Biographical Sketch

Joseph Buell Ely, son of Sarah Naomi Buell Ely and Henry Wilson Ely, Esq., was born 22 February 1881 in Westfield, Massachusetts. He attended Westfield Normal School and received his A.B. degree in 1902 from Williams College. He earned his law degree from Harvard University in 1905, after which he began practicing with his father in Westfield. Joseph married Harriet Zelda Dyson, a Westfield native and graduate of Westfield Normal School and Mt. Holyoke College, on 1 May 1906. They had one son, Richard.

In 1915 Governor David I. Walsh appointed J. B. Ely district attorney of the Western District of Massachusetts, a post to which he was elected the following year.

Ely was the 48th governor of Massachusetts, serving from 1931-1935. First elected in 1930, he ran as a "wet" candidate in favor of the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Massachusetts Baby Volstead Act; stronger state control of power and light; a state Department of Commerce to benefit Massachusetts industries; a revision of the Massachusetts tax system; and home rule for Boston and other cities of the state. He defeated Republican incumbent Frank G. Allen to become the first Democrat to serve in the state's highest office since World War I.

Ely won a second term by defeating William Sterling Youngman, Republican candidate for governor, in the Massachusetts general election of 1932. However, in 1934 he declined to be a candidate for re-election to a third term in order to be free to express his opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

J. B. Ely was active in the Democratic Party at the national level. He was an elected delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1924 and 1928. He nominated former governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith, for president at the convention of 1932, but supported Franklin D. Roosevelt in the general election after Roosevelt was chosen over Smith by the party.

The Democrats chose Roosevelt to run for a second term in 1936, but Ely publicly supported Republican Alfred Landon for president because he thought Roosevelt had abandoned the Democratic platform of 1932, the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act were unconstitutional, and the New Deal was to accomplish the principles of communism, socialism, and fascism.

In 1940, Ely resigned from the Democratic National Convention, surrendering his credentials, after he had backed James A. Farley for the party's presidential nomination. He was against any president serving more than two terms. He remained an outspoken opponent to Roosevelt throughout his third term.

Ely sought the Democratic nomination for president in 1944 in an attempt to divide the party and defeat Roosevelt in his bid for a fourth term. After failing to win the nomination and block Roosevelt, Ely supported the Republican candidate, Thomas Dewey, for president.

In 1944, Ely wrote The American Dream. He based the book on his speeches and addresses which illustrated the development of his convictions and his view, as a Jeffersonian Democrat, of the fundamentals of American democracy.

Williams College, in 1931, and Holy Cross and Wesleyan Colleges, in 1934, acknowledged Ely's achievements with honorary degrees.

Ely died 13 June 1956.