Samuel Harrison Elrod was the fifth Governor of South Dakota. Elrod, a Republican from Clark, South Dakota, served from 1905 to 1907.

Joseph Buell Ely was an American lawyer and Democratic politician from Massachusetts. As a conservative Democrat, Ely was active in party politics from the late 1910s, helping to build, in conjunction with David I. Walsh, the Democratic coalition that would gain an enduring political ascendancy in the state.

From 1931 to 1935, he served as the 52nd Governor. He was opposed to the federal expansion of the New Deal, and was a prominent intra-party voice in opposition to the policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1944 he made a brief unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Berkley Warren Bedell is a former U.S. Representative from Iowa. After starting a successful business in his youth, Berkley Fly Co., he ran for the United States Congress in 1972, but was defeated by incumbent Wiley Mayne. In 1974, however, Bedell beat Wiley Mayne and was elected to Congress.

He was known for his support of representative democracy and his populist style. For example, he would hold town halls and let constituents vote on motions to decide what he would do in Congress on their behalf. These meetings helped Bedell understand the problems of his constituents; as a result, he backed issues that were important to his farming constituency, such as waterway usage fees and production constraints.

Robert Christopher “Chris” Bell  is an American politician, attorney, and former journalist. He is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and South Texas College of Law. Bell served five years on the Houston City Council from 1997 to 2001, followed by one term in the United States House of Representatives from Texas’ 25th Congressional District in Houston from 2003 to 2005. He was then the Democratic nominee in the 2006 election for the office of Governor of Texas, losing to Republican incumbent Gov. Rick Perry by 406,450 votes (Perry 39% versus Bell 30%) in a fractured general election campaign that also drew in two significant independent challengers.

Bell, a member of the Democratic Party, is currently an attorney specializing in many forms of litigation, including commercial disputes, copyright infringement, and securities disputes. Prior to practicing law, Bell had been a prominent radio journalist in Texas. In 2015 he ran for the non-partisan position of mayor of Houston, and finished 5th during the general election.

William Moore “Bill” Benidickson, PC was a Canadian politician. He was the Liberal-Labour Member of Parliament for Kenora-Rainy River for over twenty years.

Born in Manitoba of Icelandic stock, Benidickson served in World War II as a Wing-Commander in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Following the war, he was elected to the Canadian House of Commons in the 1945 federal election. Due to the politics of Kenora-Rainy River which had a history electing Independent Labour politicians and where the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation posed a serious threat, the Liberals worked with the Communist Party of Canada to run Liberal-Labour candidates in federal and provincial elections. Accordingly, Benidickson ran and was elected as a “Liberal-Labour” MP for most of his parliamentary career though he always sat with the Liberal caucus and was considered a Liberal for all intents and purposes.

Benidickson served as parliamentary assistant to the minister of finance Douglas Abbott before serving in the same capacity to the minister of transport through the 1950s. In 1963, Benidickson joined the cabinet of Lester Pearson as Minister of Mines and Technical Surveys. Pearson appointed him to the Canadian Senate in 1965 where he sat as a straight Liberal until his death in 1985. Benidickson’s wife, Agnes was a member of Winnipeg’s prominent Richardson family and later served as chancellor of Queen’s University.

Joseph Clay Stiles Blackburn was a member of the State house of representatives from 1871 to 1875. He was then elected as a Democrat to the Forty-fourth and to the four succeeding Congresses (March 4, 1875 – March 3, 1885). He was the chairman of the Committee on the District of Columbia (Forty-fifth Congress) and the Committee on Expenditures in the Department of War (Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth Congresses).

In 1885, Lt. Henry T. Allen of the U.S. army named a mountain after Joseph Blackburn. Mount Blackburn is the highest peak in the Wrangell Mountains of the state of Alaska and the fifth highest peak in the United States.

Blackburn was elected to the United States Senate in 1884, was reelected in 1890, and served from March 4, 1885, to March 3, 1897. He failed to be reelected in 1896. He was the chairman of the Committee on Rules (Fifty-third Congress).

