Albert Baird CumminsThe Most Restless Man in Iowa Politics

Albert Baird Cummins in 1915

Albert Baird Cummins looked like a man who ironed his conscience every morning. Sharp collar, sharper tongue. Born in a Pennsylvania log cabin, he clawed his way to Iowa with a hammer and a law book. A reformer, he said. A Republican, he swore. Somewhere between the two, he lost a few friends and gained a few enemies who looked exactly like him.

 “I am neither radical nor reactionary,” he said. “I am progressive.” That was his favorite trick — claiming middle ground while sawing off both ends of the plank.

 

The Des Moines Register called him “the most restless man in Iowa politics.” They weren’t wrong. Cummins paced like a man waiting for his better angels to catch up. His voice carried that Presbyterian thunder — moral certainty wrapped in prairie dust. “The great evil of our time,” he warned, “is the domination of business in government.” Then he’d smile like a man who knew half the crowd owned stock.

 

He wasn’t the barnstorming type like Teddy Roosevelt, all teeth and testosterone. He was cooler, lawyerly, surgical. Robert La Follette fought with his fists; Cummins fought with commas and tariffs. He talked reform like a judge handing down a sentence. “The law,” he’d say, “isn’t sacred because it’s written down — it’s sacred because it’s right.”

 

Albert Baird Cummins in 1906

Reporters loved him until they didn’t. “Cummins,” one wrote, “has the face of a scholar and the temper of a mule.” Another called him “a volcano in a frock coat.” Cummins didn’t mind. “I’d rather be accused of temper,” he snapped, “than of cowardice.”

 

He threw himself into the “Iowa Idea,” a plan to strip the tariffs of their cozy monopoly padding. “The tariff must not be a shelter for robbery,” he said, pounding the lectern till his knuckles went white. The room went quiet. Then the railroad men started whispering. 

 

“If you can’t sell your product without protection,” he said once, “maybe you shouldn’t sell it at all.”

 

He turned the governor’s office into a reform shop — direct primaries, utility regulation, fare caps. He treated corruption like a leaky roof: fixable, not fatal. His contemporaries wanted to blow the house up. Cummins just wanted to patch it so the rain didn’t get in. “Revolution,” he said, “is what you get when men stop listening. Reform is what you do when you still can.”

 

The old guard called him dangerous. One senator hissed, “He’s got the zeal of a preacher and the habits of a lawyer — he’ll damn you with paperwork.” Cummins shot back, “If justice comes in the form of paperwork, then pass me another sheet.”

 

Cummins speaking at a political rally

Washington didn’t know what to make of him when he became a senator. He was too straight for the crooks, too crooked for the saints. He once told a lobbyist, “You mistake me for a friend. I’m only polite.” 

 When he backed the Esch–Cummins Act to give the railroads back their power, progressives turned on him like he’d sold his soul for a Pullman pass. “He’s forgotten who brung him,” wrote the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Cummins didn’t answer. He never did. “I do not apologize for compromise,” he said. “It is how civilization survives its own noise.”

 

By the 1920s, he’d outlived his own revolution. The party he’d fought to reform had reformed him instead. “Every great movement must one day meet its own moderation,” he sighed. That was his epitaph in slow motion.

 

Brookhart beat him in ’26 — a louder, meaner kind of progressive. The voters didn’t want logic anymore; they wanted fireworks. Cummins walked off the stage like a man leaving church after the hymn had gone flat. “The mob,” he said bitterly, “is the ugliest face of democracy.”

 

He died in ’26, just months after the election. The Des Moines Register called him “an honest man in dishonest times.” Another paper said, “He dreamed of clean politics in a dirty age.” Cummins might’ve written his own obituary: “The cause of reform is eternal. The reformer is temporary.”

 

He was the ghost of decency in a room full of dealmakers. A prairie moralist stuck between the barroom and the Bible. A man who thought you could scrub corruption out of government with soap and speeches.

 

He couldn’t, of course. Nobody could. But for a few years in Iowa, people believed he just might.