Charles Grilk Davenport Lawyer Iowa Attorney General

Charles Grilk (from The Daily Times. 
April 4, 1924)

When Charles Grilk ran for Congress in 1906 as a young Republican lawyer out of Davenport, the party brought in its heaviest weapon to carry him across the line: Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt arrived like the weather. Loud. Electric. Unavoidable.

That morning, he took breakfast at the Davenport home of novelist Alice French—known to readers as Octave Thanet—one of the most powerful literary and political voices in the state. The table was crowded with influence. Words were chosen carefully. Futures were weighed between coffee cups.

Then, Roosevelt and Grilk went to Central Park.

Thousands packed into Central Park in Davenport. Roosevelt spoke. The crowd surged. Grilk stood beside him, absorbing the force of borrowed gravity. It was a public anointing. A signal that this young Davenport lawyer had entered the bloodstream of national power.

He lost that race, but the door never closed again.

Guy Gillette Iowa Senator

Guy Gillette (The Courier. May 29, 1924)

Guy Gillette came to Washington in 1936 while the country was still bleeding from the Depression. Iowa farms were drowning in debt. Banks were collapsing. The New Deal promised rescue. Gillette arrived as a Democrat, but he never arrived as a loyalist.

He didn’t trust party machines. He didn’t trust Wall Street. He especially didn’t trust men who spoke softly while reaching for control.

Washington wanted obedience. Gillette offered scrutiny.

He backed farm relief because Iowa was starving. He backed soil conservation because the land was breaking. He backed rural electrification because darkness still ruled whole counties. Those votes earned him enemies in corporate boardrooms and quiet allies in farm kitchens.

The real fight came during World War II.

The Senate was flooded with emergency bills. Weapons contracts. War industries. Spending without ceilings. Gillette voted for the war, but he fought the money behind it. He questioned contractors, challenged cost overruns, and warned that corporations were growing fat while soldiers bled. As he told the Senate not long after America entered the conflict, “We said that they went over there … not to prove the prowess of America … but to see to it that there never was such a war again.”

Chancy J. Stevens Montour, Iowa Mayor

In 1927, the Des Moines Register profiled Chancy J. Stevens of Montour, Iowa, believed to be the oldest mayor in America at age 94. Stevens had served as mayor for 18 years.

He came to Iowa from New York as a young man and first settled in Indiantown, two miles north of Montour. He supported prohibition, equal rights for women, and the woodshed as a corrective measure for wayward youths.

(picture from the Des Moines Register. December 25, 1927)

Oscar Heline Iowa Congressman Farmers Holiday Association

Oscar Heline erupted out of the farm crisis like a man done waiting for permission. He wasn’t polite. He wasn’t polished. He was the human bill collector for every bad policy and blind bureaucrat that helped wreck the countryside. He’d watched neighbors lose everything, and he wasn’t going quietly.

In the early 1930s, Iowa farmers were getting chewed to ribbons. Prices tanked. Land vanished. Entire communities folded like cheap card tables. The entire system felt wired for failure, and the people running it acted surprised every time it blew up.

Heline didn’t bother with committees or measured tones. He helped form the Farmers Holiday Association—a movement that felt less like a meeting and more like a pressure cooker ready to pop. They blocked roads, shut down markets, and stared down sheriffs and bankers with the dead-eyed resolve that makes a man rethink his job. Critics screamed “radical.” Heline shrugged. What else do you call trying to stay alive?

Washington started hearing the noise. Soon Heline was advising the Roosevelt administration, stomping through the halls like someone sent to collect a debt. He didn’t deal in jargon. He talked about farm auctions that felt like funerals and families smothered by bank notices. He pushed for anything—price supports, production cuts, whatever—if it kept farmers from being scraped off their land like roadkill.

Samuel Freeman Miller Supreme Court Justice

Samuel Freeman Miller grew up in Kentucky, where slavery lay over everything like a shadow nobody wanted to talk about. He talked about it anyway. It made him feel like he was living inside a house with a rotten beam. You could pretend it wasn’t there, but the ceiling still sagged.

So he left.

He went to Iowa, where the towns were young and nothing was settled yet. Keokuk in 1850 wasn’t pretty. There was mud everywhere, steamboats coughed smoke into the sky, and strangers drifted in with the river current. Men trying to become something they weren’t yet. Miller stepped onto the landing with a medical degree in one hand and a law license in the other, not sure which one would carry him farther.

