“God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb”
James H. Andrews
A paper delivered to the Chicago
Literary Club
February 2, 2009
Copyright
2009 James H. Andrews
“God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb”
By James H. Andrews
A paper delivered to the Chicago Literary Club
February 2, 2009
“God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.”
The phrase comes from a late 18th century collection of sentimental
sketches by Lawrence Sterne, author also of the novel, Tristram Shandy. The sketches are not now taken seriously, but once
they were, and the lines I quote must have been familiar to American students
in the late 19th century.
I use the phrase because it was quoted by
my grandfather. I don’t remember his saying it, but many years after my
grandfather’s death in 1956, his son and law partner, my father, remembered it
well.
I understand it to mean that God cares for
the vulnerable, those who are in need, the weak and less fortunate, and that we
can find some comfort in that. But even when tempered, the wind does blow,
sometimes harshly. I take that to mean there is still a need for human action.
These thoughts came to mind as I explored
the life of my grandfather, a project I undertook several years ago. What
intrigues me most is his life as a public man, with a long career of advocacy
and action, winning and losing. I am struck by the vigor and duration of his
public life.
I am his namesake, and I lived across the
street from my grandfather, except for my college years and Naval service,
until his death at 86, when I was 23. Most of his life was spent in Kewanee,
Illinois, a city of at most 20,000 people, 140 miles southwest of Chicago. The
center of his career was the sixteen years he served as mayor of Kewanee, from
1919 until his defeat in 1935.
My research has led me to read many old
newspapers and to benefit from their detailed coverage of his political life.
That coverage has for some periods included more or less verbatim excerpts from
his speeches.
EARLY YEARS
James Harper Andrews, born December 18,
1870, was named for his father, who owned and farmed land near Geneseo,
Illinois, on the Green River not far from Rock Island and the Mississippi.
James was the fourth child, the fourth son in a family that eventually included
10 children, one born every two or three years from 1863 to 1882, a span of
almost 20 years.
He grew up on the farm, sharing the work
with his three older brothers, and as time went on, three younger brothers and
three sisters. He went to grammar school on adjacent property set aside for a school
when the government opened the land to white settlers.
Andrews attended high school at Geneseo
Collegiate Institute, which had been organized in 1883 by Presbyterians and
members of other Protestant churches. The school provided instruction in languages—Greek,
Latin, German, English—as well as mathematics, music, drawing and painting,
commercial subjects, and elocution. He rode a horse two and a half miles to
school in town.
As a fourth child, it is likely Andrews had
little supervision beyond the demands of his assigned work at home and in
school. He made himself known at an early age. His children tell of his
creating a mild sensation when he rode his horse down the middle of the school.
They most likely heard the story years later from the rider himself.
Andrews worked on his father’s farm until
he was 21, as his father had before him, as sons were expected to do in those
days. But in the fall of 1891, just before his 21st birthday in
December, he enrolled as a student at Knox College in Galesburg, 50 miles away.
He graduated four years later in 1895.
How did he happen to go to college? A
onetime law partner, speaking many years later, put it this way: “He early
determined that an excellent education was the basis for a successful and happy
life.”
His elder brothers, so far as I know, had
not sought a college education. But Andrews knew from previous generations
about higher education and its benefits. His father invested in farmland and
farmed all his life, but was also said also to be “a reader of good books and a
thinker.” His grandfather, the Rev. Wells Andrews, a clergyman and farmer, was
a graduate of Jefferson College in Pennsylvania and Princeton Theological
Seminary. He taught English and history at Ohio University in Athens between pastorates
in Presbyterian and Congregational churches in Virginia, Ohio, and Illinois
near Peoria.
Another model for the young Andrews may
have been a great uncle, Joshua Harper, who lived in Geneseo. After a career in
shipping and business in Rio de Janeiro and New York City, Harper moved to
Henry County, one of its first white settlers and county officials. He served
in the Illinois House of Representatives and as a delegate to the 1848 state
constitutional convention. A biographer called him “a classical scholar of more
than ordinary claims.”
