OLLI: "Uncle" Joe Cannon

Presenter: Tim Smith, Retired Attorney of Law
     
The Cannons were Quaker immigrants from New Garden, North Carolina, who arrived in Annapolis, Indiana in late 1842. Joseph John Gurney Cannon, their youngest son, was born in 1836 and spent 13 years in Annapolis,  his boyhood home. Today historians know him as "Uncle Joe" Cannon, the most powerful Speaker of the United States¹ House of Representatives (1903-1911).

Throughout his life and career, J. G. Cannon, kept Parke County close to his heart. When he died in Danville, Illinois, in 1926, his obituary in the New York Times noted, "His greatest regret was Šhis inability to speak at a school house near Annapolis, IN, where he made his first public speech as a schoolboy." When he retired after 46 years in the House another newspaper noted in 1923: "to friend and foe alike, he was always the embodiment of courage, of directness, of integrity." These are extraordinary eulogies for a man who served in Congress during its most corrupt period, the Gilded Age, and was proud of the fact he learned the value of a dollar working in a store in Annapolis.

Cannon was a remarkable product of west-central Indiana, and a man who learned lessons in Parke County that served him well during his extraordinary political career. He is a man worth revisiting.