People trusted him sooner than he expected. He spoke plainly. He didn’t pretend to know more than he did. When he knew more, he didn’t make a show of it. One lawyer said Miller “could read an entire library before breakfast,” and maybe that was true. He read because he couldn’t help himself. Books steadied him. They made the world feel a little less chaotic.

Keokuk leaned Democratic, but Miller leaned toward anything that looked honest and open. Slavery had chased him out of Kentucky, and he didn’t plan on letting it creep into Iowa. “A nation cannot be half free and half pretending,” he said once. It wasn’t meant to be a famous line. It was just the truth as he saw it. He joined the Young Republican Party because it seemed to move toward that truth.

Word spread. By 1862, people in Washington were hearing about the sharp-minded lawyer from Iowa who worked like a man trying to outrun himself. Lincoln needed new Supreme Court justices—men who wouldn’t flinch when the war pushed the Constitution to its limits. Miller’s name came up. Lincoln looked at his record, at his steadiness, and said yes.

William Boyd Allison Iowa Politician

 

William Boyd Allison walked into the state like a mild-mannered undertaker with a pocket full of dynamite and a handshake that meant you were already halfway buried.

Born in Ohio, he wandered west, and landed in Dubuque — a city that in those days smelled like wet sawdust and pig fat. Allison set up a law office, wore tidy clothes, spoke softly, and terrified everyone. “You never knew what he was thinking,” one rival said. “Mostly because by the time you figured it out, he’d already outmaneuvered you and sent you a polite note about it.”

 

The Civil War blew half the country sky-high, but Allison didn’t rattle. He slid into Congress like a man taking the wheel of a slow, ugly machine. Lincoln loved him — “steady as a church bell,” he said — which from Lincoln was basically anointing someone with holy oil. Allison wasn’t a firebrand. He was a locksmith. He understood the gears, the tumblers, the secret hinges that kept the Union from falling apart.

 

Washington reporters noticed early. “Allison is the only man in the chamber who reads the entire bill,” one wrote. “Which makes him the most dangerous.”

James W. Grimes Iowa Politician

James W. Grimes landed in Burlington when it was still half frontier, half fever dream—muddy streets, cheap whiskey, and men who argued politics like they were swinging shovels. Grimes fit right in. “This is a place where a man can make something of himself,” he supposedly said. “Preferably noise.”

Everyone who met him remembered his voice. Not loud, but cutting. It could slice through a crowded saloon and make the piano player lose his place. One editor said, “Grimes didn’t speak; he struck.” Another said, “He had the manner of a man who expected you to be wrong.”

In 1854, Iowa made him governor—a bad idea for anyone who preferred peace. Grimes was built for conflict. Slavery’s supporters tried to push their influence west, and he met them like a brick wall. “If slavery enters Iowa, it will come over my dead body,” he said, and people believed him. He didn’t smile when he said it. He didn’t smile much at all. A Davenport paper described him as “a man who looks permanently disappointed in human nature.”

He became one of the early architects of the Republican Party, back when it was more movement than machine. He didn’t care if he made enemies. “Let them shout,” he said. “I’ll shout louder.” When a rival called him radical, Grimes shrugged it off. “If freedom is radical, the Founders were radicals,” he said, and the line stuck because it sounded like something hammered into metal.

Mary Louise Smith Iowa Political Leader From Eddyville

Mary Louise Smith

Mary Louise Smith grew up in Eddyville, Iowa, in a house where the radio never shut up and the news barged in like a half-drunk uncle with opinions about everything. She was born in 1907—late to the suffrage fight, but early enough to feel the leftover electricity crackling through the country.

She wasn’t loud. Not the type who storms rooms or slams fists. She watched and saw the tiny things—how a chair scraped just before someone disagreed, how an entire meeting could tilt off its axis because one person liked the sound of their own voice. She could sort the talkers from the doers in under a minute.

Politics in the 1920s and ’30s wasn’t made for women. It wasn’t made for most men either. It was a noisy, overheated kitchen where everyone was burning something and nobody wanted to clean the pan. Most women stayed out of it. Mary Louise stepped in like she’d been sent to organize the pantry before the entire place exploded.

