Martin B. Madden was an American congressman. He was a U. S. Representative from Illinois.
Background
Martin Barnaby Madden was born on March 21, 1855, in Darlington, England. He was the son of John and Elizabeth (O'Neill) Madden.
At the age of five, he emigrated with his parents and settled in Lemont, Cook County, Illinois.
Education
Madden attended to public school. Family necessity forced him to start earning money at the age of ten, and his subsequent education was gained in night school and business college.
Career
Madden's first position as waterboy in a quarry at Lemont opened a career in the stone business that carried him to an important position in the Western Stone Company, which became one of the largest concerns of its kind in the world. This prominent position brought to him other offices, such as the presidency of the Quarry Owners' Association of the United States, and of the Illinois Manufacturers' Association, and the vice-presidency of the Builders' and Traders' Exchange of Chicago.
Becoming interested in politics, he began in 1889, an eight-year period of service in the Chicago city council, of which he was president from 1891 to 1893. Here he affiliated with the dominant Cook County machine so closely that the Municipal Voters' League frowned upon his activities in behalf of so-called "boodle ordinances" alleged to have conferred franchises without adequate compensation to the city.
In the early stages of the campaign for a seat in the United States Senate in 1897, he was supported by the Cook County machine which, however, deserted him when it became evident that he could not win the nomination. Promptly swinging his support to William E. Mason, he helped complete the wreck of the machine and started a realignment in the local Republican party. Later joining the Lorimer faction, he made an unsuccessful race for the House in 1902 but was elected in 1904 to the Fifty-ninth and each succeeding Congress through the seventieth. These activities were punctuated by party service on various local committees, as temporary chairman of the state convention in 1896, and as delegate to the national conventions of 1896 and 1900.
At the latter convention, he was a member of the committee on resolutions and drafted the plank in the platform that committed the party to the construction of a canal across either Panama or Nicaragua. In the House he evinced a good deal of ability, rather unusual activity, and a high degree of party regularity, the last marked by occasional streaks of intelligent independence.
He was made a member of the committee on appropriations in the Sixty-sixth Congress and helped to frame the bill to create the bureau of the budget. In that same Congress, he also became a member of the "steering committee. " As chairman of the powerful committee on appropriations in the Sixty-seventh Congress, he celebrated his elevation by bringing in the first appropriation bill under the new budget system.
His chief claim to fame in the later days lay in the fact that his committee position and his natural bent made him one of the long line of "watchdogs of the treasury, " being considered by the contemporary press as, perhaps, the grimmest of them all. In 1925, he published in the Saturday Evening Post two articles on "Tax Reduction and the Public Debt" and "The Budget to Date", which are popular expositions of his ideas on the relation of the government to the money acquired by federal taxation.
Madden died from a heart attack at his desk in the room of the appropriations committee at the Capitol.
Achievements
Politics
Much of Madden's early work naturally centered around local interests and his committee assignments, and in these days he showed special solicitude for the welfare of postal workers and the postal service as a whole. He was probably the most progressive member of the Chicago delegation on questions of railroad rate regulation, frequently supporting the various measures intended to increase the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission. He made repeated efforts to obtain a physical valuation of the roads as a basis for a fair assignment of charges.
His interests tended to concentrate more and more upon fiscal and financial matters.
Connections
Madden married Josephine (Smart) Madden on May 16, 1878. They had a daughter.