Background
James Robert Mann was born on October 20, 1856 near Bloomington, Illinois. He was the son of William Henry Mann, Illinois horticulturist, and Elizabeth Dabney (Abraham) Mann.
James Robert Mann was born on October 20, 1856 near Bloomington, Illinois. He was the son of William Henry Mann, Illinois horticulturist, and Elizabeth Dabney (Abraham) Mann.
He attended the University of Illinois, where he distinguished himself in student activities and athletics and graduated as valedictorian in 1876. He was also valedictorian of the class of 1881 at the Union College of Law (Chicago), and while a student, began to assist in the editing of certain United States court reports.
His real-estate and legal connections with the nearby village of Hyde Park brought him a fortune which permitted him to indulge a taste for politics. He became attorney for the Hyde Park commissioners and the South Park commissioners of Chicago, and master in chancery of the superior court of Cook County. His aid in bringing the Columbian Exposition to the Hyde Park area sent him to the Chicago common council upon the incorporation of his village. Serving from 1892 to 1896, he became known as a hard fighter and a hater of "boodle, " a not-unknown commodity in the council of that day. In 1897 his strongly Republican district sent him to Congress and kept him there until his death in 1922. Mann was connected with much of the important legislation of his period. Seniority made him chairman of the commerce committee for a single congress before the Democratic landslide of 1912. Measures bearing his name or handiwork are: the Mann-Elkins act (railroad rate regulation, anti-rebate law), the pure food and drugs act (1906), the bureau of corporations act, the Mann act ("white slave" law), the wood-pulp tariff, isthmian canal legislation, the resolution providing for the woman-suffrage amendment, and numerous local matters. Cannon's choice of Mann as official "watchdog of legislation" in part explains his rise and his tendency to stand-pattism. Just at the time (1912) when his talents were coming to their peak the shift of parties threw him into the position of minority leader. Here he came into his own. Often on his feet, an able and willing filibuster, for six years he served his party by hectoring the Democratic majority. After a short retirement in 1914 caused by illness Mann returned in 1915, seemingly with some notion of his own eligibility for the presidential nomination in 1916. Failing this, he lost the caucus nomination for the speakership in 1919, a defeat illustrating if not resulting from his own characteristics as minority leader. His devotion to the Cannonism which gave him his start made him unacceptable to the post-Progressive Republican party, and his very capabilities were a limitation. Better informed on legislation than his fellow Republicans, he tended to shoulder the entire burden, leading an exasperated colleague to accuse him of undertaking "not only to play Hamlet, but the fair Ophelia and the King and the Queen and first gravedigger". This hurt his larger usefulness while making him superficially even more valuable to the party. With his health and prestige weakened, he retired into a sort of emeritus position with the return of a Republican majority, ending his career as a sort of peppery oracle delivering opinions on the questions of the day.
Quotations: "All of the horrors which have ever been urged, either truthfully or fancifully, against the black-slave trade pale into insignificance as compared to the horrors of the so-called 'white-slave traffic'. "
member of the Oakland Board of Education in Chicago (1887), member of the City Council of Chicago (1892–1896)
He was a rather short, stocky, grizzly-bearded, beetle-browed individual. To his ability, industry, and keen insight into parliamentary intricacies friend and foe bore witness; the former with pride tempered by a somewhat smarting sense of Mann's self-imposed superiority, the latter with envy not untouched with humiliation at the flaws he had found in their legislative armor.
On May 30, 1882, he was married to Emma Columbia of Champaign, Illinois.