She started in the church-basement world of Republican women’s clubs. She taught people how to vote, how to read a ballot that looked like it had been typeset in a coal mine, how to stand up without shaking like a loose fencepost. She said politics was something anyone could learn “one stitch at a time,” and she meant it.

Leslie Mortimer Shaw Iowa Politician

Leslie Mortimer Shaw

Leslie Mortimer Shaw came into the world in 1848 in Morristown, Vermont, a place that taught thrift, discipline, and that comfort was something other people had. He grew up believing you survived by grinding harder than the next man. That philosophy followed him west to Iowa, where ambition grew faster than corn.

Shaw arrived in Denison in 1874, opened a law practice, and married the schoolteacher. He served on boards, ran civic committees, and quickly built a reputation as someone who didn’t waste time or patience. People noticed. One Denison editor wrote, “Mr. Shaw has no talent for idleness; he is a steam engine disguised as a lawyer.”

 

By the 1880s, Shaw had taken over Denison’s banks and insurance companies. He studied financial systems with an intensity usually reserved for religious conversions. Currency debates, farm credit, banking power—these were the storms he wanted to steer. The local newspaper called him “a gentleman of firm will and iron reason,” a man who refused to back down once he decided he was right. Another paper noted, “He speaks of money the way a surgeon speaks of pulse—one wrong beat can kill the patient.”

 

In 1898, the Iowa Republican Party nominated him for governor. His speeches hammered stability, sound money, and predictable government. “Shaw speaks as if lecturing Congress from the steps of a barn,” the Des Moines Register wrote, half amused and half impressed. Voters responded. He won the election and walked into the governor’s office with the air of a man who already knew what needed fixing. One supporter said, “We did not elect a showman. We elected a mechanic with a toolbox.”

Harold E. Hughes Iowa Governor & Senator

Harold E. Hughes didn’t look like a governor—he looked like the truck driver he used to be. Big shoulders. Thick hands. A face carved by cold highways and too many nights sleeping three states from home. He talked straight, prayed hard, and carried the ghosts of alcoholism like extra luggage.

He wasn’t a polished politician. He was something rarer. He was real. And from 1963 to 1969, Iowa found out what it meant to put a real man in the governor’s chair.

 

Hughes came into office when Iowa government still smelled faintly of the 19th century—old boys, old systems, and old fears. The state needed oxygen, and Hughes brought a tank.

 

His inaugural address made the establishment nervous. “We are not here to preserve the past. We are here to build the future.” That sounded harmless…but Hughes meant every word like a fist hitting a desk.

 

He started with mental health—an issue most politicians tiptoed around. In 1963, he pushed through a sweeping reorganization of Iowa’s mental health system, shifting treatment to community centers instead of massive state institutions. The Des Moines Register wrote, “Governor Hughes speaks of mental health not as a program, but as a moral duty.”

George Wallace Jones Dubuque Iowa Miner Politician

George Wallace Jones was born in 1804, when the world was still figuring out what it wanted to be. He came to Dubuque when it was more mud than map. Men swung picks for lead and prayed they didn’t find bullets instead. The Sauk and Fox still owned the mines. Half the town dug for fortune, the other half dug graves. Jones tried both.He had an easy smile and a fast tongue, the kind that made people forget how dangerous he was. He could sell sand to a riverboat man and have him thank him for it. When the miners started coughing up their lungs, Jones bought their land. That’s how he got rich.

Politics was just another kind of digging. He went from miner to delegate to senator without breaking stride. Washington liked him for a while. He wore good clothes, told good stories, and didn’t scare the ladies. Then the country split in two, and Jones picked the wrong half.

He said it was about “states’ rights.” Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. The war came. His friends wrote from the Confederacy, and he wrote back. The government called it treason and locked him up. He said it was a mistake. Maybe it was.

When he came home, Dubuque had grown up without him. The saloons were quieter, the streets cleaner. He was still loud and proud, walking around like he expected a parade. No one threw one. People nodded when he passed, then went back to their business.

William B. Allison Iowa Senator

William B. Allison worked the Senate like a quiet machine, oiling the gears while everyone else tried to blow it up. “When he rises in his place,” one reporter wrote, “he leaves all that shouting to the youngsters.” They called him “the Old Fox,” and it fit. He never rushed, never panicked, just waited for everyone else to wear themselves out.

