Adlai Stevenson
Adlai Stevenson was a Kentucky born lawyer in Illinois, where in his youth he developed a friendship with Stephen Douglas and a contempt for Abraham Lincoln which never left him. Following the end of the Civil War he partnered with James Ewing, a cousin, in Bloomington where their law firm of Stevenson and Ewing grew into one of the largest and most successful firms in the city and later the state of Illinois. In 1875 and later in 1879 he won a seat in the House of Representatives as a Democrat, and gained some attention among the national party leaders. In between his stints in Congress he started a newspaper in Bloomington, the Daily Bulletin, which was pro-Democrat in its leanings.
During a vacation in Wisconsin Stevenson became friends with William Vilas, himself a close friend of Grover Cleveland. Cleveland was elected President in 1884 after a campaign in which Stevenson supported him both on the campaign trail and through his newspaper and was rewarded for his efforts by receiving the job of Assistant Postmaster General, a position of expansive power. The Post Office was one of the largest patronage job systems in the country, with postmasters throughout the United States hired by appointment of the Postmaster General in Washington.
Stevenson began an immediate campaign to fire postmasters around the country, replacing them with members of the Democratic Party. This type of hiring and firing had been going on in the United States since the beginning of the government and was not considered to be unfair or unethical at the time. Stevenson fired tens of thousands of postal workers and replaced them with Democrats, earning the ire of Congressional Republicans who could do little to stop him. After Cleveland lost his re-election bid in 1888, he nominated Stevenson to fill a seat on the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia and the Republican led Congress happily sat on the nomination until Cleveland left office and the appointment was replaced by the new President.
Cleveland was nominated to run for President in 1892, and Stevenson was nominated to be his Vice President on the first ballot. Cleveland did little public campaigning but Stevenson did much, traveling across the country in an active role expressing the ticket’s view of the future. When they entered office Stevenson returned to his distribution of patronage through the use of cabinet officers and civil service leaders. Although he frequently visited the White House as Vice President Stevenson did not have much political influence with the President.
Stevenson ran for Vice President again in 1900 as the running mate for William Jennings Bryan, which made him the first Vice President to run for the office with his former President’s opponent as his running mate. Stevenson was the father of Adlai Stevenson II, who ran twice for President of the United States, losing in each instance to Dwight Eisenhower. He later served as the US Ambassador to the United Nations during the Cuba Missile Crisis. He was also a Governor of Illinois, an office his father tried to win several times, including in his last campaign for office in 1908. Adlai Stevenson died in 1914, in Bloomington.
