William S. Kenyon (Iowa Politician) - U.S. Senator

U.S. Senator

Kenyon, relatively unknown in political circles, announced his candidacy for election to the U.S. Senate by the 1911 Iowa General Assembly. Considered "a conservative with progressive proclivities," he sought to wrest the seat away from fellow Republican Lafayette Young, who had been appointed by the governor upon the death of Jonathan P. Dolliver. On April 12, 1911, Kenyon was elected on the 67th ballot after a session-long stalemate, in which Young was his principal Republican adversary until the 23rd ballot. Kenyon was re-elected to the Senate in January 1913 (by legislative ballot) and November 1918 (by direct popular election, following ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution), defeating Democrat Charles Rollin Keyes, a noted geologist.

In the Senate, Kenyon was considered a leading progressive and co-sponsored the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act, and the Child Labor Act. In 1921, he formed the bipartisan "farm bloc" in the Senate, which led to the enactment of several farm-related bills, such as the Packers and Stockyards Act, regulation of grain futures and futures trading in grain, and the Fordney-McCumber Tariff. A supporter of prohibition, he co-authored the Webb-Kenyon Act, which was intended to bolster the ability of states to enforce their own prohibition laws (prior to the adoption of the Volstead Act).

On the eve of the United States' entry into World War I, Kenyon was one of a group of twelve senators who blocked President Woodrow Wilson's armed neutrality bill, which would have given Wilson the power to arm American vessels. However, after Wilson asked Congress to declare war one month later, Kenyon voted in favor of the declaration. Following the Armistice, when Wilson pressed the Senate to support the United States' membership in the League of Nations, Kenyon became a member of the moderate faction known as the "mild reservationists," who allowed for the possibility of membership so long as the treaty were amended to address a specified list of reservations held by those senators and pursued compromise solutions. However, when Wilson refused to compromise, Kenyon continued to oppose U.S. membership.

He served as chairman of the Committee on Expenditures in the Department of State in the Sixty-second Congress, chairman of the Committee on Expenditures in the War Department (also in the Sixty-second Congress), chairman of the Committee on Standards, Weights and Measures (in the Sixty-fifth Congress), chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor (in the Sixty-sixth Congress and Sixty-seventh Congress), and chairman of the Committee on the Philippines (in the Sixty-sixth Congress).