Background
William Augustus Ayres was born on April 19, 1867 in Elizabethtown, Illinois, United States. He was the son of William Warren and Katherine Drumm Ayres.
William Augustus Ayres was born on April 19, 1867 in Elizabethtown, Illinois, United States. He was the son of William Warren and Katherine Drumm Ayres.
Ayres completed his primary education in Wichita, Kansas, United States where his family moved in 1881. From 1888 to 1890, he attended Garfield (later Friends') University.
In 1942, he received the LL. D degree from Friends' University.
After reading law with a local attorney, he was admitted to the bar in 1893.
His political career began in 1907 when he was elected on the Democratic ticket as prosecuting attorney of Sedgwick County (Wichita). He held the office for four years. In 1914, he was elected to the House of Representatives from the district encompassing Wichita. It was the first of his nine terms in Congress, a career interrupted only once by a narrow defeat in the Republican landslide in 1920. While in the House he was a member of the Naval Affairs and Appropriations committees.
Throughout most of the 1920's he was the sole Democrat in the Kansas congressional delegation. He weathered a determined attempt by Republicans to oust him in 1928 by generally avoiding controversial issues. He made few speeches, took few positions, and carefully refrained from taking a stance on the touchy issue of prohibition.
The leading Democrat in Kansas, he was the state's favorite son candidate for the 1928 presidential nomination.
As an early supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt during his campaign for the 1932 presidential nomination, Ayres was one of a small group of congressmen with whom Roosevelt regularly consulted. On June 30, 1934, President Roosevelt selected Ayres as one of the five members of the Federal Trade Commission. He was reappointed in 1940 and 1947. Under the prevailing policy of rotating chairmen, he served in that capacity in 1937, 1942, and 1946.
Ayres was apparently a silent and inactive observer of the controversies within the Federal Trade Commission. He emerged from bureaucratic anonymity only once, when in 1947 he clashed with the commission's stormy petrel, Lowell Mason, over charges that the FTC should emphasize "hit and miss" prosecutions less and seek industry-wide voluntary compliance agreements more.
He served as a federal trade commissioner until his death in 1952.
With the coming of the Great Depression, Ayres attacked the tariff policies of the Hoover administration without, however, losing Republican votes in Kansas. He criticized the Democratic National Committee, which was controlled by Al Smith and John J. Raskob, for focusing on prohibition and the depression as its two main concerns and insisted that the party's sole emphasis should be economic issues.
On December 30, 1896, Ayres married Aldula Pease. They had two daughters.