Andrews’s aunt, Lucy Andrews Shaw, attended
college for a time and her husband was a graduate of Brown University,
practiced law in Geneseo, and was said to have a large library and know seven
languages.
KNOX COLLEGE
Knox College and Galesburg were founded in
1837 by a band of Congregationalists and Presbyterians from Upstate New York.
New Yorkers of similar views also settled Geneseo, and in the college’s early
years Geneseo was a leading source of students for Knox.
Andrews enrolled at Knox in 1891. He would
have heard about several graduates of the 1880s who went on to great success in
journalism in New York. Among them was the magazine magnate S.S. McClure, class
of 1882, an employer of muckraking journalists for McClure’s magazine. Another,
whom he came to know directly, was John Huston Finley, of the class of 1887.
Finley went on to become president of City College of New York and editor of
the New York Times.
Finley returned to Knox as its president
only four years after his graduation. That was 1892, at the end of Andrews’s
first year. The new president and Andrews lived in the same rooming house for
some time. Andrews, a farm boy, was an early riser. He could hear Finley
getting up early in the morning, and was greatly impressed with the president’s
energy. Finley’s seven years as president, one writer says, reflected “the glow
of intellectuality.”
But the college in the 1890s was not purely
intellectual. Knox had a tradition of oratory and addressing the great issues
of the day. Its students organized interstate debating contests. Public
speaking was a stepping-stone to campus prestige. Public speaking and literary
efforts were led by two societies founded in the 1840s. Their needs led to the
construction of a college building with auditoriums and rooms for public
speaking and other programs. Benjamin Harrison, president of the United States,
dedicated the new building in October 1891, soon after Andrews arrived on
campus.
Andrews became president of one of the
societies, Adelphi. One writer described his contribution this way: “As a
debater he was fiery, impetuous, and frequently partisan. But an opponent who
underestimated his knowledge of a subject usually had a prompt and not always
pleasant awakening.”
The campus political alignment of the time
involved fraternities. Andrews fought with the “barbarians,” as they were
called, against the Greeks. The issues were debated not only through the spoken
word, but written word as well. Andrews used journalism to take a lead in the
fray.
A student paper known as the Coup d’Etat, run by fraternity men, had
overtaken another publication, the Knox
Student, a dozen years before Andrews arrived on the scene. Late in his
junior year Andrews “rallied a staff around him” to revive the Student. Under his “vigorous and
hardworking editorship,” as one writer recalled, the new weekly newspaper edged
“the moribund Coup d’Etat off the
stage.” The Knox Student is still
being published.
Andrews’s college years were a foretaste of
the years ahead. My guess is that by the time he graduated, many of his
qualities of character, temperament, and personality were clearly defined. He
had intelligence, energy, and ambition. He had a trained mind and
well-developed skills of writing and public speaking.
He possessed a desire for attention and
prominence. He reveled in conflict and in testing himself. He enjoyed other
people, and drawing them to him and his ideas and ambitions. Though he was
determined, he was also good-humored and enthusiastic. He liked to tell
stories, and comment on the ways of the world. People liked him and he knew how
to rally them to a cause.
Andrews believed in commitment to
principles and to ideas. By and large his sentiments were fixed. He was ready
to find a place in which he could use his talents to make the world a better
place. He was independent in his thinking and not easily dissuaded. If he
believed in something and thought it ought to be done, he was ready to
persevere in its accomplishment.
Growing up as the fourth son in a large
family, Andrews had probably had the freedom to try out his feelings and
behavior and ambitions. At the same time, his family heritage provided a guide
to which he could commit himself. A speaker at a family reunion in 1922 noted
the Rev. Wells Andrews’s strict adherence to the Sabbath. His descendents don’t
all believe as Wells did, the speaker noted, “yet the underlying principles of
his religion are yet with them, and the Andrews family has always had a heart
for the unfortunate and oppressed.”
