Daniel Webster Turner - Biography

Biography

Daniel Webster Turner, named after the famed antebellum senator and orator, was born on a farm near Corning, Iowa. As a boy, he did farm chores and clerked at the general store owned by his father, a civil war veteran. Graduating from the Corning Academy in 1898, he enlisted in the Army and served in the Philippines during the Spanish American War. He boxed in the division championship fights and won, but suffered a broken nose that became a permanent facial feature. Returning from the war, he joined the National Guard and rose to the rank of major. In 1903, at age 26, he was elected to the Iowa Senate. His political activism and boxer’s nose led the press to dub him, “Fighting Dan Turner.”

As a representative of the progressive wing of the Republican Party during the era of “prairie populism,” when the Midwest was a font of radicalism, Turner advocated for many reforms. In a 1912 address to the Republican State Convention, he defended the anti-trust law and called for direct election of U. S. senators, income and corporate taxes as more equitable than property taxes, and an end to corrupt leadership, saying, “We must cleanse our party of complacent plutocrats and corpulent freebooters, masquerading as Republicans.” Elected to the Governorship in 1931, he attacked lobbyists in his inaugural address and demanded fair congressional districts, measures to promote child welfare, and establishing a state conservation commission:

“The professional lobbyist . . . should be ejected from the presence of honest men . . . . He is not interested in the well being of the people we represent.”

“Our streams are rapidly degenerating into open sewers, receiving the waste drainage of private industry and municipalities. We must terminate this practice.”

In a prelude to the Great Depression, the farming economy collapsed during the 1920s, with many related bank failures. Turner, as a "Son of the Wild Jackass" and one of four speakers at the Republican National Convention of 1928, urged the party to support farm relief. He traveled twice to Washington to unsuccessfully plead the same cause with President Hoover during the 1930s.