Speech of Hon. William Lorimer of Illinois in the Senate of the United States, February 22, 1911 (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Speech of Hon. William Lorimer of Illinois i...)
Excerpt from Speech of Hon. William Lorimer of Illinois in the Senate of the United States, February 22, 1911
Mr. Beveridge: The Senator can proceed. Besides, he does so under a unanimous consent agreement, and it would not be possible for me to change it.
Mr. Lorimer: Mr. President, many questions have been suggested by the statements of Senators in the debate on this case. Those suggestions concern mostly the actual condition of my election to this body.
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Proceedings Before the Committee on Privileges and Elections and a Subcommittee Thereof of the United States Senate, in the Matter of the ... From the State of Illinois (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Proceedings Before the Committee on Privileg...)
Excerpt from Proceedings Before the Committee on Privileges and Elections and a Subcommittee Thereof of the United States Senate, in the Matter of the Investigation of Certain Charges Against William Lorimer, a Senator From the State of Illinois
Senator lorimer. Nothing more than to state that my counsel, Judge Hancey, is with me, and if the committee desires to hear him on any matter that they have under consideration as representing me I would be glad to have him state my Side of the case.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
William Lorimer was a British-born American politician. He served as a member of the U. S. House of Representatives and United States Senator from Illinois. He was accused of the corruption in the elections to the Senate in 1912.
Background
William Lorimer was born on April 27, 1861 in Manchester, England, first son and second among six children of the Reverend William Lorimer, a Presbyterian minister, and his wife, Sarah (Harley) Lorimer, natives of Scotland. When he was five his parents brought their family to the United States. After a sojourn in Detroit, they settled in Chicago in 1870.
Education
Lorimer's father did not believe in schooling for small children and William had no formal education up to the time of his father's death when the boy was ten. Thereafter there was no chance for him to attend school.
Career
Lorimer started to work in his teens. He sold papers, blacked shoes, painted signs, worked as a cash boy, solicited business for a laundry, wheeled coal, labored in packing plants and at twenty became a horse-car conductor on Chicago's growing West Side. Already the organizer, in his mother's kitchen, of a young men's ward Republican club, Lorimer now formed the Street Railways Employees' Benevolent Association and turned it to political uses. A ward boss in his early twenties, he was elected constable in 1886; about this time he also ran a collection agency, sold real estate, and formed a teamsters' company for city work.
For helping elect Hempstead Washburne mayor in 1891 he was appointed water department superintendent, but he resigned the next year to run unsuccessfully for clerk of the superior court of Cook County. Cultivating the immigrant population intensively, he was elected two years later a representative in Congress, at the age of thirty-three, from a nominally Democratic district. Altogether regular in his voting, he was reelected in 1896 and 1898, but was defeated in 1900 after party quarreling in his district. Following a fortunate redistricting, he was returned to Congress in 1902 and reelected in 1904, 1906, and 1908, by which time he had become an active member of the House committees on rivers and harbors, and agriculture.
While a representative, Lorimer was elected United States senator under most unusual circumstances. His opposition to Senator Hopkins, with whom he was dissatisfied, split the Republicans and produced a five-month deadlock in the Illinois legislature. Finally, on May 26, 1909, Lorimer himself was chosen on the ninety-fifth ballot, 53 of his 108 votes being cast by Democrats. Filling the seat belatedly, he entered the Senate June 18 and was appointed to the committees on manufactures, private land claims, Pacific Islands and Puerto Rico, and expenditures in the Navy Department. Of this last he became chairman. As in the House, his voting followed the party leadership. In less than a year, the placid newcomer was the center of one of the bitterest senatorial controversies American politics has known. The storm broke, April 30, 1910, when the Chicago Tribune, under the editorship of James Keeley, printed the sworn statement of a young Democratic legislator, Charles A. White, of O'Fallon, Illinois, that he was paid $1, 000 to vote for Lorimer. Three other Democratic legislators confessed to receiving similar payments. Lorimer appeared before the Senate on May 28, 1910, to defend himself against these charges of bribery and corruption and himself introduced a resolution providing for a senatorial investigation. The case quickly became a national scandal, with widespread public demand for Lorimer's retirement. In the ensuing congressional campaign, Theodore Roosevelt informed the Hamilton Club of Chicago that he would not be its banquet guest if Lorimer also attended; Lorimer's invitation was withdrawn. President Taft, only mildly interested at first, soon began to work actively against Lorimer and was outraged when the Reverend Francis C. Kelley of Chicago called at the White House, January 27, 1911, to deliver what Taft called a "studied threat" that presidential opposition to Lorimer would cost the administration the Irish Catholic vote.