NEWSPAPERS
Before he graduated, Andrews made plans to
start a newspaper back in Geneseo and lined up backing. His partner was a Knox
classmate, president of the other literary society. He was also an active
Republican. Andrews presumably was a Democrat, like his father. The paper,
known as the Arena, has been
described as nonpartisan and independent. It was sympathetic to the
organization of workers and advancement of their interests, and aggressive in
presenting its views. A competing paper, noting its location in the former
Cragin China Store, called the Arena
“a bull in a china shop.” Maybe the editor was, too.
After the first year, Andrews’s partner
sold his share of the business and moved away. The venture was never a
financial success, and lasted only two years. Andrews did not find the audience
or advertising to support his newspaper ambitions in Geneseo.
After college, besides attending to his
publishing career, Andrews “studied law at every spare moment,” a newspaper
later reported. At age 26, he looked beyond his hometown.
In November 1897 he carried a letter of
recommendation that certified “from personal knowledge to the sterling
character, energy and industry of Mr. J.H. Andrews . . . I knew him as a
student at Knox College where with little or no financial assistance he secured
a thorough education. He is of the right stuff and will faithfully perform any
work entrusted to him.”
The letter was signed by Edgar A. Bancroft.
Bancroft was then general solicitor of the Chicago and Western Indiana
Railroad, later general counsel of International Harvester, and U.S. ambassador
to Japan. You will be glad to know that from 1892 until his death in 1925, he
was a member of the Chicago Literary Club.
MOVE TO KEWANEE
In 1897, after two years in Geneseo,
Andrews moved to Kewanee, the largest town in Henry County. He was 26 years
old.
Kewanee had a population of 7,600, more
than twice Geneseo’s 3,100. By 1900 Kewanee would have 8,400 inhabitants. The
town was founded in 1854, soon after the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy
Railroad came through, linking Kewanee with Chicago and the West. It was a
trading center for the surrounding farms, but increasingly a center of
manufacturing, drawing workers from other parts of the country and overseas.
Its earliest business was coal mining on land north of town. The dominant
industries were iron and steel works and rolling mills that produced steam
fittings and heating equipment. The Kewanee Boiler Corporation became the most
famous. Its boilers sent the city’s name all over the world. In 1906 Kewanee
ranked tenth among Illinois cities in the value of its manufactured products.
Kewanee offered opportunity at both ends of
the economic ladder. The largest factory was managed by an executive sent from
its Eastern headquarters, but the other industrial companies were run by the
men who built them, the major stock holders, who lived in town. Many of their
employees were European immigrants. There were substantial numbers of Flemish
Belgian and Polish immigrants as well as the Yankees, Swedes, Germans, and
Irish from earlier years, whose numbers continued to grow.
The railroad and the adjacent factories
divided the city. Blue-collar workers tended to live on the North Side,
white-collar workers, merchants, and executive and professional people on the
South. Political leadership at the turn of the century was primarily in the
hands of early settlers, businessmen, and factory executives. But as the
factories expanded, labor became a potential force, and the Socialist party
appeared on ballots from time to time.
Andrews founded the Kewanee Democrat, later known as the Kewanee Daily Verdict, “a paper championing the cause of labor.”
The newspaper market was competitive, with papers coming and going from year to
year. Andrews decided to seek elective office.
In 1900 he ran for the Illinois House of
Representatives on the Democratic ticket. The primary was close and a recount
was necessary. He was declared the nominee. He went on to win the general
election in November, a beneficiary of cumulative voting, which elected one
Democrat and two Republicans in a heavily Republican district.
“Meanwhile,” as a Kewanee paper—not
his—later told the story, “the newspaper business got bad. Faithful printers
reported every day. Jim made a bargain with them. If they would stick until the
Legislature convened he would pay off. In those days and these days members of
the legislature get $3,000 pay on the opening day of the session. Jim collected
the $3,000. When he alighted from the train here at midnight the printers, the
wives and children formed a reception committee. They went to the Wilson hotel,
where money was advanced on the state check and in the early morning hours the
printers were paid off.”
That was the end of his newspaper career.
