Adlai Stevenson I

Who was Adlai Stevenson I?

Adlai Ewing Stevenson I served as the 23rd Vice President of the United States. Previously, he served as a Congressman from Illinois in the late 1870s and early 1880s. After his subsequent appointment as Assistant Postmaster General of the United States during Grover Cleveland's first administration, he fired many Republican postal workers and replaced them with Southern Democrats. This earned him the enmity of the Republican-controlled Congress, but made him a favorite as Grover Cleveland's running mate in 1892, and he duly became 23rd Vice President of the United States.

In office, he supported the free-silver lobby against the gold-standard men like Cleveland, but was praised for ruling in a dignified, non-partisan manner.

In 1900, he ran for Vice President with William Jennings Bryan. Although unsuccessful, he was the first ex-Vice President ever to win re-nomination for that post with a different Presidential candidate. Stevenson was the grandfather of Adlai Stevenson II, a Governor of Illinois and the unsuccessful Democrat presidential candidate in both 1952 and 1956.

Famous Quotes:

• The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions.
• The human race has improved everything, but the human race.
• On this shrunken globe, men can no longer live as strangers.
• Change is inevitable. Change for the better is a full-time job.
• Peace is the one condition of survival in this nuclear age.
• A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth.
• Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.
• Every age needs men who will redeem the time by living with a vision of the things that are to be.
• What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is for the most part incommunicable.
• Golf is a fine relief from the tensions of office, but we are a little tired of holding the bag.