Noah Morgan Mason

Noah Morgan Mason (July 19, 1882 – March 29, 1965) was an American politician who was a U.S. Representative from Illinois. A conservative Republican, he served 13 terms representing first the state's 12th congressional district and then, after a redrawing of boundaries, the 15th.

Career Born in Glamorganshire, Wales, the 12th of 13 children, Mason immigrated to the United States in 1888 with his parents, who settled in La Salle, Illinois; his father was a coal miner and then a farmer. He left school at 14 to help on the farm, but at his mother's urging Mason voted against the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, while he voted present on the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Mason was a conservative Republican who represented a rural district west of Chicago. Less flamboyant and less visible than his colleague Everett McKinley Dirksen, he ardently supported states' rights in order to minimize the federal role, for he feared federal regulation of business. He also favored higher tariffs to protect American business and workers, a position that was increasingly unsupported by the wider Republican Party. He distrusted Roosevelt, and made many speeches against high federal spending. He criticised New Dealers, such as Eveline Burns, Henry A. Wallace, Adolph A. Berle, Jr., and Paul Porter, as socialists. He was an isolationist who voted against the Lend-Lease program in 1941. He was a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee (1938–43), and in 1950 he championed Joe McCarthy's exposes. During the Eisenhower administration, while praising the Republican president, he opposed substantially all his initiatives, including statehood for Hawaii, and he supported Senator Pat McCarran in sharply restricting immigration to the US. He advocated a radical rewriting of the tax code.

He was not a candidate for renomination in 1962 for the Eighty-eighth Congress. He retired and lived in Plainfield, Illinois. He died in Joliet, Illinois, and was buried in Plainfield Cemetery in Plainfield.