It was also the end of his legislative career. The other Democratic House
candidate in the district challenged his election, and although Andrews was
eventually declared the winner, he was not seated during the short time the
legislature met during its two-year life. But he had been paid.
Andrews used the rest of his legislative
salary to study law. He went to Chicago that summer to take a six-week course
run by practicing lawyers and known as the Illinois College of Law. In October
1901 he was admitted to practice. He was 30 years old.
It was a good time to set up a law practice
in Kewanee. There were only nine lawyers in town. In 1905 he became associated
with Nels F. Anderson in the firm of Anderson & Andrews. Anderson, then 47,
had graduated from Knox College in 1882. Anderson was the first of a number of
partners with whom Andrews practiced over more than 50 years.
MAKING HIS WAY
For his first 10 years in Kewanee, Andrews
lived in a boarding house, as did other young men who moved to town. During
this time he made his way among the working men of the city and those in
professional and business circles as well. He joined the Congregational Church,
which counted among its 400 members old settlers, leaders of industry, banking,
and the professions and their families.
He was part of a social circle of
up-and-coming young men also making their way. One of them was Dr. Frank
Russell, a graduate of Rush Medical College in Chicago and the son of early
settlers in the area. He introduced Andrews to his younger sister, Eva. She had
graduated from the University of Chicago in 1901 and taught at Eastern Illinois
Normal School (now Eastern Illinois University) for several years before
returning home to care for her sick brother.
Eva Russell and James Andrews were married
in 1907 (102 years ago today). By that time Andrews was sufficiently prosperous
to build a fine house for his bride, on a lot given to her by her father.
Andrews often remarked–after they moved 20 years later— that he ended up paying
taxes on the house while his wife collected the rent. Their first child was
born at the end of their first year together; four more children followed over
the next 17 years.
A newspaper account of their wedding assessed Andrews’s position in town at the time of his marriage: “He is recognized as a competent attorney and as an orator of marked ability. Mr. Andrews since coming to Kewanee has been actively identified with the political life of the city, county, and state, being prominent in the councils of the Democratic Party.”
POLITICS
A year later, in 1908, Andrews was again a candidate on the Democratic ticket, this time for states attorney of Henry County. His chances were not good; the county had voted Republican since the founding of the party. He took his best shot. His slogan was, “Independent voters must rescue the county from official carelessness.” There were apparently not enough independent voters, and he lost. So did Democrats running for state office. Theodore Roosevelt was elected president of the United States.
Four years later, in 1912, Roosevelt ran as a Progressive against the reelection of President William Howard Taft. The Democrats elected a president, a governor of Illinois, and, even in Henry County, a states attorney, Andrews’s former law partner Nels Anderson.
Some of the Progressive enthusiasm carried into 1914. Even though he was a lifelong Democrat, Andrews that fall took a two-week swing through Southern Illinois in the campaign for the Progressive party candidate for the U. S. Senate. Speaking in Kewanee just before the November election, Andrews claimed that both the Democratic and Republican parties were boss-ridden and it was up to the Progressives to elect men who would be for clean government. His Senate candidate carried Henry County, but the Progressives did not do well, and by 1920 the party had pretty much disappeared locally and nationally.
The first decades of the century were exciting times in the nation and in Kewanee for someone who wanted to help the working man and his family and improve government to that end. Part of the reform agenda, advanced by Progressives and business people in general, focused on local government. The goal was to eliminate political party machines and bribes paid by businesses to obtain franchises, control competition, and obtain other advantages. Government franchises for utility companies—gas, electric power, and streetcar or traction systems—would be replaced by public ownership.
Many cities adopted the commission form of government, as Kewanee did in 1911. Aldermen were replaced by a commission of five members—a mayor and four commissioners. They were elected for four-year terms in the city at large on a nonpartisan ballot. Each was assigned one or two city departments to manage like a business. If residents did not like the way things were handled, they could initiate and vote on public issues in referendums.
