William Boyd Allison (March 2, 1829 – August 4, 1908) was an American politician. An early leader of the Iowa Republican Party, he represented northeastern Iowa in the United States House of Representatives before representing his state in the United States Senate. By the 1890s, Allison had become one of the "big four" key Republicans who largely controlled the Senate, along with Orville H. Platt of Connecticut, John Coit Spooner of Wisconsin and Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island.

Born in Perry, Ohio, Allison established a legal practice in Dubuque, Iowa and became a prominent member of the nascent Iowa Republican Party. He was a delegate to the 1860 Republican National Convention and won election to the House of Representatives in 1862. He served four terms in the House and won election to the Senate in 1872. He became chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, serving for all but two years between 1881 and 1908. Four different Republican presidents asked Allison to join their Cabinet, but Allison declined each offer. A significant number of delegates supported his presidential nomination at the 1888 and 1896 Republican National Conventions.

Allison emerged as a centrist and pragmatic leader in the Senate, and he helped pass several important bills. The Bland–Allison Act of 1878 restored bimetallism, but in a less inflationary manner than had been sought by Congressman Richard P. Bland. A prominent advocate of higher tariffs, Allison played a major role in the passage of the McKinley Tariff and the Dingley Act. He also helped pass the Hepburn Act by offering the Allison amendment, which granted courts the power to review the Interstate Commerce Commission's railroad rate-setting. Allison sought a record seventh term in 1908, but died shortly after winning the Republican primary against progressive leader Albert B. Cummins.

Early life and career

Born in Perry, Ohio, Allison was educated at Wooster Academy. Afterward, he spent a year at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, then graduated from Western Reserve College (then located in Hudson, Ohio) in 1849. He then studied law and began practicing in Ashland, Ohio. While practicing law there from 1852 until 1857, he was a delegate to the 1855 Ohio Republican Convention and an unsuccessful candidate for district attorney in 1856.

Although serving in the 1856 Know Nothing national convention, Allison left the party and joined the Republicans. which nominated Abraham Lincoln for President of the United States.

During the subsequent Civil War, he was on the staff of Iowa Governor Samuel J. Kirkwood, who ordered him to help the state raise regiments for the war. He personally helped raise four regiments. He was given the rank of lieutenant colonel during the war, although it was unlikely he actually served in uniform.

In 1862, in the midst of the war, Allison was elected to the United States House of Representatives as the representative of Iowa's newly created 3rd congressional district. As a congressman and member of the House Ways and Means Committee,

In the House, Allison sided with the powerful Radical Republican wing of the party which frequently opposed President Lincoln's policies as being too moderate, he was a member of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, in addition to emerging as a leading expert on protective tariffs and railroads.

The Radical Republicans were not unified on ideological issues aside from their advocacy of harsher Reconstruction policies to ensure and safeguard the constitutional rights of blacks. Indeed, Allison broke from the factions' more staunchly conservative members in maintaining a moderate stance on tariff policy. on which he was accused of conflicts of interests.

Post-war political career

thumb|left|200px|Portrait of Senator Allison which hangs in the [[United States Capitol|U.S. Capitol.]]

Following the war, Allison continued to serve in the House after winning re-election in 1866 and 1868. In January 1870, he was an unsuccessful candidate for election by the Iowa General Assembly to the United States Senate seat for 1871–1877, losing to Iowa Supreme Court Justice George G. Wright. Allison declined to be a candidate for renomination to his own House seat later that year, but instead focused on laying the groundwork to run for Iowa's other Senate seat (then held by James Harlan), which was up in January 1872, following November 1871 state legislative races. In the 1871 state legislative races, candidates were nominated and elected on the direct issue of whether they would vote for Harlan, Allison or James F. Wilson for senator. Enough legislators who favored Allison were nominated and elected in 1871 that in January 1872 he won the required number of votes to take Harlan's U.S. Senate seat, effective March 4, 1873.

Allison was reelected to six-year terms in the U.S. Senate six times – in 1878, 1884, 1890, 1896, and 1902. His U.S. Senate tenure was marked by his influence on regulation, railroad, and tariff policy. the conservative wing of the GOP which opposed civil service reform in the late 1870s out of concern for the plight of Southern blacks in addition to supporting Grant during the 1880 United States presidential election.

