Willis Chatman Hawley was born on May 5, 1864 near Monroe, Oregon, United States. He was the second of at least three children and the oldest son of Sewel Ransom Hawley and Emma Amelia (Noble) Hawley. Both parents had come to Oregon in the 1840s as the children of early settlers, Hawley's father from Ohio, his mother from Illinois. Hawley took pride in his pioneering background.
Growing up as the son of a moderately successful farmer, Hawley attended country schools and worked his way through Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1884.
For two years after leaving college, Hawley served as principal of Umpqua Academy in Wilbur, Oreg. He then returned to Willamette University, where in 1888 he earned both a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Law degrees.
Later he received a Master of Arts from Willamette and joined its faculty as professor of mathematics.
Although Hawley was subsequently admitted to the Oregon bar in 1893, he did not practice law extensively but instead followed a career in education. In 1888 he became president of the Oregon State Normal School at Drain.
In 1893 he shifted to the chair of "political history, political economy, and political science" (soon changed to history, economics, and constitutional law), and that same year he became president of the university. He stepped down in 1902 to become vice-president and dean, but continued to teach until 1907. He was also president of the Willamette Valley Chautauqua Association.
During his years at Willamette University, Hawley was a frequent public lecturer.
In 1906 he ran for Congress from Oregon's first district as a Republican. He was later elected for what proved to be the first of thirteen terms. Hawley's party regularity and his quiet, unruffled manner were popular with his Congressional colleagues, and he achieved considerable influence in Republican councils, serving as chairman of the party's House caucus in the 69th and later Congresses.
As a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, he wrote the agricultural schedule for the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922.
Hawley reached the apex of his career in 1928 when he succeeded to the chairmanship of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, a post that brought him the only widespread attention he received outside Congress. Herbert Hoover had promised in the 1928 presidential campaign to revise the tariff, and this became an early item of business when Congress met in special session in April 1929.
Hawley, a champion of the protective tariff, exercised firm control of the committee hearings and quickly maneuvered the administration bill through the committee and the House, which passed it on May 28, 1929. Senate opposition, however, to a companion bill sponsored by Senator Reed Smoot of Utah delayed final passage of the act until June 1930. Originally conceived as a "reform" measure to aid American farmers by increasing the import duties on agricultural products, the law as finally passed raised the rates on a wide variety of goods to unprecedented levels. Many blamed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff for intensifying the depression of 1929, and it became an important issue in the 1932 elections. Despite his defense of the act, Hawley was defeated in the Republican primary of that year.
He returned to the practice of law in Salem, Oregon, where he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1941. He was buried in Salem's City View Cemetery.
Hawley was an active Methodist.
Hawley was a Republican.
Although not particularly dynamic in personality, Hawley was an impressive figure--over six feet tall and of sturdy physique--and a popular speaker.
A popular campus figure, he seems to have had a close relationship with the students.
On August 19, 1885, Hawley married Anna Martha Geisendorfer, the daughter of an Albany, Oregon, farmer. They had two sons, Stuart Cecil and Kenneth Fabius, and a daughter, Iras Alma.
