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John was born on January 6, 1843 at Lawrenceburg, Indiana, United States, moved with his parents to Madison, Wisconsin, in 1859.
His father, Philip Loring Spooner, born in New Bedford of old Massachusetts stock, was married in 1839 to Lydia Lord Coit, of Plainfield, Connecticut, and lived for twenty years at Lawrenceburg, Indiana. He was a lawyer, and the reporter of four volumes (XIIXV) of the Wisconsin Reports.
John attended the University of Wisconsin, receiving his degree while on duty at the front in 1864.
Mustered out with the brevet rank of major, Spooner became colonel on the staff of Gov. Lucius Fairchild, whose secretary he was; and in 1867 he was admitted to the Wisconsin bar. He moved in 1870 to Hudson, on the western border of the state, where he at once took rank as a brilliant lawyer. In due time he was elected to the Assembly (1872) and appointed as regent of the University of Wisconsin.
His brief for the state in the case of Schulenberg vs. Harriman (21 Wallace, 44) helped establish the federal law as to railroad land grants, and pointed to the class of legal business for which he was fitted. As counsel for the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis & Omaha Railway, and for the roads that were merged as the Chicago & Northwestern Railway, he developed marked talent, and as legislative adviser he watched proceedings at Madison, where he was described as "chief of the corporation lobbyists".
As a campaigner for Blaine in 1884 he established his reputation on the stump. He was elected to the United States Senate in 1885, with the patronage of Philetus Sawyer, defeating Lucius Fairchild in the caucus and William F. Vilas in the canvass. Spooner sacrificed a large private income when he became senator, but he acquired immediate reputation as an able debater, brilliant parliamentarian, and sound constitutional lawyer. When his term came to an end in 1891, Wisconsin was in the hands of the Democrats, who chose Vilas to succeed him.
Spooner returned to Madison, resumed the practice of his profession without abandoning his activity in politics, and assisted as counsel in the gerrymander cases, whereby the supreme court of Wisconsin in 1892 twice set aside Democratic apportionment laws.
He managed on the floor of the Senate the intricate matters of constitutional law relating to the new colonial ventures, and attached his name to the canal bill of 1902.
In 1900 he talked of leaving the Senate to resume the law, but he was persuaded to accept reelection in 1903, and he became, as caricatured, the mahout of the G. O. P. elephant, with Roosevelt on its back. In 1904 his intimacy with Roosevelt created a perplexing dilemma for the President, for La Follette was selected as head of the regular delegation to the Republican National Convention, while Spooner was head of a bolting delegation, and Payne was both postmaster general and vice-chairman of the Republican National Committee.
The Spooner delegation was seated, throwing La Follette into bitter opposition that was dangerous even to Roosevelt. Lincoln Steffens chose this moment to attack the original election of Spooner to the Senate in 1885, as due to corrupt manipulation by Sawyer, and other "enemies of the Republic"; the death of Payne removed the local organizer of "stalwart" victory; and when La Follette was elected to the Senate in place of Joseph V. Quarles in 1905, Spooner set the date at which he proposed to resume his practice.
He had declined the offices of secretary of the interior and attorney general under McKinley and was later to decline the secretaryship of state under Taft. At the end of the Fifty-ninth Congress, March 2, 1907, Spooner sent in his resignation, effective May 1. He left the Senate, with brevet from the New York Times, as "the ablest man in it", but without a client or an announced plan of operations. For the rest of his life his name appeared rarely in the news, but his office in New York was busy and profitable, for he was among the greatest lawyers of his day. He rarely returned to Wisconsin, and seems never to have reconciled himself to the reversal in politics that left his friends in a minority.
He died in New York City.
John Coit Spooner was a powerful conservative force in Wisconsin and in Congress. Spooner emerged as a leading conservative voice in the Senate, consistently opposing labour reform and other progressive measures. With senators Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island, William B. Allison of Iowa, and Orville H. Platt of Connecticut, he formed a core of conservative leadership that exerted strong influence on national affairs at the turn of the century. He was author of the Spooner Act (1902), which authorized Pres. Theodore Roosevelt to purchase rights to build the Panama Canal. At the 1904 Republican national convention in Chicago, Spooner, as the head of the regular Wisconsin delegation, became embroiled in a bitter credentials fight with state Progressives led by Robert M. La Follette.
Quotations:
Spooner said in description of political campaigns after the reform of direct primary elections:
"Direct primaries would destroy the party machinery. .. and would build up a lot of personal machines, and would make every man a self-seeker, and would degrade politics by turning candidacies into bitter personal wrangles. "
He married Anna E. Main of Madison, on September 10, 1868, and moved in 1870 to Hudson.
