's failing gas company. Copley revived the utility by marketing gas as a fuel instead of as an illuminant. Building on this success, he went on to acquire several other utilities in Illinois, merging them in 1905 into the Western United Gas and Electric Company, of which he became president.
Over the next two decades he expanded his holdings through the purchase of additional gas and electric companies and streetcar lines, and in 1914 organized a firm to market coke and coal tars. His utilities empire was consolidated in 1921 into the Western United Corporation. Meanwhile, Copley had also built parallel careers in publishing and politics.
As early as 1894 he was a member of the Republican state central committee and a lieutenant colonel in the Illinois National Guard. "Colonel" Copley, as he became known, served on the State Park Commission (1894 - 1898) and as an aide on the staff of Gov. Charles S. Deneen (1905 - 1913). Copley purchased his first newspaper, the Aurora Beacon, in 1905; by 1913 he also owned papers in nearby Elgin and Joliet. A longtime foe of United States Senator Albert J. Hopkins, an Aurora neighbor and owner of a rival newspaper, Copley opposed his reelection by the state legislature in 1909. The political boss William Lorimer was chosen instead, but was later unseated as a result of charges that the position had been bought. Unsubstantiated rumors that Copley was a party to the bribery failed to thwart his own political career, and in 1910 he was elected to the first of six consecutive terms in the federal House of Representatives.
In 1926, after a long struggle for dominance in Illinois with the utilities magnate Samuel Insull, he sold his interest in the Western United Corporation to two investment firms. He was restless in retirement, however, and two years later, at the age of sixty-three, he bought up twenty-four newspapers in southern California, including the San Diego Union and the San Diego Evening Tribune, at a cost of $7. 5 million.
Copley died of arteriosclerotic heart disease at Copley Hospital and was buried in Spring Lake Cemetery, Aurora.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
Religion
Reared as a Unitarian, he became a member of Aurora's Trinity Episcopal Church.
Politics
Politically liberal, he supported the Progressive presidential candidacy of Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, but ran as a Progressive himself only in 1914. In Congress, he introduced a bill to prevent the interstate shipment of goods produced by child labor, supported a graduated income tax and a national referendum on prohibition, and advocated the regulation of public utilities.
Views
Copley's business career was guided by the principle that the safest investment is a monopoly serving many customers so well that it discourages competition. In applying this principle to journalism, he hastened the spread of newspaper monopolies. He preferred to operate in small and medium-sized cities; by the time of his death all his papers, except for those in San Diego, were in one-publisher cities.
Personality
Slight of build, with angular features, and always fashionably dressed, Copley was a complex man, friendly but formal, tolerant but authoritative.
Copley was one of the few men to find the key to successful management of a large group of newspapers. Recognizing that each paper and each community has a distinct identity, he refused to do what he called mass thinking for his chain. He gave his publishers considerable autonomy and insisted that they publish all local news impartially. Thus Copley, who lacked editorial background, transferred managerial techniques from one industry to another.
Connections
Copley was married twice: on March 3, 1892, to Edith Strohn of Los Angeles, who died in 1929; and in Paris, France, on April 27, 1931, to Mrs. Chloe (Davidson) Worley, whom he had known in Aurora. Three children by Copley's first marriage died in infancy, and he later adopted two sons: James Strohn in 1920, who succeeded his father as head of the Copley Press, and William Nelson in 1921. He also had a stepdaughter, Eleanor Worley.