Maurice Connolly

Maurice Connolly (March 13, 1877 – May 28, 1921) was elected in 1912 to a single term as a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Iowa's 3rd congressional district. After giving up his House seat in an unsuccessful bid for election to the U.S. Senate in 1914, Connolly then served as an aviation officer in World War I and died in a plane crash in 1921.

He was born in Dubuque, Iowa on March 13, 1877, as the son of a successful carriage maker, Tom Connolly, and his wife Ellen Brown Connolly. Connolly attended the common schools. He was graduated from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in 1897, where he was a member of the Quill and Dagger society. In 1898, at age twenty-one, he graduated from the New York University School of Law, in New York City. He was admitted to the bar in 1899 and did postgraduate work at Balliol College, Oxford, England, and the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He returned to Dubuque when his father died suddenly in 1903, and assumed his ownership and management of the Connolly Carriage Company. Later, Connolly engaged in the insurance business and banking.

Connolly ran as a Democrat for Congress in 1912, against incumbent Republican Charles E. Pickett. Connolly's hometown of Dubuque was a Democratic-leaning city at the edge of Iowa's strongly-Republican 3rd congressional district, which in Connolly's lifetime had elected only Republicans. Indeed, in every election since 1890, Republicans captured either all or all but one of Iowa's eleven seats in the U.S. House, while holding each seat in the Senate. When Iowa Republicans were divided between Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party candidacy and Republican Party nominee William Howard Taft, Connolly tied himself closely to Democratic presidential candidate Woodrow Wilson. Along with incumbent Democrat Irvin S. Pepper in Iowa's 2nd congressional district and Democrat Sanford Kirkpatrick in Iowa's 6th congressional district, Connolly was elected in 1912 to the Sixty-third Congress.

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