(Excerpt from Folks
The women Of the family, after delay...)
Excerpt from Folks
The women Of the family, after delay, came down and, following introductions, joined the circle. Over the buttermilk the conversation began.
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Victor Murdock was a U. S. Republican politician and newspaper editor.
Background
Victor Murdock was born on March 18, 1871, at Burlingame, Kansas, to Marshall Mortimer Murdock and Victoria Mayberry. His father, who came of a Scotch-Irish West Virginia family, had moved to Kansas from southern Ohio in 1856. During the next half century Marshall Murdock served at various times as a state senator and as postmaster of Wichita, but his principal activity was as a newspaper publisher, first in Burlingame and then, from 1872, in Wichita.
Education
Victor was educated in Wichita common schools and at Lewis Academy.
Career
He had early learned the printer's trade, and at fifteen he became a reporter on his father's Wichita Daily Eagle. A facile writer, he covered the 1890 Congressional race in his district, in the course of which he dubbed Jerry Simpson, the Populist candidate, with the famous "Sockless" epithet.
Murdock moved to Chicago in 1891 to become a reporter on the Inter Ocean, where he introduced baseball slang to sports reporting. But in 1894, at a time of business depression, he returned to Wichita to serve as managing editor of his father's paper.
In 1903 the Republican convention of the "Big Seventh" Congressional district, Simpson's old bailiwick, nominated Murdock to replace Chester I. Long, whom the Kansas legislature had just sent to the United States Senate. Murdock captured two-thirds of the vote in the general election; he was reelected regularly thereafter through 1912. When he first entered Congress, Murdock was in the conservative mainstream of Kansas Republicanism, but he gradually began to move leftward.
In his first term he championed irrigation, an issue important to his constituents and also acceptable to G. O. P. leaders. But he was effectively silenced by the House leadership when he complained of excessive expenditures in the Post Office Department - the first of his several confrontations with the prevailing House rules.
In 1904 his uncle Thomas Benton ("Bent") Murdock, editor of the El Dorado Republican, worked actively with Edward W. Hoch and Walter R. Stubbs against the established Republican leadership in Kansas, and by 1906 Victor was aligned with Stubbs and other reformers. In those years, Murdock supported several regulatory measures.
In 1905 - 1906 he backed the Townsend and Hepburn bills for railroad rate regulation, though he considered the latter measure insufficiently stern. As a member of the Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, he fought for a downward revision of the weighing formula by which the government paid railroads for carrying mail. He was, however, ruled out of order, and his reform was subsequently achieved by executive rather than Congressional action. His legislative positions and his alignment with reform elements made him unpopular with the powerful railroad interests in Kansas, and though he bid for a Senate seat in 1906, the legislature chose the more conservative Charles Curtis.
Murdock revealed his pugnacity as a leader, with Norris, of the "Insurgents" who waged the successful fight of 1910 against Speaker Joseph G. Cannon and the autocratic House rules. Murdock bolted the Republican party to support Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, and was re-elected to Congress in that year as a Progressive.
Two years later, with Senators now popularly elected, he ran as Progressive candidate for Senator. In his campaign he found, in the words of a contemporary, "almost as many" things wrong in Washington as "the Populists of twenty years ago, and they are largely of the same character"; but a split in the reform ranks assured the reelection of Curtis.
Murdock became Progressive national chairman in February 1915, and Bainbridge Colby unsuccessfully proposed him as the third party's presidential candidate in June 1916, after Roosevelt declined. In the campaign of that year Murdock and the Wichita Eagle supported Woodrow Wilson's reelection. Wilson appointed the Kansan to the Federal Trade Commission in 1917 and again to a full seven-year term in 1918, during part of which he served as chairman; he resigned in 1924.
Murdock returned to Wichita as editor-in-chief of the Eagle. Until the end of his life he continued to be a "booster" of the Plains region, supporting highway development and the growth of the oil, natural gas, and aviation industries which were rapidly becoming key parts of the regional economy. Victor Murdock died on July 8, 1945, in a Wichita hospital, of chronic myocarditis and nephritis.
Victor Murdock was a member of the Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads.
Personality
With his solid figure, angular features, and wiry reddish hair, Murdock looked the part of a reformer. As George W. Norris recalled, Victor Murdock was honest, courageous, and well informed. Impatient to correct wrongs, he "did not care much for technicalities. "
Interests
Victor Murdock enjoyed music and traveling.
Connections
On May 21, 1890, Victor Murdock married Mary Pearl Allen of Wichita. They had two daughters, Marcia and Katherine Allen.