Senator William Perry Whipple View All Years

Mr. President: Your committee appointed to take recognition of the death of Senator Whipple, and to offer resolutions commemorative of his life, character and public service, respectfully submit the following:

William P. Whipple was born December 26, 1856, on a farm near the city of Vinton, Iowa, and grew to manhood thereon. He graduated from the high school in Vinton and immediately thereafter entered the State University, taking the full collegiate and law courses therein and receiving his law degree in 1878. Soon thereafter he entered upon the practice of his profession in his home city of Vinton, and continued in such vocation up to the time of his death. He early reached high rank in the profession and was a recognized leader of the bar in his district.

He was first elected to the Senate from the Benton-Tama district in 1901 and re-elected in 1906, serving in the Twenty-ninth, Thirtieth, Thirty-first, Thirty-second, Thirty-second Special and Thirty-third General Assemblies. At the very beginning of his legislative career he took high place and held it with increasing influence and power to the end of his service in the Senate.

From an appreciation written of the Senator soon after his death by an intimate personal friend, we quote, with approval, the following:

“One of the most vivid memories of my early University days is that of the face of a big-browed youth from Vinton, William P. Whipple. It was a face that at once and always challenged attention. You felt instantly that you were in a ‘presence’. You expected him, when he spoke, to know what he was going to say before he said it. He looked deliberation, maturity, mastery. He was great enough to have brought honor to himself, his state, or his country in any station, however exacting or exalted. But he was too gentle and retiring to engage in strife for place, and too modest to indulge in self-exploitation. The honors that actually came to him were not of his procurement but the sincere tribute of those who had gone near enough to him to see his great, good heart, and to get the true measure of his mind. * * * He would have made an attorney-general surpassed by none in the history of the state. There was enough of the executive in his endowments to have rendered him illustrious as the head of our commonwealth. His was, however, more markedly a judicial temper. His well stored mind, his mastery of the law as a science, his clearness of reasoning, his ability to recall precedent and apply principle, would soon have brought him fame as a member of our supreme court, and the name ‘Whipple’ attached to any opinion emanating from that tribunal would have given it added weight.

“Senator Whipple was the author of many important measures, though he competed with no member as to the number of bills he might introduce. He had little of the ‘beat ’em to it’ in his make up and never wrote any bill merely to get his name into the journal or into the public mouth. His most conspicuous services were rendered as a member of the committee to supervise the publication and distribution of the Code Supplement in 1902; as the chairman of the Committee to investigate the state educational institutions in 1904; and as the author of the bill under which they are now controlled and administered. But while these services and the bills—which he personally introduced—brought forth his name, they were not by any means a measure of his value to the state. The best work of every sincere legislator is done in the quiet of the committee room or as a member of some sub-committee in charge of some bill with which his name may never be associated—sometimes far from the public eye—where the heart is open to one’s colleagues, where views are frankly given and where each member gets the full benefit of every other’s experience, reasoning and opinion. Whipple was, when necessary, a power on the floor, but he was relatively stronger and more helpful still in the committee room where his keen analysis, broad grasp, large information, and splendid reasoning powers made him invaluable to his colleagues.”

Senator Whipple left surviving him his widow, formerly Jennie E. Keith, and adult son, Milo, and a little daughter, Virginia, to all of whom he was deeply devoted and to whom his untimely death was a heavy crushing blow.

We, his colleagues, who knew him so well and loved him so much, do therefore resolve that in his death there has been taken out of the life of the community one of its most exalted citizens; out of the life of the state one of its most conspicuously efficient public servants and out of Senate itself a legislator who gave the best that was in him to his colleagues without stint or hesitancy and with never a thought as to where credit would rest.

We, therefore, recommend that this memorial be printed in our Journal and that the Secretary of the Senate be instructed to forward an engrossed copy of the same to the family of our deceased friend.

ASA L. AMES,

SHIRLEY GILLILLAND,

JOHN L. WILSON,

The resolutions were adopted unanimously by a rising vote.