HENRY ALLEN COOPER
HENRY ALLEN COOPER, lawyer, representative in the lower house of the United States congress, is a native of Walworth county, Wisconsin, where he was born, in the village of Spring Prairie, September 8, 1850. He is the only son of a physician, Doctor Joel H. Cooper, a native of Vermont, and a graduate of Wesleyan university, Middletown, Connecticut, who soon after graduation removed to Wisconsin, and there began the practice of medicine. After attending the district schools young Cooper prepared for college at the Burlington, Wisconsin, high school, and entered Northwestern university, at Evanston, Illinois, from which he was graduated in 1873. Two years later, he received his bachelor's degree in law, from the Union college of law, Chicago, was admitted to the bar, and at once entered upon the active practice of his profession in that city. He remained here six years, when he took up his residence in Burhngton, Wisconsin, and formed a law partnership with Honorable Charles A. Brownson, a former judge of the county courts. He rose steadily in favor and prestige at the bar, and, in 1880 was elected district attorney of Racine county. He was twice reelected to that office without opposition, being nominated by the Republicans and indorsed by the Democrats. In the meantime he had removed to Racine, the county seat. In 1884, he was chosen delegate to the Republican national convention at Chicago, which nominated Honorable James G. Blaine for president. At the expiration of his term as district attorney, 1886, he was elected to the Wisconsin state senate, and served one term, during which he drafted the bill which became the law known as the "Cooper Law," establishing the Australian ballot system in Wisconsin. In 1893, the Republicans of the first congressional district of Wisconsin nominated and elected him to the fifty-third Congress, to which body he was reelected as a member of the fifty-fourth, fifty-fifth, fifty-sixth, fifty-seventh, fifty-eighth and fifty-ninth Congresses.
During the fifty-sixth, fifty-seventh and fifty-eighth Congresses Mr. Cooper was chairman of the important committee on Insular
