Representative Gilbert Nelson Haugen View All Years

GILBERT N. HAUGEN was born near Orfordville, Rock County, Wisconsin, April 21, 1859, and died in Northwood, Iowa, July 18, 1933. His parents were Nels and Carrie Haugen, natives of Norway. He spent his early years on his father’s farm and in attending public school. At fourteen years of age he began his own support, becoming a farm hand in Winneshiek County, Iowa. For a time he attended Breckenridge College at Decorah, and later the Academic and Commercial College, Janesville, Wisconsin. At the age of eighteen he purchased a farm of 160 acres in Worth County. Besides farming he engaged in the implement and furniture business at Kensett. In 1887 he was elected treasurer of Worth County and removed to Northwood and was twice re-elected, serving six years. In 1893 he was elected representative, was re-elected in 1895, and served in the Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth general assemblies, being chairman of Private Corporations Committee during the Twenty-sixth. In August, 1898, he received the Republican nomination for congressman from the Fourth District in a convention that required 366 ballots to nominate. At the beginning of the balloting the then Congressman Thomas Updegraff and James E. Blythe were the leading contestants, but neither was able to obtain a majority. He was elected in November and was regularly renominated by his party and re-elected each two years for sixteen more congresses, making seventeen in all, or thirty-four years of continuous membership, the longest in the history of the House, and after receiving the eighteenth party nomination was finally defeated at the polls in 1932 by Fred Biermann, his Democratic opponent. On entering Congress in 1899 Col. D. B. Henderson had just reached the speakership and Mr. Haugen was given membership on the Committee on Agriculture and Committee on War Claims. The membership on the Committee on Agriculture he retained throughout the seventeen congresses, and when the Republicans regained control in the House in 1919 he became chairman of that committee, only to relinquish it when the Democrats regained the majority in the House in 1931. Mr. Haugen was the joint author with Senator McNary of the famous McNary-Haugen bill, and was the author of more legislation relative to agriculture than any other one man in Congress during his time. He was highly regarded by the membership of the House regardless of party lines. When Mr. Haugen was in the office of county treasurer at Northwood he became interested in banking and for years was president of banks at Northwood and Kensett. He also added largely to his land properties both in northern Iowa and in Minnesota and the Dakotas.