Seven years before winning a Minnesota congressional seat, attorney Thomas Schall was arguing a personal injury case in Fargo in 1907. During a lunch recess, he popped into a cigar shop and attempted to light his stogie with a newfangled electric lighter.
He had unknowingly plugged the 110-volt device into 220-volt outlet. The ensuing electrical shock left him blind.
But the sight-stealing mishap was merely one of myriad hardships Schall overcame on his way to Congress. First a Progressive and later a Republican, Schall won five terms in the U.S. House from 1915 to 1925 before unseating U.S. Sen. Magnus Johnson — a popular member of the Farmer-Labor party and the chamber's only Swedish-born member ever.
"This blind senator from Minnesota deserves not to be forgotten by those who today share his passions," retired Prof. G. Daniel Harden of Washburn University in Kansas wrote on the Front Porch Republic political science blog. "He believed in freedom for the individual and increasingly saw it endangered by the forces of concentrated power, whether by huge corporations, international banking cabals, or statist politicians."
Born in Reed City, Mich., in 1878, Schall came from a broken family. His father abandoned his wife of 20 years and their three kids in the early 1880s, opting for a warmer climate in Missouri. Schall's suddenly single mother moved the family to tiny Campbell, Minn., near the border with North and South Dakota in 1884. Thomas was 6 and wouldn't start his schooling until he reached 12.
He quickly developed his academic and oratory chops and also was known as a tough boxer and baseball player. He enrolled at Hamline College in St. Paul and started his own laundry service to pay for tuition and books.
After two years at Hamline, he transferred to the University of Minnesota, finishing his degree in 1902, picking up a law degree at the St. Paul College of Law (now Mitchell Hamline School of Law) a few years later. Three years into his successful law career, the lighter accident in Fargo rendered him blind.
Within a year, he and his wife, Margaret, had burned through the money he made in his years working as an attorney. But he neither complained nor considered himself disabled.