Thomas D. Schall was twice a self-made man: first in rising from rural poverty to become a lawyer, second in recovering from an accidental blinding to serve twenty years in Congress.
Born in 1878 in a log cabin near Grand Rapids, Michigan, Schall spent his childhood in desperate poverty. His father died when Schall was a toddler, leaving the family with nothing. Eventually his mother took up a homestead near Wheaton, in Traverse County, and worked as a cook. Young Tom worked where he could to help his mother.
Schall started school in Wheaton at age twelve. At sixteen he entered high school in Ortonville, where he discovered oratory. In 1896 the president of Hamline University heard him speak and arranged a scholarship, allowing Schall to enter Hamline in 1898. He transferred to the University of Minnesota in 1900; he graduated from there in 1902 and from St. Paul College of Law in 1904.
Schall was trying a case in Fargo in 1907 when he used a newly installed electric device at a cigar stand to light a cigar. Connected to the wrong power source, it flashed in his face. Over the next three months he lost his eyesight completely. After a period of doubt he resumed his law practice, specializing in personal injury. With his wife, Margaret, doing his reading and writing, Schall prospered; juries liked his oratory.
In 1914 Schall ran for Congress from the Tenth Congressional District—Hennepin, Wright, Anoka, Pine, Kanabec, Pine, and Mille Lacs Counties—on the Progressive Party ticket. In a three-way race he won by just 1,403 votes. He became the first blind member of Congress. In 1916 he won again, this time easily.
In April 1917, as the country geared up for war with Germany, Schall made a dramatic speech in Congress and cast a key vote electing Democrat Champ Clark Speaker of the House, giving President Wilson a unified government for conducting the war. By 1918 the Progressive Party had ceased to exist, and Schall tried to enter the Republican Congressional primary. It took a ruling by the Minnesota Supreme Court to get him in. He won that primary by a huge margin and then the general election easily in 1918, again in 1920, and in 1922.
In 1924 he ran for the US Senate against Magnus Johnson, a Farmer-Labor politician who had come to the Senate by special election in 1923. Schall won by just 8,000 votes in another three-way and bitterly contested election. Johnson challenged Schall’s win in the Senate, claiming that Schall had violated Minnesota’s Corrupt Practices Act through unlawful spending, bribery, and the promising of favors. In June 1926 the Senate unanimously rejected Johnson’s complaint. In an angry speech afterward, Schall called Johnson “a marionette who kicked and waved his hands and opened his mouth according to the tension of the string.”
In 1927 Schall became one of the first Americans to use a recent German innovation, the guide dog, and forced the Senate to change its rules to accommodate him. He became an avid horseman. He also loved aviation and flew often.
Schall ran for re-election in 1930. In yet another three-way race against Farmer-Labor and Democratic opponents, he won by 11,000 votes with just 37 percent of the total. The Farmer-Labor candidate Einar Hoidale challenged Schall’s election again, on much the same grounds that Magnus Johnson had done, and lost, just as Johnson had done.
Schall was a progressive, Theodore-Roosevelt-style Republican. He supported child labor laws, federal regulation of big business, and federal protection of Minnesota’s Quetico-Superior wilderness area. But the New Deal seemed to unhinge the already volatile Schall. He repeatedly called Franklin Roosevelt a communist intent on dictatorship and blamed all modern wars on the Rothschild family of bankers.
In November 1935 Farmer-Labor Governor Floyd Olson announced that he would challenge Schall for the Senate seat, and a historic battle of two aggressive politicians loomed for 1936. But it was not to be. On December 19, 1935, on his way home from the office, Schall was killed by a hit-and-run driver. He was fifty-eight. Olson died of stomach cancer in June of 1936 at age 44. Both Olson and Schall are buried in Lakewood Cemetery, Minneapolis.