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Note: Jouett Shouse was born in Woodford County, Kentucky, near the village of Midway on December 10, 1879. His father was a minister of the Christain (or Disciples) Church. In 1982 his father accepted a pastorate inMissouri and therefore the education of young Shouse was in that state, at the Mexicao High School, and later the University of Missouri.
His first newspaper waork was under Colonel R. M. White, publisher of the new Mexico Ledger, whose grandson, Robert M. White II, has recently been made President and editor of the New York Herald Tribune; and also under Dr, Walter Williams, who was later to become head of the College of Journalism at the University of Missouri and president of that institution.
At the time Shouse worked under Walter Williams the latter writing the Columbia, Missouri Herald, a very unusual country weekly gotten out at great cost primarily as an advertisement for the law book publishing house of E. W. Stephens. Shouse was in charge of the University of Missouri page in this publication and also contributed a considerable amount of spot news, relative to football, to papers in Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri and Chicago Illinois.
In March of 1898 Shouse returned to his old home in Lexington, Kentucky and became associated with the lexington Herald under the management of Desha Breckenridge. This association lasted for a number of years and resulted in a very close friendship between Shouse and Breckinridge. Shouse was successfully a reporter city editor, managing editor and business manager of the Herald. He was also secretary for some years of the Lexington Chamber of Commerce, was one of the organizers and secretary of the Fayette Home Telephone Company, and was editor of the Kentucky Farmer and Breeder, a weekly devoted to livestock. Shouse also was one of the organizers, and was for a number of years secretary of the Blue Grass Fare Association, which held probably the greatest horse show in the world in addition to a notable exhibit of other livestock.
In December of 1911 Shouse went from Lexington to Kinsley, Kansas, with the expectation of remaining in Kansas only a period of six to eight months. His mission there was to assist his fater-in-law, R. E. Edwards, in the adjustment of certain property matters. Almost immediately he became active in politics, and in 1912 was a candidate on the Democratic ticket for the Kansas State senate. This district embraced eighteen counties of Southwestern Kansas, a very large area. Shouse was elected over a long-term resident of that section, who was and had been for some years mayor of the largets town in that district.
Kansas is a predominantly Republican state, and it is rare that democrats are elected to any office there. Dus to the division of the republican party in the election of 1912, the democrats had a bare majority of the legislature. In the state senate for example, out of a membership of fifty, there were twenty-one democrats and nineteen republicans.
Shouse was active in the organization of the senate and was made chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means which, under Kansas law, originates and deals with appropriation bills. He acheived conciderable recognition in that activity and became candidate for congress in 1914. Although there were half a dozen candidates foe the democrtic nomination in the beginning, the race narrowed down to Shouse and Judge Hettinger of Hutchinson, the largest city in the old seventh district. That district embraces thirty-two counties. Shouse carried thirty, and did not make any campaign in Hettinger's home county, which the Judge carried. In the general election John S. Simmons of Hutchinson was the nominee against Shouse, and Shouse won by a margin of some eighteen hundred votes.
Mr. Shouse became a member of the Banking and Currency Committee and was active in the formation of the Federal Farm Loan Legislation. Also, he formed a very close friendship with carter Glass of Virginia, who was Chairman of the Banking Committee.
Shouse was reelected by the largest vote any congressional nominee had ever received in the then Seventh District. He was an ernest advocate of the various war measures and often expressed himself as being very proud of the fact that he was permitted to serve in the War Congress of the first world war under Woodrow Wilson.
He was one of the early and comparatively few advocates of the Selective Service Act, or Draft Act, when it was first suggested, and when that act had passed, despite the opposition of the entire Democratic leadership of the House, including the Speaker, Champ Clark, Shouse was personally thanked by the Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker, for his activity and his help.
In 1918 Shouse was defeated for reelection. He has always said that his defeat was due largely to the mistaken plea made by Presiden Wilson for a Democratic Congress. Before he left Washington, when this plan was first broached by Scott Ferris of Oklahoma, Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Committee, Shouse maintained emphatically that if the plan were carried out it would result in the defeat of Democrats throughout the country whose tenure held in normally Republican or close districts. President Wilson was himself definitely opposed to the idea when it was first brougbt to his attention. Later, however, the pressure on him became so great, particularly from some members of his cabinet in whose judgment he had much faith, that he assented to issue the fatal letter. The result, of course, is well known. A Republican Congress was elected and Shouse was not alone in his opinion that the result wus due In large measure to the President's mistaken plea.
In Shouse's district there was another factor. An influenza epidemic was rampant throughout Kansas, with the result that by gubernatorial edict all public meetings were prohibited, and thus no campaign was possible.
At approximately the time the winter session of the old Congress began, which under the procedure then in vogue was approximately the first of December, Secretary McAdoo had resigned from the Treasury Department and the President was endeavoring to induce Carter Glass to succeed as Secretary. Glass had been to Europe and Shouse sent him a cablegram urging that he accept the President's invitation. Glass replied that he would go into the Cabinet if Shouse would go with him as Assistant Secretary. To this Shouse demurred, but after some five or six weeks of constant pursuasion by Secretary Glass he consented to give up the business plans he had made to become a member of the "Kitchen Cabinet" of President Wilson.
