Professional and Political Career
The younger Hunn, known as "Honest John", grew up at Magnolia and Port Royal, South Carolina, where his father was working with the Freedmen's Bureau. In 1876 he returned to Delaware, permanently settled at Camden, Delaware and began operating a merchandized fruit, lumber, and lime business in nearby Wyoming. He maintained this business throughout his life.
At the turn of the twentieth century Delaware was going through a political transformation. Most obvious to the public was the unprecedented division in the Republican Party caused, in part, by the ambitions of J. Edward "Gas" Addicks for a seat in the U.S. Senate. A gas company industrialist, he spent vast amounts of his own fortune to build a Republican Party, primarily for that purpose. Largely successful in heavily Democratic Kent County and Sussex County, he financed the organization of a faction that came to be known as the "Union Republicans." Meanwhile he was making bitter enemies of the New Castle County "Regular Republicans," who considered him nothing more than a carpetbagger from Philadelphia.
Behind the headlines, however, all the effort was making obvious the archaic and corrupt practices that characterized elections and the resultant state government. This caused a consensus to develop that major reform was needed in all areas of state government, but especially in voting procedures, apportionment, and the assignment of various responsibilities to the governor, legislature, and judiciary. The result of the all this was the Constitution of 1897 and the return of two-party politics to Delaware. It also created a state-wide, moderately progressive, Republican Party, which become a state-wide majority, particularly after the 1905 end of the highly personal Addicks controversy.
Read more about this topic: John Hunn (governor)
Famous quotes containing the words political career, professional, political and/or career:
“He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“I sometimes wonder whether, in the still, sleepless hours of the night, the consciences of ... professional gossips do not stalk them. I myself believe in a final reckoning, when we shall be held accountable for our misdeeds. Do they? If so, they have cause to worry over many scoops that brought them a day’s dubious laurels and perhaps destroyed someone’s peace forever.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)
“If any doubt has arisen as to me, my country [Virginia] will have my political creed in the form of a “Declaration &c.” which I was lately directed to draw. This will give decisive proof that my own sentiment concurred with the vote they instructed us to give.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating “Low Average Ability,” reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English Language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)