He ran the nation’s money like a farmer minding his crops—steady, patient, and suspicious of fast talkers. One colleague said, “No man who has ever been in the Senate knew so much about it as he does.” Allison didn’t argue. He didn’t have to. He knew where the deals were buried, and most of the bodies too.

Presidents came and went—Grant, Cleveland, McKinley, Roosevelt—Allison just kept showing up, same seat, same half smile that said he’d already counted the votes.

When asked how he lasted so long, he shrugged. “You do what you can,” he said, “and you let the noise take care of itself.”

By the time he died, Washington barely looked up. The loud ones had taken over. Still, every bridge, fort, and railroad budget had his fingerprints on it. William B. Allison didn’t shout or grandstand. He built the country, one quiet deal at a time.

Henry Clay Dean Iowa Orator Preacher & Agitator

Henry Clay Dean

Henry Clay Dean was born loud. He entered the world in 1822 in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, with a voice like thunder and opinions to match. By the time he could walk, he was arguing with adults. By the time he could read, he was preaching to fence posts. People said he was born to save the Republic or set it on fire.

He went to college in Virginia, studied law, then ditched it all to become a Methodist preacher—because shouting in court didn’t give him enough range. Dean could make sinners cry and atheists consider hedging their bets. His sermons weren’t polite little Sunday affairs. They were explosions—half scripture, half outrage, and all Henry. “He believed in God,” one man said, “and in Henry Clay Dean, in that order.”

 

When he moved to Iowa in the 1840s, the frontier was still a muddy sprawl of log churches and whiskey. Dean built congregations with fire and sarcasm. His beard grew wild, his eyes burned bright, and his voice could shake rafters. He married, had children, and somehow found time to write angry letters to newspapers about everything from bad theology to bad roads.

 

He had a gift for offending the right people. He loved to debate and hated to lose. When a heckler said his sermons were “too long and too loud,” Dean shot back, “That’s the same complaint sinners make about hell.” The crowd roared. The heckler left early.

James Baird Weaver Iowa Politician Populist Greenback

James Baird Weaver, age 60

James Baird Weaver was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1833—tall, loud, and sure of himself before he could spell “politics.” His family moved to Iowa when it was still a muddy promise of a state. They built fences, fought grasshoppers, and prayed for rain. Weaver grew up believing hard work should count for something, and that it usually didn’t.

 He went east for school, learned law, and came back ready to make noise. When the Civil War hit, and Weaver joined the 2nd Iowa Infantry, fought at Fort Donelson and Shiloh, and came home with a general’s star and a head full of ideas about freedom and fairness. “A nation that can save itself with blood,” he said, “can save itself with justice.”

 

After the war, he tried being a Republican. It didn’t take. It had turned into a party of bankers, and Weaver couldn’t stomach it. He watched farmers losing their land while railroads fattened on government favors. He said the country was “run by men who never plowed an acre or swung a hammer.” That line stuck. Iowa farmers started quoting it over coffee and seed corn catalogs.

 

Weaver’s enemies called him dangerous. He called himself “an honest radical.” He wasn’t the kind to back down or smooth out his edges. “I never learned to whisper,” he said. “The truth should be spoken loud enough for the thieves to hear.”

Annie Nowlin Savery Des Moines Iowa Suffragette

Annie Nowlin Savery was all lace and lightning—smart, restless, and way too opinionated for a world that preferred its women quiet and breakable. She married James Savery, a businessman with money, charm, and no idea what kind of storm he’d invited to dinner. While he built hotels and railroads, Annie built a revolution.

She threw herself into every cause that promised to make the world a little less stupid—abolition, temperance, women’s rights. Her parlor became a war room for reformers. Picture velvet chairs, cigars, and Susan B. Anthony sitting by the fire planning how to blow up the patriarchy (politely, of course, with pamphlets). Annie wrote editorials so sharp they could slice wallpaper, and she never apologized for making men uncomfortable. “Mrs. Savery’s courage is not of the quiet kind,” one newspaper said.

When people told her that women shouldn’t talk politics, she invited them over and made them listen. When they said women couldn’t own property, she told them to read the law again because she was going to change it. Her energy was nuclear before anyone knew what that meant.

