William Boyd Allison: The Man Who Ran The Senate From The Shadows

 

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: An Iowa Politician Who Refused to Play It Safe

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.

Laughed Off Stage, Written Into History: The Cherry Sisters

A colorized image of The Cherry Sisters

The Cherry Sisters didn’t arrive on the American stage—so much as detonate on it, like some godforsaken cyclone stuffed with tin pans, bad hymns, and the righteous confidence you normally only see in evangelists or heavily medicated congressmen. Five of them—Effie, Addie, Ella, Lizzie, Jessie—marching into the 1890s like a militia of homemade virtue, certain the world was ready for their greatness.

The world, of course, had other ideas.

 

Their traveling revue, a fever dream called “Something Good, Something Sad,” wasn’t a show so much as a moral crusade welded to accidental slapstick. They sang with the reckless abandon of people who did not know what singing required. They recited poetry like hostile witnesses in their own trial. They dispensed moral lectures with the zeal of frontier prosecutors. And they performed dramatic sketches stitched together like ransom notes.

 

The Clown Who Outsold Charlie Chaplin: Iowa's Harry Langdon

Harry Langdon was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1884—small, pale, blinking like the sun was too bright and the world too loud. He wasn’t built for noise, so he made his own. Soft noise. Strange noise. The kind that made people lean in.

 He grew up watching more than talking, a quiet kid who turned confusion into comedy. Vaudeville grabbed him early. He drifted into tent shows that smelled like dust and popcorn, where comics fought for dimes and dignity. His act was a man-child stumbling through life like someone had swapped the instruction manual for a blank sheet of paper. “I never knew much,” he said. “That seemed to help.”

 

Crowds loved him. They felt protective, then foolish for feeling protective, then they laughed harder. One reviewer said he looked “one sneeze from disaster.” Another said, “Langdon makes you hold your breath, then giggle at yourself for it.”

 

Mack Sennett signed him in 1924. Hollywood figured he’d break instantly. He didn’t break. He shuffled his feet, and underplayed everything until audiences lost their minds. Moving Picture World said, “Langdon doesn’t hit gags. He drifts into them like fog into a valley.”

The Iowa Woman Who Changed the Republican Party From the Inside: Mary Louise Smith

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.

The Iowa Woman Who Broke the Bar: Belle Babb Mansfield

Belle Babb Mansfield grew up in a house where books were treated like they mattered. Her parents believed girls should learn the same things boys did. Her mother said she had “a mind that runs ahead of her years.” Belle spent her childhood catching up to it.

When the family moved to Mount Pleasant, Iowa, Belle found herself living two blocks from Iowa Wesleyan University. The campus buzzed with students arguing about politics and the future of the country. Belle slid into that world like she belonged there. She read constantly, took every challenge seriously, and graduated as valedictorian. One professor said she had “a steadiness rare in the young.”

After college, Belle taught school. She liked her students, but the work didn’t use her whole mind. Whenever she visited her older brother Washington’s law office, she’d sit near the window with a law book open on her lap while the office cat slept on her feet.

Her brother remembered, “She read the law as if she had known it all her life.” She read case after case until the pages smudged under her fingers. The work made sense to her—the structure, the logic, the arguments. It lit something in her that teaching couldn’t.

Before The FED, There Was Leslie Mortimer Shaw: Iowa's Man At The Treasury

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.”

When The Fighting Stopped & The Land Changed Hands: Winfield Scott & The Black Hawk Purchase

Winfield Scott in 1812

When General Winfield Scott reached Fort Armstrong, the Black Hawk War was over. The shooting had stopped. The militia had gone home. What remained was the uneasy quiet that settles in after a storm. Scott hadn’t come to win a battle. He had come to draw the new lines that followed one.

He was supposed to arrive at the height of the campaign with a fresh army behind him. Instead, cholera ripped his force apart as it moved along the Great Lakes. Soldiers died fast—sometimes within hours. One volunteer wrote, “Death travels faster than the soldier.” Scott burned contaminated gear, quarantined entire units, and marched on through the sickness anyway.

 

By late July, he reached Illinois with what one newspaper called “a column of survivors rather than an army.” And by then, Black Hawk had been defeated at the Bad Axe River. The war had closed its own curtain.

 

But Washington wanted more than peace. Officials wanted land—security for settlers, control of the Mississippi, and a treaty that would keep Native nations from returning to Illinois. If the war had been fought with bullets, the settlement would be finished with signatures.

A Drunk, A Reformer, A Governor: Harold E. Hughes of Iowa

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.”

UFOs over Iowa

In 1967, two state troopers near Norwalk chased a red-orange
spacecraft down a rural highway at 2 am

Something was loose in the Iowa sky during the 1960s and 70s—something bright, silent, and definitely not from any Air Guard training schedule. Iowa papers were printing UFO stories with the same straight face they used for county board meetings. It wasn’t fringe. It was news. And to read those old clippings today is to feel the weird throb of a state trying to keep its sanity while the heavens misbehaved.

 Take 1964, for example—Lisbon and Mount Vernon. The Cedar Rapids Gazette reported locals watching an oval-shaped light that shot across the sky, stopped cold, and hovered like a nervous housefly with a PhD. One man told the paper it “hung there like it was thinking.” Thinking! This was Iowa, where nothing thinks in the sky except clouds and maybe the occasional bird with ambition.