After extensive hearings the committee on privileges and elections reported that Lorimer's title to a seat had "not been shown to be invalid by the use or employment of corrupt methods or practices. " However, one member, Albert J. Beveridge, dissented vigorously. Introducing a resolution that Lorimer "was not duly and legally elected, " he pushed it to a vote immediately after making a dramatic speech to a crowded chamber, in which he said that the issue was the future of "the American experiment in liberty". Though such party stalwarts as Henry Cabot Lodge and Elihu Root voted for it, Beveridge's resolution failed, 40 votes to 46, and Lorimer kept his seat.
Meantime there were new disclosures in Illinois. Hearing that a $100, 000 fund had been collected "to put Lorimer over, " H. H. Kohlsaat began the newspaper campaign afresh in his Chicago Record-Herald, with the result that the editor and the implicated executives of the International Harvester Company and lumber and packing companies were summoned before a special committee of the state legislature. With the convening of the Sixty-second Congress, April 6, 1911, Senator Robert M. La-Follette introduced a resolution for a reinvestigation in the light of the new testimony, and two months later the Illinois Senate asked the United States Senate to investigate the case further. A committee of eight senators, after lengthy hearings, finally divided five to three in Lorimer's favor, May 20, 1912. But when the anti-Lorimer resolution of the minority was put to a vote, July 13, 1912, it was adopted by a vote of 56 to 28, in the face of an impassioned and eloquent appeal by Lorimer himself. New senators swelled the opposition ranks, which were augmented by the reversal of several holdover members, including Lorimer's Republican colleague from Illinois, Shelby M. Cullom. The ousted senator returned to Chicago, where he was greeted with a parade and musical fanfare arranged by a political protégé, William Hale Thompson.
The Lorimer bank, the La Salle Street Trust & Savings Bank, was now in trouble. After its collapse in 1914 with $6, 500, 000 in deposits, Lorimer was acquitted on charges of misappropriation of funds in a long drawn-out trial but his partner, Charles B. Munday, was sent to jail. On Thompson's election as mayor, Lorimer sought unsuccessfully in 1916 the Republican nomination for popular election to the Senate. Two years later he tried for his old seat in the House but ran far behind in the primary. To recoup his fortunes, he became the representative in the early twenties of an American railroad syndicate in Colombia. Still moving in political circles, he went to Washington in 1927 to appear before a congressional committee in behalf of the Lakes-to-the-Gulf waterway, which he had proposed thirty years earlier; on this occasion he had breakfast with President Coolidge.
In his last years he headed paving and lumber companies and operated a farm at Crystal Lake, Illinois, where he maintained a home. Lorimer fell dead in his seventy-fourth year of a heart attack in a Chicago railroad station.
The historian of the Senate concludes that Lorimer's unseating was "deserved", while a careful student of Chicago politics says that this "cold, silent, calculating" boss, indifferent as he was to "the welfare of the community, " set the tone for much that followed in the political life of Illinois. It is significant that between the two votes on Lorimer's unseating, the constitutional amendment to choose senators by direct election (against which Lorimer voted) was approved in both branches of Congress and submitted for ratification. The circus tent, band, Negro quartet, and moving pictures, which he used in his congressional races, introduced new if scarcely statesmanlike elements to American political campaigning.
(Excerpt from Speech of Hon. William Lorimer of Illinois i...)
Religion
Lorimer had been received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1914.
Politics
Lorimer was a member of the Republican Party.
Personality
Lorimer was exemplary in personal conduct. He did not drink, smoke, or swear, and his soft-spoken manner was one of innocence, patience, and non-resistance. He dominated party councils without giving the appearance of doing so.
Connections
In July 1884 Lorimer married Susan K. Mooney of Chicago. She died sixteen years before him. Two sons, William and Leonard, and six daughters, Ethel, Loretta, Loraine, Marjorie, Helen, and Lenore, survived him.