Senator Thomas David Schall

Thomas David Schall (June 4, 1878 – December 22, 1935) was an American lawyer and politician. He served in both the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate from Minnesota. He was initially elected and then reelected as a Progressive but later joined the Republican Party. Schall was born in Reed City, Michigan, and moved with his family to Campbell, Minnesota, in 1884. He initially attended Hamline University, but graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1902, followed by William Mitchell College of Law (then the St. Paul College of Law) in 1904. Three years later, he was blinded by an electrical shock from a cigar lighter. Schall was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1914, representing Minnesota’s 10th congressional district. He was reelected four times thereafter, serving from March 4, 1915, to March 3, 1925. As he was legally blind, he was granted, by House vote, a full-time page to assist him with his work.

After losing the Republican primary for a special election to the U.S. Senate in 1923, Schall was elected to the Senate in 1924, defeating incumbent Senator Magnus Johnson with 46% of the vote. He served from March 4, 1925, until his death in 1935. Johnson would challenge Schall’s electoral victory in 1924, leading Schall to infamously label him “a marionette who kicked and waved his hands and opened his mouth according to the tension of the string.” He had a tough reelection campaign in 1930, facing strong candidates from both the Democratic and Farmer-Labor parties, and eventually won with 37% of the vote with the support of the NAACP owing to his support of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. Long noted as a vitriolic and personal campaigner, Schall would emerge as a leading opponent of the New Deal, going so far as to compare Franklin D. Roosevelt to Satan and claim his reform program was communistic in nature. Going further, Schall would accuse Eleanor Roosevelt of corruption and liken President Roosevelt to Mussolini and Hitler, while at the same time accusing him of plotting “the destruction of all private industry.” Schall was struck by a hit and run driver while walking across the Washington-Baltimore Boulevard, now known as Bladensburg Road, in Cottage City, Maryland, on December 19, 1935. He died in Washington three days later, becoming one of the few members of Congress to die in a road crash while in office. He is buried in Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis.