Biographical Sketch

Born in Buckfield, Maine, on October 27, 1838, John Davis Long was the son of Zadoc Long (1800-1873), a farmer and trader of prominence, and Julia Temple Davis Long, a descendant of Dolor Davis (1593-1673), who emigrated to Massachusetts from Kent, England, in 1634. After preparing at Hebron Academy in Maine, Long went on to Harvard, where, often homesick and uncomfortable, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated second in his class in 1857.

From 1857 to 1859, Long tried teaching and, for a time, served as principal of Westford Academy in Massachusetts, before shifting his focus to a legal career. From 1860 to 1861, he studied law at Harvard Law School and in the Boston offices of Sidney Bartlett (1799-1889) and Peleg W. Chandler (1816-1889). Following his admission to the bar in 1861, he returned to Maine to begin practice. Two years later, however, a more self-assured and ambitious John Davis Long made his way back to Boston.

Though maintaining an office in Boston, Long moved his residence to the South Shore community of Hingham, Mass., in 1869. In 1870, he married Mary Woodward Glover (1845-1882) and began to drift into politics. Associating mainly with civil service reform elements, Long supported Democratic and Liberal Republican candidates for office and himself ran as an independent for the state legislature before settling into the dominant regular Republican Party. Elected four times to the Massachusetts House of Representatives between 1874 and 1878, he became Speaker in 1876. He was considered a moderate figure who embraced the causes of temperance, prison reform, and women's suffrage. During this period, the Longs had two daughters: Margaret (1873-1957) and Helen (1875-1901).

In both 1877 and 1878, Long was a candidate for governor. He failed to capture the party nomination but accepted a consolation bid to run for lieutenant governor in 1878. After a single term in the lesser office, he was nominated for governor by the Republicans and defeated the colorful Democrat, Benjamin Franklin Butler (1818-1893), by 13,000 votes in a vituperative contest. He was re-elected by 52,000 votes in 1880 and won a third term in 1881.

In his journal, Long wrote that he "filled it [the governorship] well and honestly and not without grace and brilliancy." On the whole, his administration was thought to have been efficient but largely uneventful. He practiced retrenchment in the area of state finance and did his best to preserve Republican Party unity for his three years in office. He occasionally showed an awareness of corporate abuses and labor unrest but, in the manner of the times, took no strong, potentially divisive stands on these issues.

Mary Woodward Glover Long died in 1882. That same year, Long was elected to Congress from the Second District of Massachusetts and remained a member of the House until 1889. He served ably, but without real distinction, as a member of the Appropriations, Commerce, and Shipping Committees. During his stay in Congress, he became a close friend of future president William McKinley (1843-1901) of Ohio. Long married Agnes Peirce (1860-1934) in 1886, and the following year, their son Peirce Long (1887-1941) was born.

Seeking more national stature, Long ran unsuccessfully for the United States Senate in 1883 and 1887, but, in the 1880s and 1890s, found himself increasingly in the shadow of a younger, more forceful Massachusetts figure, Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924), who, after distinguishing himself as a Representative, maneuvered his way into the Senate in 1892.

After eight years out of the political limelight, President McKinley appointed Long Secretary of the Navy in 1897. Long's plan was to direct departmental affairs in a general fashion, leaving details in the hands of the entrenched bureau chiefs, and to restrain his overzealous Assistant Secretary, Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), whom he regarded as something of a "bull in a china shop." Despite occasional differences of opinion, the conservative, small-navy Secretary got on well with the impetuous, large-navy assistant and was sorry to see him go off to war in 1898.

After the Navy's successful performance in the Spanish-American War, Long was considered a leading candidate to become McKinley's vice-presidential running mate in 1900. However, at the GOP convention, Long confronted the ambitions of Lodge and Roosevelt. In the end, Lodge helped obtain the nomination for his New York friend over Bay State favorite son Long.

With McKinley's assassination in 1901 and Roosevelt's succession to the presidency, Long decided to leave the cabinet, because his powers had been derived from McKinley and he was uncomfortable under his former subordinate. After resigning in 1902, Long, an accomplished writer, fashioned a series of historical, partly autobiographical articles which were later published as The New American Navy.

The sociable, cultivated Long spent his last years primarily in Hingham. He served as president of the Harvard Board of Overseers from 1902 to 1914 and as vice president of the Massachusetts Historical Society from 1914 to 1915. He also wrote poetry, an avocation since boyhood, and lent his name to the causes of world peace and the abolition of capital punishment. He died on August 28, 1915.