Blackburn was once again elected to the United States Senate in 1900 and served from March 4, 1901 to March 3, 1907, but failed in his next election bid in 1906. Loosely associated with the free-silver wing of the Democratic party, he was well-known nationally and his name was placed in nomination for the presidency in 1896.

Blackburn was appointed Governor of the Panama Canal Zone by President Theodore Roosevelt on April 1, 1907. He resigned in November 1909 and returned to his estate in Woodford County.

He died in Washington, D.C. and was interred in the State Cemetery in Frankfort.

Leslie Egerton Blackwell was a Canadian politician, soldier, lawyer, and land developer.

During the 1937 Ontario general election Blackwell was a candidate in Toronto’s Eglinton electoral district where he came in second on election night. He ran again in Eglinton, and was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario in the 1943 election that brought George Drew’s Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario to power with a minority government. Blackwell was immediately put into Drew’s cabinet as Attorney General.

After Drew’s departure from provincial politics, Blackwell was a candidate to replace him in the 1949 Conservative leadership election, placing second to Leslie Frost. He did not join Frost’s cabinet and served his remaining time as a backbencher in the legislature, and did not run in the 1951 election.

Rich Bolling was a prominent Democratic Congressman from Kansas City, Missouri, and Missouri’s 5th congressional district from 1949 to 1983.

Bolling was elected as a Democrat to the Eighty-first Congress in 1948 and to the sixteen succeeding Congresses, serving from January 3, 1949 until January 3, 1983. In Congress, he served as chairman of the Select Committee on Committees of the House (in the Ninety-third Congress), Joint Economic Committee (in the Ninety-fifth Congress); and the Committee on Rules (in the Ninety-sixth and Ninety-seventh Congresses). He introduced the discharge petition that released the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from the Senate’s committees chaired by southern democrats, a vital step to passing the act. He was twice a candidate for House Majority leader, losing to Carl Albert in 1961 and to Jim Wright (by three votes) in 1977.

Due to heart disease, in 1981 he announced his retirement and was not a candidate for reelection in 1982 to the Ninety-eighth Congress. He remained a resident of Washington, D.C., until his death there on April 21, 1991.

Charles Grosvenor Bond was a Republican United States Representative from the state of New York who served in the 67th United States Congress.

Elected as a Republican, Bond served one term as U. S. Representative from New York’s eighth district in the Sixty-seventh United States Congress from March 3, 1921 to March 3, 1923.

Defeated in 1922, Bond resumed the practice of law and made an unsuccessful bid for the borough presidency of Brooklyn in 1926. He was the attorney for writer O. Henry, and was a delegate to Republican National Convention from New York, 1936. He served as chairman of the Alcohol Beverage Control Board of New York City from 1934 to 1970 when he retired at 93 years of age.

Roger Douglas Branigin was the 42nd governor of Indiana, serving from January 11, 1965, to January 13, 1969. A World War II veteran and well-known public speaker, Branigin took office with a Democratic general assembly, the first time since the Great Depression that Democrats controlled both the executive and legislative branches of the Indiana state government.

Branigin was a conservative Democrat who oversaw repeal of the state’s personal property taxes on household goods, increased access to higher education, and began construction of Indiana’s deep-water port at Burns Harbor on Lake Michigan. During his one term as governor, Branigin exercised his veto power one hundred times, a record number for a single term.

Branigin was the last Democrat to serve as governor of Indiana until Evan Bayh took office in 1989. In 1968 Branigin received national attention when he ran as a stand-in for Lyndon B. Johnson in Indiana’s Democratic presidential primary. Johnson dropped out of the race on March 31, 1968, but Branigin continued to run as a favorite son candidate against Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. Branigin hoped his efforts would gain a stronger role for Indiana at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Branigin finished second in the primary to Kennedy. A

fter his term as governor ended, Branigin returned to Lafayette, where he resumed a private law practice and remained active in civic life, serving as president of the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce and the Harrison Trails Council of the Boy Scouts of America. Branigin also served as a trustee for Franklin College, Purdue University, and the Indiana Historical Society.