His decision, he has always said, was based primarily upon the condition of the so-called War Risk Bureau. At the beginning of the World War this had been a small bureau of less than thirty people in the Treasury Department. Upon it had been placed by Congress the onerous burden of allotments and allowances of the troops brought into the Army, compensation of the wounded soldiers and the government insurance which was urged upon each man who became a member of the armed forces. As a result, this little bureau of the Treasury Deartment had expanded within a few months to a personnel of well over 25,000, scattered in some fifteen or twenty buildings over Washington. The resultant confusion was such that papers were constantly lost, and members of both Houses of Congress were complaining bitterly each day of the inadequacy of the bureau, which had become a terrific liability to the Wilson Administration.
It was primarily to adjust this bureau, and at the same time try to bring order out of chaos in the Bureau of Internal Revenue, that Shouse gave his final consent to go into the Treasury. The result of his efforts in connection with the War Risk Bureau may be judged by the fact that in the summer of 1920, John Jacob Rogers, a Republican Member of Congress from Massachusetts, made a speech on the floor of the House in which he said that from the worst managed beaureau in the federal Government, the Bureau of War Risk Insurance had become the best managed, and for this transformation he gave entire credit to Shouse. In any event, between February of 1919 and July of 1920, the personnel of the bureau had been brought down from 25,000 plus to approximately 7,500, it was housed in one building instead of twenty, and its actions were so immediate as to satisfy not merely the public, but a critical Congress.
In November of 1920 Shouse resigned from the Treasury and established law offices in Kansas City, Missouri and in Washington, DC. During the immediate succeeding years he did not lose his liking for politics nor his grip apon political conditions. He was generally regarded as the outstanding Democratic power in the State of Kansas. He was chairman of the Kansas delegation to the National Democratic Conventions of 1920 and 1924. In the Convention of 1924 he originally supported McAdoo, but later changed the Kansas delegation to John W. Davis and was an important factor in the latter's nomination. In 1928 he was for Al Smith for President and was able to direct the Kansas delegation to that course. Twice he had refused to become National Comnitteeman for his party, but, first in the person of Samuel B. Amadon, and second, in the person of his law partner Dudley Doolittle, he was named National Committeeman to serve for the State.
After the nomination of Al Smith in 1928, Shouse was prevailed upon by Judge Joseph M. Proskauer and other leaders of the Smith movement to come to the New York headquarters where he was a member of the Executive and Advisory Committees handling the Smith campaign. John J. Raskob, wholly unschooled in politics, had been named Chairman of the National Committee at the request of Al Smith. Raskob leaned heavily on Shouse, realizing that he himself had neither political experience nor political inclination. Shouse worked at the New York headquarters constantly until the eye of election, fully conscious that Smith could not be elected, but hoping to build up the largest possible vote.
In March of 1929 Shoiise was persuaded by Raskob to consent to go to Washington and to take charge of Democratic Headquarters, to be open continuously, for an active campaign prior to the 1932 election. He consented to do this on the understanding with Raskob that he would have no responsibility and nothing to do with the raising of money for the headquarters. Raskob assumed this chore, and in the spring of 1929 Shouse opened headquarters in Washington and became the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Democratic National Committee.
In the 1928 campaign, along with Smith's defeat, the Democratic Party lost an overwhelming number of members of both Houses of Congress. Shouse had often said that his most difficult time in the early days of his tenure at Democratic Headquarters in 1929 was with Democrats themselves. There was a feeling of pessimism in the party after its overwhelming Congressional as well as its Presidential defeat in 1928. Many Democrats felt that the party was dead, and that a new party would have to be organized if supremacy were again to be attained in the United States. Mrs. Emily Newell Blair, for example, former Vice Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, published a magazine article in which she declared that the party was extinct and that it could not be revived.
In these discouraging conditions, Shouse set about the resuscitation of the Democratic Party. He had frequently remarked that his greatest aid in that regard was President Hoover, who had come into office by so overwhelming a majority and, with him, a large majority of his party in both Houses of Congress. Hoover's ineptness was early demonstrated in his Agricultural Marketing Plan, and was reinforced by his permission to an overwhelming Republican Congress to amend the schedules of the existing tariff. This was wholly out of conformity with the promise that had been made to the American people in the 1928 campaign and to the message of Hoover to Congress at the opening of the session in 1929.
As the tariff bill wended its tortuous way, first through the House, and then through the Senate, Shouse was unceasing in his attacks upon it and upon its exorbitant schedules at the expense of the American people. Through his publicity division at Deniocratic Headquarters, he placed in the hands of Democratic members of the two Houses of Congress constant expressions of the various schedules, and when the bill finally became law in the summer of 1930, he hailed it as the issue of the congressional campaign of that year.
In the meantime (and Shouse maintained the tariff bill was a responsible factor in the situation) there occurred in the autumn of 1929 the beginning of a severe recession, which soon took the form of panic. Shouse spoke constantly over the radio and in every section of the country in advocacy of the election of a Democratic Congress and was successful in this regard by the greatest overturn In American political history. As a result, John Garner of Texas became the new Speaker of the House, and while Democratic control was scant, it was sufficient to control legislation.
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