Mamie Doud Eisenhower

Mamie Doud Eisenhower

Mary Geneva “Mamie” Doud Eisenhower was born in Boone, Iowa, in 1896. Her father was a successful meatpacker; her mother believed in good manners, good friends, and never running out of cake. Mamie grew up cheerful, social, and full of energy. “I was a chatterbox from the beginning,” she liked to say, and no one who met her ever disagreed.

She met Dwight Eisenhower in Texas in 1915, when he was a young Army lieutenant with big ears, a friendly smile, and zero money. “He had the nicest smile I’d ever seen,” she said. He was equally gone on her. “I’m walking on air,” he wrote after their first date. They were married that summer and spent the next fifty years in a love story that was half war zone, half road trip.

Army life was no picnic. They moved constantly—Panama, the Philippines, Washington, Denver. Over two dozen homes in thirty years. “The only thing we ever owned that wasn’t government issue,” she joked, “was our dog.” She learned to make a home out of whatever walls the Army handed her. “Home,” she said, “is wherever Ike happens to be.”

She turned chaos into order with a smile and a clipboard. Other officers’ wives adored her. “She was tiny but commanding,” one said. “You just wanted to do what she said.” Her secret was charm and discipline in equal measure. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you Mamie wasn’t tough,” an aide once said. “She was steel in satin.”

Robert Ray Five Time Iowa Governor

Robert D. Ray was born in Des Moines in 1928. After graduating from Roosevelt High in 1946, he joined the army and served in occupied Japan with the military police.

When he came home, he went to Drake on the G.I. Bill, earned his law degree, and married his college sweetheart, Billie Lou Joyce. They settled in Des Moines, where Ray built a small law practice and a reputation for honesty and staying calm under pressure.

Politics followed. He became chairperson of the Iowa Republican Party in 1963, modernized it, raised money, and recruited new candidates, earning respect from both moderates and conservatives. Reporters called him “unflappable” and “impossible to dislike.”

America was a mess in 1968—Vietnam, protests, assassinations. Iowa Republicans needed someone calm. They picked Robert Ray. He won. Then he won again. And again. Five times. Fourteen years as governor.

People called him “the conscience of Iowa.” Others called him dull. He didn’t care. He governed like a man tuning an engine—carefully, quietly, and with purpose.

Then he did something that took real guts.

James D. Bourne First Settler in Clinton County

No one’s sure who got there first. Maybe it was Elijah Buell, who built a cabin on the Mississippi and drifted south before the ink on his claim dried. Maybe it was James D. Bourne, who came up the Wapsipinicon River in 1836 and never left.

The land didn’t look like a place where anyone could stay. The river bent and twisted through low timber, its banks soft with mud and cattails. Bourne stepped onto the shore and decided it would do. He built his cabin where the bend caught the morning sun.

It was a trading post for the American Fur Company at first. Coffee and powder for pelts, tobacco for tallow. A dozen faces came and went each week—trappers with frost in their beards, Native families with venison to trade, river men drifting between towns that didn’t yet exist. Bourne kept a notebook of what each man owed, though sometimes the ledger wasn’t worth the paper. He stayed anyway.

Redemption of Herbert Hoover

Herbert Hoover, 1918

Herbert Hoover didn’t leave the White House — so much as escape it.

 Critics said he’d wrecked America and sat on his hands while people starved. They built shantytowns called Hoovervilles, wrapped themselves in Hoover blankets, and cursed his name between bites of government cheese. No president before or since has been so thoroughly damned by public opinion — not even Nixon.

 

FDR came riding in like a smiling messiah with a cigarette holder and a jaw made for the newsreels, while Hoover looked like a disappointed banker in a dust storm. Roosevelt promised hope and handouts; Hoover believed in hard work and human decency. “Blessed are the children of the poor,” he said dryly, “for they shall inherit debt.” Not exactly a campaign jingle for a nation waiting on its next meal.

 

So Hoover went west — back to Palo Alto. The man who once fed Europe spent his evenings pacing the hills above Stanford, wondering how a nation he’d saved could turn on him so fast. He wrote his vengeance on a typewriter: The Challenge to Liberty. The Memoirs. The Problems of Lasting Peace. Books with titles so dry you could light cigars with them — but inside them burned fury. “The New Deal,” he said, “is an attempt to divide men by class and set them to fighting each other. You cannot build freedom out of envy.”