Richard Yates

Richard Yates Jr. (December 12, 1860 – April 11, 1936) was the 22nd governor of Illinois from 1901 to 1905—the first native-born governor of the state. From 1919 to 1933, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois.

Early life and career His father, also Richard Yates, was also an Illinois politician; indeed, the senior Yates was Illinois' popular Civil War governor, and the younger Yates spent a portion of his boyhood living in the Executive Mansion in Springfield, which would one day again be his home. The son was born in Jacksonville, Illinois on December 12, 1860. He attended public schools and, from 1870 to 1874, the Illinois Woman's College (now MacMurray College). He was the city editor of the Daily Courier in 1878 and 1879, and of the Daily Journal from 1881 to 1883. Yates graduated from Illinois College in Jacksonville in 1880 and from the law department of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1884. Yates served as a private in Company I, Fifth Infantry, Illinois National Guard from 1885 to 1890. He married Ellen Wadsworth in 1888. In the 1906–07 United States Senate election, Yates challenged incumbent Shelby Moore Cullom for the Republican nomination. Yates lost the primary and subsequently the Republican caucuses of both houses of the Illinois General Assembly renominated Cullom as the Republican candidate. Governor Edward Fitzsimmons Dunne appointed Yates to the Board of Public Utilities. In 1918, he served as an assistant attorney general in the Office of the Illinois Attorney General.

Congress He was elected to Congress in 1918. Although he failed to receive his party's nomination in 1928 to the Seventy-first Congress, he was later appointed nominee and elected in place of Henry R. Rathbone who died prior to the election. In 1932, he was unsuccessful in his bid for reelection to the Seventy-third Congress. His final act of service was to cast a vote in 1933 against the repeal of the 18th Amendment. After leaving Congress, Yates resided in Harbor Springs, Michigan, and Springfield, Illinois, while writing his memoirs. He died in Springfield on April 11, 1936, and was buried in Diamond Grove Cemetery, Jacksonville.