He chaired the 1884–1886 Allison Commission, a bipartisan joint congressional committee "among the first to explore the question of whether federal intervention politicizes scientific research." It considered the charge that parts of the government were engaged in research for theoretical, not practical, purposes. The majority report favored the status quo, and Congress upheld it. then by President Benjamin Harrison. In 1897, President William McKinley offered him the position of U.S. Secretary of State.

It was deemed just as well; no Republican senator was so well fitted for the duties of responsible statesmanship, or positioned so well. For thirty years he sat on the Senate Finance Committee and took a critical role in framing legislation. In 1881, he became chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and continued to serve there until his death in 1908. After 1897, he was chosen as chairman of the Republican caucus, an unofficial position, but one generally accorded to the most venerable and respected party member in the Senate.

Eminently conservative, trusted by the railroad interests, Allison's pragmatism made him the centrist that everybody could deal with, including Democratic colleagues. When in 1888 a Republican alternative was needed to the Mills tariff bill coming out of the House, Allison handled the details. The bill that emerged from committee was purely for campaign purposes. Nobody thought that it could pass, but it put the best face on protectionist principles and later served as a model for the 1890 McKinley Tariff, which Allison played a large part in framing. In 1897, when the Dingley Tariff bill reached the Senate, Allison did most of the work reconciling discontented interests. When the Bland bill, allowing the free coinage of silver, came to the Senate, Allison altered it. The resulting Bland–Allison Act of 1878 simply had the government buy a certain, more limited amount of silver, which the Treasury was permitted to put into circulation as silver dollars. It was far less inflationary than Bland's original bill. The Act passed over the veto of President Rutherford B. Hayes. It remained unchanged until the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890. In 1892, Allison chaired the Brussels Monetary Conference and in 1900 was one of the fathers of the Gold Standard Act.

In 1896, he became a dark-horse candidate for the presidency. However, support for his candidacy faded when it became clear that McKinley would be nominated on the first ballot.

"Allison is the man of experience," an admiring reporter wrote in 1906, "the sage old pilot of the Senate. They say that no man who has ever been in the Senate knew so much about it as he does. He is the political forecaster, the compromiser, the weather prophet, the man who brings irreconcilable things together. It is said that the oldest inhabitant cannot recall having heard Allison give utterance to an opinion on any subject whatever. Doubtless he does give utterance to them, but never except in the inner councils of the Caesars. Sagacious to the point of craft, it does not annoy him to know that the epithet most frequently applied to him is 'the Old Fox.'...When he rises in his place in the Senate, he disdains to talk as if he were making a speech; he leaves all that to the youngsters, whose sum of knowledge does not equal all that he has forgotten. He never rises except to shed light on some knotty point, and when he does it is always as briefly as possible, and in a conversational voice that is almost an undertone. Then he drops back into his seat and, with sublime indifference, lets the talk go on."

Allison was married twice, first to Anna Carter, who died in 1859, four years after the marriage. His second marriage was to Mary Neally, who died in 1883, ten years after their marriage.

1908 Senate race

In 1908, as Allison neared his 44th year in Congress, and his 80th birthday, he sought a record seventh term in the Senate. However, Iowa's Republican Governor at the time, Albert B. Cummins, had aspired to become a U.S. Senator for several years, and as leader of Republican progressives had targeted his party's "old guard" for retirement or (if necessary) defeat. After seeming to promise that he would not challenge Allison in 1908, Cummins ran against Allison for the Republican nomination in the state's first-ever congressional primary on June 2, 1908. Much like Allison's 1873 race for the Senate against incumbent Harlan, As a reflection of the nature of its preference for Allison over Cummins, the Ames Times reported the primary results under a two-level banner headline simply stating "GLORY TO GOD!"

Death and legacy

thumb|200px|right|Sen. William Boyd Allison Monument, Des Moines, Iowa, 1916

Allison did not live to see the 1908 general election or a seventh term. Two months after his primary win, he died in Dubuque. Many were surprised by his death, but news reports soon indicated that he had been under constant medical care for more than two years and that those familiar with his condition had expected his death.