Roger Sullivan

Roger C. Sullivan, Democratic boss of Cook County and Illinois during the early twentieth century, was born in Belvidere, Illinois 1861 and died in Chicago, Illinois in April 1920. He dominated the Illinois Democratic Party for two decades and was a national figure during the age when urban machine bosses reached the height of their power and prestige. Sullivan made several million dollars after he and his cohorts engineered approval by the Chicago City Council of an ordinance authorizing them to run their own gas company to compete with the city's already established utilities. Shortly after the turn of the century, Sullivan sold his interest in the Ogden Gas Company to People's Gas for a sum believed to exceed ten million dollars.

Sullivan was elected to the Democratic National Committee in 1906. He engaged in a long-running feud with William Jennings Bryan that vaulted him to national prominence during the first decade of the twentieth century. The feud stemmed largely from Bryan's belief that Sullivan's election to the national committee had been engineered through fraudulent means.

Sullivan played a critical role in delivering the 1912 Democratic nomination to Woodrow Wilson at the party's convention in Baltimore. He switched the votes of the Illinois delegation from Champ Clark of Missouri to Wilson on the 43rd ballot despite the fact that Clark won the state's primary by over one hundred thousand votes. It was said that Sullivan and Indiana boss Tom Taggart forged a deal with one of Wilson's aides in a Baltimore hotel room while all three men were clad in their pajamas; the deal allegedly involved putting Thomas Marshall on the ticket as vice president in exchange for the Indiana and Illinois delegations throwing their support to Wilson. When Clark lost, it was the first time a Democrat failed to obtain the party's nomination after securing a majority of the votes of the delegates in the convention since Martin Van Buren was denied the nomination in 1844.

Sullivan did not get much for his trouble--he was denied federal patronage by the administration and it did nothing to help him when he ran for the U.S. Senate in Illinois in 1914. Sullivan lost despite having the opposition split between Progressives and Republicans. He remained a national figure of some renown as Democratic boss of what was then the third most populous state until his death in April 1920. His supporters organized a Sullivan for vice-president movement at the 1916 Democratic convention in Denver, but there was no real chance of Wilson putting him on the ticket. Roger Sullivan High School in Chicago, Illinois is named after him.