William D. Kelley - Character and Family

Character and Family

Thin, "a tall lath of a man with a bloodshotten eye and a voice like an eloquent graveyard," as one reporter put it, Kelley ranked as one of the hardest workers in Congress. He was known for his generous and honorable character, according to biographer Dr. L. P. Brockett, who said "he would scorn to do an act of injustice to a political opponent as much as to his dearest personal friend." An assiduous scholar, he indulged in no social pleasures, spending his spare time studying political economy. He was generous with what money he had, but frugal in his own wants, and even enemies saw him as a warm-hearted, impulsive man. To his credit, obituaries noted that he left political life as poro as when he entered it in 1890, that he had never made money from office and never tried to. He opposed the franking privilege and insisted on paying the postage on letters he sent, and refused the free railroad passes so common in his day.

An inveterate smoker, he died from complications arising from mouth and throat cancer, from which he had suffered for some six years.

His daughter Florence Kelley was an influential social reformer, associated with Hull House.

A granddaughter, Martha Mott Kelley, wrote murder mysteries under the pseudonym Patrick Quentin.