Public ownership of utilities did not take hold in nearly so many places as the commission form, but it won approval in Springfield and many smaller communities in Illinois and around the country. The principal argument for public ownership, based on a report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of Illinois, is stated succinctly in an 1899 headline in the New York Times: “PLANTS OWNED BY CITIES; Illinois Statistics Show Municipal Control Lowers Prices. TOWNS PAY HIGHER WAGES But Electric Light and Water Service Cost Consumer Less.”
A controversy over the power company’s franchise was an issue in Kewanee as early as 1906. The city council voted to extend the franchise, then rescinded its action, then eventually approved the renewal. Further stirring the waters were two indictments. One handed down in Henry County in 1913 charged company officials with discriminating between customers in assigning service rates. The other, in Cook County in early 1914, charged the Kewanee publisher of a Progressive-labor newspaper with trying to sell the newspaper’s good will to the power company for $25,000. My guess is that neither case went to trial, and perhaps no one expected they would.
Andrews thought the solution to these problems was a publicly owned power plant. In 1914 he addressed the Municipal League of Kewanee, which had probably been organized for that purpose. He scolded the city council for inaction on the franchise and rate issues and called for a referendum. The issue was “cheaper rates for light,” he said, and he urged the crowd not to moderate their demands in order to preserve harmony, as town leaders counseled.
“They accuse us of knocking,” he said. “I
don’t feel that way. The Savior was a knocker. But they could not kill his
cause. St. Paul was a knocker. They accused President Wilson of being a
knocker. When he took his office, his friends told him to be quiet—to make
friends and don’t stir up things. They said, ‘we want harmony.’”
But “how can there be harmony without
truth,” Andrews asked. “Harmony is the cloak under which many municipal crimes
are committed. . . . When a fellow says ‘let’s have harmony’ and keeps both
hands in his pockets, he is not sincere.”
RUNNING FOR MAYOR
By the next year, 1915, Andrews was ready
to run for mayor. Two other candidates filed for the office: the incumbent, a
businessman, and a self-declared socialist. The socialist lost in the primary
election.
The issues in the election, Andrews said,
“were freedom from entangling alliances with favor-seeking interests, whether
those interests grow out of the illicit sale of liquor [a big issue in those
days] or the exorbitant prices charged by a utility company.”
He looked for victory. “When my candidacy
was first announced some people laughed,” he said. “They knew that I have run
for office many times, and that I have usually been selected to lead a forlorn
hope when no one else would do so. But now they realize that I am likely to get
elected.”
But he did lose. He received only 34
percent of vote. He ran with a slate of three candidates for commissioner, and
they lost too.
He ran for mayor again, four years later,
in 1919. His slate of candidates that year was called the Labor party. It was
well-organized, and it was successful. It ran four candidates for
commissioner—two socialists and two lawyers, as one opponent characterized
them. The socialists were factory employees. The lawyers won, giving the mayor
two allies on the five-member city council. Andrews defeated the incumbent
mayor, a Kewanee Boiler company officer who had beaten him four years earlier.
He won 53 percent of the vote.
Andrews ran for mayor four more times, in
1923, 1927, 1931, and 1935—losing at last in 1935. He was 44 years old when he
ran for mayor the first time, 64 at the time of his final defeat. His mayoral
races stretched over 20 years; he held the office for 16. He won more votes
each time he ran, even at the end. His majorities ranged from 51 to 55 percent.
In the last few weeks of every campaign,
there were public meetings and rallies every night. Opposition was not always
vigorous or well-organized, but it certainly was the year he lost.
He was a riveting speaker, and an entertaining
and humorous one. He spoke in crowded and overflowing schoolrooms and
auditoriums. A reporter for the Kewanee-Star-Courier
noted one year that large segments of the audiences were “composed of persons
who have followed Mr. Andrews around on all his campaign excursions.” A 1927
editorial called him “a wizard campaigner. His vigor and his aggressiveness
give him a measure of popularity. Through a quick sally of phrasing he may
easily impale an opponent’s political head on the sword point of rhetoric. He
can make a group of schoolhouse stoics roar with laughter or remain tense with
anticipation.”
