William Squire Kenyon

William Squire Kenyon

William Squire Kenyon (born June 10, 1869 in Elyria , Lorain County , Ohio , † September 9, 1933 in Sagadahoc County , Maine ) was an American politician and lawyer. Between 1911 and 1922 he represented the state of Iowa in the US Senate .

Career

William Kenyon attended public schools in Iowa, where he had moved with his family in 1870. Then he graduated from the local Grinnell College. After a subsequent law degree at Iowa State University and his admission to the bar in 1891, he began to work in Fort Dodge (Iowa) in his new profession. Between 1892 and 1896 he was a district attorney in Webster County . He then took part in the Spanish-American War of 1898 . Between 1900 and 1902 he was a district judge in the eleventh judicial district of the state of Iowa. He then worked as a legal advisor for the Illinois Central Railroad Railway Company. In 1910 and 1911 he served as Assistant Attorney General for the Federal Ministry of Justice. Politically, he joined the Republican Party .

After the death of US Senator Jonathan P. Dolliver , Lafayette Young was appointed by the governor as his acting successor. The official nomination for this office was the Iowa General Assembly (IGA), which consists of the Senate from Iowa and the House of Representatives from Iowa . In 1911 there were a total of 67 ballots for new appointments to the senatorial office. In the end, Kenyon prevailed against Young. On April 12, 1911 he was able to take up his new mandate in Washington, DC . In 1913 he was re-elected in this office by the IGA. After that, the 17th Amendment to the United States Constitution came into effect, reforming the voting rights of US Senators and prescribing state-wide popular elections. In 1918, William Kenyon was re-elected to the new franchise. In the Senate, he supported several anti-trust laws. He was also a member of several committees. In the meantime, he headed the Foreign Ministry's expenditure control committee. He was also a member of the War Department Expenditure Control Committee, the Education Committee, the Philippines Committee, and the Weights and Measures Committee. He was also a proponent of prohibition . After the First World War , his Republican Party was in opposition to American membership of the League of Nations , which was founded at the suggestion of President Woodrow Wilson . Under certain conditions, Kenyon and a few other Republicans would have been willing to vote for the United States to join this community. However, their demands met with rejection from the president, so that he finally voted against accession.

After Kenyon was appointed federal appellate judge to the Eighth Court of Justice in 1922, he resigned as a Class 2 Senator on February 24, 1922 . In the years that followed he was associated with several political offices. In 1924, at the Republican National Convention, he received 172 first round votes for the nomination for vice presidential nomination. However, that was not enough. Eventually Charles Dawes was nominated. During the presidency of Calvin Coolidge , he turned down two appointments to his cabinet. Coolidge's successor Herbert Hoover appointed him to the so-called Wickersham Commission in 1929, which dealt with the causes of crime. At the same time, Kenyon retained his office as a federal judge. He died on September 9, 1933 in his summer residence at Sebasco Estates, Maine.

Web links

• William Squire Kenyon in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)

• William Squire Kenyon in the database of Find a Grave (English)