Friday

25-04-2025 Vol 19

Adlai E. Stevenson III, Ex-Senator and Scion of Formidable Political Household, Dies at 90

In 1955, he married Nancy Anderson. That they had 4 kids: Adlai Ewing 4th, Lucy, Katherine and Warwick. He’s survived by his spouse; sons Adlai and Warwick, daughters Lucy and Katherine and a minimum of 9 grandchildren, in addition to his brothers John and Borden.

Mr. Stevenson graduated from Harvard Legislation Faculty in 1957, and after serving as a regulation clerk for an Illinois Supreme Court docket justice in 1958, joined and later turned a associate in a prestigious Chicago regulation agency, Mayer, Brown & Platt.

His political profession started in 1964. Elected to a seat within the Illinois Home of Representatives, he sponsored 84 payments in two years, together with measures to regulate lobbying and conflicts of curiosity in authorities, a graduated state earnings tax and credit score reforms. The Impartial Voters of Illinois named him the home’s “greatest legislator.”

From 1967 to 1970, he was the elected Illinois state treasurer. In what may need been a routine publish, he eradicated workers patronage, withdrew state funds from banks that practiced racial or spiritual discrimination, and put cash in black-owned banks to finance small enterprise, low-income housing and concrete growth.

After quitting lively politics in 1986, Mr. Stevenson resumed practising regulation, however within the Nineties he turned president and chairman of SC&M Funding Administration and later a co-founder of HuaMei Capital, each specializing in monetary transactions between America and East Asia.

“The Stevensons: A Biography of an American Household,” by Jean H. Baker, appeared in 1996.

In 2008, Mr. Stevenson printed “The Black E-book,” a historical past, begun as a scrapbook, of 5 generations of his household. In addition to the three Adlais, it coated his great-great grandfather, Jesse Fell, a patron of Abraham Lincoln, and his grandfather, Lewis Stevenson, the Illinois secretary of state, who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic vice presidential nomination in 1928.

Mr. Stevenson, who lived in Chicago, mentioned in a 2017 interview for this obituary that his household political dynasty was virtually definitely completed. His son, Adlai 4th, is a businessman and former media reporter in Chicago. A grandson, Adlai fifth, born in 1994, is “a pc whiz,” his grandfather mentioned.

“Neither one has proven a lot curiosity in politics,” he added.

Jesus Jiménez contributed reporting.

Avatar photo

Brian Kraut