Frank O. Lowden was born in Minnesota in 1861, and was educated in Iowa. In 1886 he moved to Chicago to study law. After he received his bar diploma, he practiced law in Chicago with signal success: His first dash into politics was a failure; he was defeated for the gubernatorial nomination in the Illinois State convention. Two years later he was elected to the House of Representatives and there he stayed.

Governor in 1917

In 1916, twelve years after his first unsuccessful effort, he tried again and was elected governor. His two terms as State executive, which began in 1917, were marked by a systematic reorganization of the State government. The changes which he introduced included the establishment of the budget system, the reorganization of 108 overlapping bureaus into nine permanent departments, the planning of public works on a State-wide basis and similar reforms.

All these reforms save money for the taxpayers of Illinois. And all of them--since the business of reforming State governments had made such little headway be 1917 that any reform was notable and Lowden's reforms were sensational--brought Lowden fame. It is not strange that the Republican party, then preparing to break the eight years hold of the Democrats in Washington, should have begun to talk of Lowden. Nor it it strange that Lowden's own friends in Illinois should have thought the times auspicious. On November 7, 1919, an enthusiastic convention of Republican editors of Illinois meeting in the State capital demanded Lowden as a candidate for President. They let the East have a Vice President. "Lowden and Coolidge," read the ticket.

Nor did it look, for a time, as if the ticket were far wrong. From November, 1919, to May, 1920. Lowden's candidacy gained ground at an impressive pace. Delegates were lined up. Alliances were formed. The campaign had money, organization, and the bright prospect of success to drive it on. By the middle of May Lowden had the promise of more than two hundred delegates on the third ballot, with only Leonard Wood apparently capable of giving him a battle.

Then the unexpected happened. News came out that some of the Lowden managers had been overgenerous and somewhat undiscriminating in their use of money. The Kenyon committee of the Senate brought out the fact that more than $400,000 had been raised by the Lowden managers and that the sum of $32,202, in particular, had been injudiciously spent in Missouri for the apparent purpose of influencing delegates.

Claims 300 Delegates

Lowden led the field on some of the early ballots in the Republican convention, but thereafter faded rapidly, as the risks of carrying the onus of the Lowden campaign budget became increasingly self-evident. Beyond reproach on the score of private honor. Lowden saw the nomination lost because the honor of his candidacy was in dispute.

Lowden, however, did not do in 1920 what he had done in 1904; pick up the pieces and begin again. After 1904 he had shifted his objective and aimed his efforts at another office. In 1920 he stood pat. Harding offered him a chance to continue in active politics, inviting him to accept the post of Secretary of the Navy. Lowden refused. He knew nothing about the work that had been offered him and was frank enough to say so.

Lowden chose, in preference to directing the affairs of the Navy, to retire to his farm. It was a bona fide farm. He had not bought it in the first swift decline of farm prosperity with a shrewd eye to the political advantages which might accrue from being identified with a lively issue. He had bought his farm twenty-one years before this time--in 1899 and some years before his interest had ever turned to politics. Gradually the farm had grown until in 1920 it comprised more than a thousand acres. The job of reorganizing it and making it pay had the same sort of interest for Lowden that he found in reorganizing first a varied lot of industries as a lawyer, and then the government of Illinois.

To this job Lowden has given most of his time and energy since the 1920 convention upset the plan and dashed the hopes of his too industrious managers. An attempt to lure him away from his farm and persuade him to run on the ticket as Vice President, with Coolidge, fell flat in 1924 Lowden insisting. "I can be of more service to the country through the activities in which I am now engaged than I could be as Vice President."

Whether this remark carried, as early as 1924, the meaning that Lowden intended to be of "Service to the country" by championing the farmers grievances in 1928 may or may not be true. But what is unquestionably true is that Lowden has devoted a good deal of time to a practical and personal study of farm problems and to the improvement of the farm organizations of which he is the active head. He has arrived, now at a point where he is so convinced that the cards are stacked against the farmer that he has put himself on record as favoring the "equalization fee" in the dread McNary-Haugen bill.

That is the third unexpected turn in the career of Frank O. Lowden--the turn that has made a man of immense wealth and strong business ties the captain of a farm revolt and a herectic in Wall Street.

What will happen next, and whether the road will take another unexpected turn, no two political experts quite agree. Lowden's candidacy has been approved by important Republican organizations in Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota. In addition to this, the managers of the various Lowden-for-President clubs claim that their candidate will have the delegates of Missouri, Colorado, Indiana, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Wisconsin. This would give him a bloc of about three hundred delegates in the convention. The estimate is optimistic but not impossible. For, as Mark Sullivan has pointed out, the present disposition of Lowden's rivals is not to oppose him in the States which his friends regard as his farm constituency, partly because they think Lowden will win these States any-way and partly "because the Republican leaders do not want to give further occasion for seeming unsympathetic to the Corn Belt."

On the other hand, it is necessary to remember that three hundred votes is substantially short of a majority in a convention which will seat more than a thousand delegates. And it is also necessary to remember that Lowden is one of a large number of gentlemen in IIIinois who have a standing quarrel with Big Bill Thompson, and that this fact may deprive him of a solid delegation from his own State