The Star-Courier,
the city’s only daily newspaper while Andrews was mayor, was not taken in.
“Andrews has not made a bad mayor, “ the paper said, “yet there are always
reasons to expect a better man.” The Star-Courier
never endorsed him, opposed him most years, and led the fight against him in
1935.
Andrews’s principal issue, year in and year
out, was municipal ownership. He believed the city should build and operate its
own electric power plant. He believed in public ownership in principle. It was
his cause. He linked public ownership to a better life for the working man, the
average citizen, and to the community as a whole. He blasted the Philadelphia holding
company for taking profits out of Kewanee and, based on the value of its
property, paying far less than its legitimate share of local taxes.
Andrews chose running mates who agreed with
him on municipal ownership. He is certainly the reason the issue lived so long.
And it was he who defined the lineup of political forces in the city for a long
time, even after he left city hall. He was the central, mobilizing figure in
city politics, despite persistent Republican majorities in Kewanee for national,
state, and legislative office. I am told that Franklin Roosevelt carried
Kewanee only once in four elections.
Kewanee itself changed somewhat in those years. Many of the top businessmen who played important roles in the city’s prosperity and political life were visible for a time after Andrews became mayor, but they died or focused on other matters. Initially, population grew. The adjacent—and older—village of Wethersfield voted to annex to Kewanee during Andrews’s first term, adding 2,000 people and bringing the city to its population peak. First the farm depression, then the general economic collapse took their toll. Four banks failed. In 1928, in a rare collaboration—the Public Hospital was another—Andrews joined a group of corporate executives and small business owners to found the Peoples Bank, still in business today after 80 years.
Andrews continued in the general practice of law until his death, frequently representing the underdog and seldom, if ever, representing corporate interests, often filing suit against them. He welcomed young lawyers to his firm, usually one at a time. Several became prominent in the Republican party, advocates for corporations, and strong adversaries in the court room. His two sons were his law partners in the last twenty or so years of his life. When he died, one of his sons, James Campbell Andrews, was mayor.
Andrews ran unsuccessfully for Congress and
the Illinois senate while he was mayor. He enlisted other people to run usually
hopeless campaigns against entrenched Republicans, and he did so himself.
VICTORY AND DEFEAT
Municipal ownership was the issue that provided both a smashing victory and a stunning defeat.
A referendum in 1922, during Andrews’s first term as mayor, capped his campaign for a city electric light plant. The proposal passed, authorizing the city to issue bonds and build the facility. In the next city election, the following year, almost every nominee indicated that he would abide by the will of people on this issue.
Andrews was skeptical. “The great issue in
this campaign,” he said during the 1923 campaign for mayor, “is who shall sit
as members of the city council when this franchise expires and this
Consolidated Light & Power Company is compelled to negotiate for future
rights.”
“The battle is the battle of the people,”
he said, “and not merely of a few candidates who are contending for office.”
The outcome “will be important in the lives of your children who come after
you. The great cause of vice and the small crimes known as violations of city
ordinances [mainly involving the “dry laws”] is poverty. Poverty comes from the
excess charges of the big public utilities and other interests which keep a
stranglehold upon the necessities of life and take, from the slender pockets of
those who walk in and out of these factory gates, their wages. . . .
“We are opposing it and we will oppose it
even though they put to the foreground ministers of the gospel or any other
agents, however apparently pious or God fearing. Some people never rob a dinner
pail without asking a blessing and they believe that all the economic crimes in
the catalog are justified if committed in the name of the Lord.”
The Andrews ticket won a sweeping victory, claiming the three top vote totals for commissioner as well as the mayor’s office again. The fourth winner for commissioner was an independent. The entire anti-Andrews slate lost.
“The only reason I wanted to be mayor again was to complete the solution to the light and power problem in Kewanee,” he said after the election.
An impressive ceremony marked the inauguration of the new city council on April 30. It attracted a good-sized crowd, which greeted the mayor and councilmen with much applause, the Star-Courier reported. “The mayor made a stirring address.”
