Background
Stubbs was born on November 7, 1858 in Wayne County, Indiana, United States, near the city of Richmond, to a family of Quaker heritage. His father was John T. Stubbs, and his mother, Esther (Bailey) Stubbs.
contractor politician stockman
Stubbs was born on November 7, 1858 in Wayne County, Indiana, United States, near the city of Richmond, to a family of Quaker heritage. His father was John T. Stubbs, and his mother, Esther (Bailey) Stubbs.
Stubbs's education was limited to the local rural schools. Although he enrolled January 25, 1881, in the preparatory department of the University of Kansas, he did not complete any work there.
Beginning in a small way as a grading contractor in 1881, he developed a system of commissary trains to feed construction gangs, and after 1897 embarked upon building and railroad construction on a large scale. After an unsettled existence, owing to Stubbs's shifting business interests, the family established a home at Lawrence, Kansas, and in 1902 Stubbs was induced by a local political boss to enter politics as candidate for the legislature. He was elected in 1902 and reelected in 1904 and 1906.
From his initial session he fostered the tradition of applying to public administration the principles of private business efficiency and economy, and the aggressive role he played from the beginning brought him the chairmanship of the Republican state committee, 1904-08.
He was elected governor in 1908 and was reelected in 1910.
With the Democratic party so definitely in the minority, the active center in the contest for power in Kansas was within the Republican ranks. Out of these unprepossessing beginnings of personal and factional turmoil, in which political power rather than public policy was uppermost, the Progressive movement emerged gradually with a program similar in most particulars to that developed in other states.
In federal politics the rise of Stubbs promised for a time to be equally meteoric. In the three-cornered state contest of 1906, Hoch and Stubbs were both defeated by Charles Curtis for the United States senatorship, and two years later, when the Progressive movement had taken shape more definitely, the second senatorship went to Joseph L. Bristow, leaving the governorship to Stubbs.
As a Progressive governor, he was sufficiently prominent to be chosen one of the seven who joined in the appeal to Roosevelt to become a candidate for the presidency in 1912.
Because of the rapid decline of interest in the Progressive dogma, upon which Stubbs's bid for power had been based, no further opportunity for political advancement came to him.
Retiring from politics, he devoted himself to the livestock business in Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado; was appointed during the First World War to the United States Livestock Industry Committee, 1917; and in the postwar depression in the livestock industry lost his fortune. Returning to politics in 1918, he was defeated for the senatorship by Arthur Capper and was unsuccessful in an attempt to secure the Republican nomination for the governorship in 1922 and in 1924.
He died in Topeka, Kansas, in his seventy-first year, after a long illness.
Stubbs, a progressive Republican, was known for his prohibitionist beliefs, as well as for having signed the nation's first blue sky law into effect.
When Roosevelt bolted the Republican party, Stubbs continued to support him, although as candidate for the senatorship he himself had defeated Curtis for the regular party nomination.
Six feet in height, he weighed two hundred pounds and wore the broad-brimmed, high-crowned hat of Quaker tradition. He employed the forceful, informal speech and habits developed in the construction camp and resorted to the dramatic and spectacular in campaign technique, occasionally in the course of a speech removing some of his clothing piece by piece and rolling up his sleeves to expose his red undershirt. He missed no opportunity to extol the virtues of salt-rising bread, which he always served to his political guests at his mansion on the hill west of Lawrence.
In 1886 he married Stella Hostettler of Mulvane, Kansas, and four children were born to them - Lenora, Roscoe, Paul, and Margaret.