Sardius Mason Brewster

Last updated

Sardius Mason Brewster (born Irving Township, Brown County, Kansas, June 19, 1870; died Topeka, Kansas, March 5, 1936) was an American lawyer and politician. He was the Attorney General of Kansas from 1915 to 1919 and the chief prosecutor of Ronald Finney and others in the Kansas Bond Scandal of 1933–4.

Contents

Early life

Brewster's father Arthur Seeley Brewster (1841-1905) was a lawyer raised in Ohio who came to White Cloud, Kansas in 1869 and started a practice there; he served six years as the county attorney of Doniphan County. Brewster's mother was Annie Harriet Byard (1841-1922). Sardius Brewster was the second of four children; his older brother Arthur Wadsworth Brewster (1865-1919), was a lawyer and Republican politician in St. Joseph, Missouri, serving in the Missouri state senate 1895-1899 and running for Congress in 1898. Sardius' younger siblings were Annie Byard Brewster Morgan (1873-1946) and Reginald Raymond Brewster (1876-1946), a lawyer and politician in Kansas City, Missouri who was the Republican candidate for U. S. Senate in 1922, losing to Democratic incumbent James A. Reed. Sardius Brewster attended Highland College in Highland, Kansas and was admitted to the Doniphan County bar in 1897. [1]

Career

Brewster served five terms as Doniphan County attorney, from 1898 to 1908. In 1908 and 1910 he was elected state senator from Doniphan and Brown counties. From 1911 to 1915 he served as assistant attorney general of Kansas. In 1915 he won election as Kansas attorney general and served two two-year terms. After this he returned to private practice. He soon joined a firm in Topeka which became "Wheeler, Brewster, Hunt & Goodell", which exists today as Goodell Stratton Edmonds & Palmer. [2]

In 1930 he was appointed United States District Attorney for Kansas and served in that post until 1933. On August 7, 1933, Brewster informed Kansas governor Alf Landon that federal investigators suspected that forged copies had been made of bonds held in the Kansas state treasury, but that Kansas treasurer Tom Boyd was not allowing federal agents to inspect the bonds in the state vault. [3]

Landon ordered the treasurer to allow the federal agents to investigate, and this led to the Great Kansas Bond Scandal of 1933–4. After Brewster's term as district attorney was over, Landon recruited him to lead the successful prosecution of Ronald Finney, his father, and others for forging copies of over a million dollars in bonds. The Finney family were prominent Kansas bankers and close friends of Landon and of his backer, newspaperman William Allen White.

Family

Sardius married Caroline May Brown (1871-1918) on February 1, 1899. They had six children, of whom four lived to adulthood - Caroline Veda Brewster Fleeker (1900-1970), Arthur Seeley Brewster (1901-1974), Madge Adele Brewster Morgan (1903-1987), and Annie Brewster Dolman (1906-2010).

Description

Brewster was described as "unkempt", but capable of reciting extensive chunks of Shakespeare verbatim and of reading the Greek and Latin authors in their original languages. He had a record of being an aggressive prosecutor; a reporter said, "Eating breakfast with a grizzly bear is a joy as compared to being on the opposite side of a rough and tumble lawsuit with Brewster." [4]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Doniphan County, Kansas</span> County in Kansas, United States

Doniphan County is the most northeastern county in the U.S. state of Kansas. Its county seat is Troy, and its most populous city is Wathena. As of the 2020 census, the county population was 7,510. The county was named after Alexander Doniphan, a Mexican–American War hero. It is bounded on the east by the Missouri river, south by Atchison county, and west by Brown county.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur M. Hyde</span> American politician

Arthur Mastick Hyde was an American Republican politician, who served as the 35th governor of Missouri from 1921 to 1925, and as the United States secretary of agriculture for President Herbert Hoover from 1929 to 1933.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander William Doniphan</span> American attorney, soldier and politician (1808–1887)

Alexander William Doniphan was a 19th-century American attorney, soldier and politician from Missouri who is best known today as the man who prevented the summary execution of Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, at the close of the 1838 Mormon War in that state. He also achieved renown as a leader of American troops during the Mexican–American War, as the author of a legal code that still forms the basis of New Mexico's Bill of Rights, and as a successful defense attorney in the Missouri towns of Liberty, Richmond and Independence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur Capper</span> American politician (1865–1951)

Arthur Capper was an American politician from Kansas. He was the 20th governor of Kansas from 1915 to 1919 and a United States senator from 1919 to 1949. He also owned a radio station, and was the publisher of a newspaper, the Topeka Daily Capital.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henry Carroll Timmonds</span> American politician (1853–1913)

Henry Carroll Timmonds was an American judge and state legislator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert E. Davis (judge)</span> American judge

Robert E. Davis was the Chief Justice of the Kansas Supreme Court from 2009 to 2010. He was first appointed in 1993 and became chief justice on January 12, 2009.

Marla J. Luckert is the chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court appointed by Governor Bill Graves on November 20, 2002, and sworn on January 13, 2003.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fred S. Jackson</span> American politician

Fred Schuyler Jackson was an American lawyer and politician who served one term as a U.S. Representative from Kansas from 1911 to 1913.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James F. Fulbright</span> American politician

James Franklin Fulbright was a U.S. Representative from Missouri.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Walter A. Huxman</span> American judge

Walter Augustus Huxman was an American attorney, politician, and jurist who served as the 27th governor of Kansas and a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">St. Joseph Swing Bridge</span>

<span class="mw-page-title-main">K-7 (Kansas highway)</span> Highway in Kansas

K-7 is a 240.606-mile-long (387.218 km) state highway in the U.S. state of Kansas. It is mostly a small country highway winding its way through the Osage Questas and Glaciated Regions of eastern Kansas, although a portion of the highway passes through the Kansas City metropolitan area. Significant portions of the highway overlap with U.S. Route 169 (US-169) and US-73. It also has junctions with two Interstate highways, Interstate 35 (I-35) in Olathe and I-70 in Bonner Springs. The portion of K-7 between Leavenworth and the Nebraska state line has been designated the "Glacial Hills Scenic Byway."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dale E. Saffels</span> American judge

Dale Emerson Saffels was an American lawyer, legislator, and United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Kansas.

Hugo T. Wedell was a justice of the Kansas Supreme Court from July 3, 1935, to January 10, 1955.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Shaw Dawson</span> American judge (1869–1960)

John Shaw Dawson was a Scottish-born Kansas attorney who served as Kansas Attorney General, and as a justice of the Kansas Supreme Court from January 11, 1915, to January 11, 1937, and chief justice from January 11, 1937, to January 8, 1945.

Ronald Tucker Finney was a convicted forger at the center of one of the biggest political scandals in Kansas history, known as the Kansas Bond Scandal, involving over $1 million in forged municipal bonds.

David E. Bruns is a Judge of the Kansas Court of Appeals.

Mary Virginia Mitchell Kellogg was an American lawyer. She was Kansas' first female lawyer and the first woman to serve as an assistant attorney general.

References

  1. ↑ https://www.kshs.org/archives/216328 "Sardius Mason Brewster", Kansas Historical Society
  2. ↑ https://www.gseplaw.com/history History page, Goodell Stratton Edmonds & Palmer
  3. ↑ The Great Kansas Bond Scandal, Robert Smith Bader, University of Kansas Press, 1982, p. 17, 19
  4. ↑ The Great Kansas Bond Scandal, p. 196
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.