“This occasion is a happy one because it marks the climax of a controversy which we have had over some matters in the city of Kewanee.. . . While there was full debate and great discussion with some animosity and heat, there was not a dispute upon election day. There was not a heated argument nor a threat of violence. . . . The expression of the will of the majority becomes the law and we are bound by it and we go on to attend to our respective affairs, feeling that the community has settled the issues involved, for the time being. . . .”
“In the four years that have passed,” he continued, “it must be said of the council retiring tonight, that in the performance of all of its duties, no one has charged that there has been a single dollar of graft, nor that a vote has been cast from an improper motive. . . .
“We are not unmindful of the fact that the popular will is fickle and fitful and while we are elected to office today by a majority of the people, four years from now we may not represent the popular will. ‘Seven cities claimed the Homer dead, through which the living Homer begged for bread.’ They stoned the prophets and then built monuments over them. Those who followed the Savior by the sea, spat upon him at the cross. So with the favor of the people. Those who are on the high tide of popularity today may not be the favored on the morrow. We are charged with executing the people’s will. We must do the best we can.”
Six months later B. F. Lyons, a previously unknown executive of a private water, gas, and electric company in Beloit, Wisconsin, visited Kewanee to explore the purchase of the Kewanee power company and its failing streetcar and interurban business. In January 1924 he and a group of investors offered also to buy the soon-to-be built city power plant. They sought extension of the company’s franchise, which was scheduled to expire in the fall.
Proponents of what became known as the Lyons plan organized the Greater Kewanee League and petitions bearing the names of more than 4,000 residents were presented to the city council asking for a special election.
Andrews and his followers, organized as the Home Rule League, fought the purchase plan. Construction of the new municipal plant went forward, with a ground-breaking ceremony in the spring and completion that summer.
The contest was a landmark. It was described in his obituary more than 30 years later:
“There followed the most intensive house-to-house campaign in Kewanee history. Meetings of both groups were held almost nightly and as a result a record vote of 8,021 turned out” in June—thirteen months after the mayor’s sweeping electoral victory.
Seventy-two percent of voters supported the buyout—5,800 people. The vote to reject the plan was 2,117. That was the end of city ownership of the electric plant. The private company took over all electricity, gas, and streetcar and interurban rail business in Kewanee.
At the end of this drama Andrews may have uttered one of his favorite expressions: “It would have been money in my pocket if I’d never been born.” (Think about that!)
He was not unfamiliar with defeat, as he
acknowledged. When he lost, he was also known to say that he felt like Lazarus,
“licked by the dogs.”
The loss in 1924 hardly ended his political
career. He was reelected mayor two more times. In his last term President
Franklin Roosevelt appointed him to a panel of three men who selected Illinois
projects for the PWA, the Public Works Administration, the construction program
of the Great Depression. Governor Henry Horner appointed Andrews, after he left
the mayor’s office, to set up and direct the state’s Old Age Assistance
program.
Andrews continued his work and advocacy in
behalf of the shorn lamb. He did his best, and fought many a good fight, and, I
suspect, took some comfort in knowing that he did not himself have to temper
the wind—much as he would have liked to.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Among the individuals and institutions
providing assistance in the research for this paper were Larry Lock, president
of the Kewanee Historical Society, and head of its museum, in which I found the
Kewanee Daily Call and many other
resources; the reference staff of the Kewanee Public Library; the interlibrary
loan and newspaper desk staffs at the Chicago Public Library; the newspaper
archive at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield; and members
of my family, especially Jean M. Andrews and Virginia Andrews Dibeler, who
shared stories, memories, and mementoes with me.
SELECTED SOURCES
“James H. Andrews, ’95.” Knox Alumnus. March-April 1932. p. 87.
Lock, Larry, “History of Kewanee.” Kewanee,
Ill.: Kewanee Historical Society. www.Kewaneehistory.com/localhistory8.html.
Kewanee
Daily Call. 1913-1914.
Kewanee
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Copyright 2009 James H. Andrews