Remembering Phil Crane's dependable conservative voice

Phil Crane, a stalwart conservative who represented northwest Chicago in Congress for 35 years, died Saturday from cancer. He was 84.

Crane, who had a Ph.D. in history, was teaching history and serving as headmaster of a Christian school in Northbrook, Ill., when he decided to run for Congress in a special election in 1969.

He won, and in the House, he made a name for himself as an advocate for low taxes and free markets. Despite being in the minority party, in 1974 Crane argued for and won passage of legislation that once again permitted the private ownership of gold in the United States.

Crane ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980. “Positions that I have held consistently have suddenly become good politics,” he said on the campaign trail, citing his ideas on inflation, military strength, and tax cuts.

The Republican nomination went to Crane’s fellow conservative, Ronald Reagan, and Crane refocused his efforts on arguing for conservative causes in the Democratic-led House.

In 1991, Crane told me he planned to go through one more election cycle, and if the GOP didn’t win a majority of seats, he probably would retire. His party did not win, but Crane decided to hang on. He was there to see the Republicans finally become the majority party in the House following the 1994 elections. By that time, younger conservative leaders such as Newt Gingrich had eclipsed him.

Gingrich credited Crane with pioneering the way for “constitutional conservatism.” Crane went on to serve another decade before being defeated in the 2004 election. In his final speech on the floor of the House—10 years ago this month—he stayed on message.

“The history of liberty is a history of limitation of governmental power, never the increase of it,” he said. “When we resist concentration of governmental power, we are resisting the powers of death. For the destruction of human liberty has ever been preceded by concentration of governmental power.”

Listen to Joseph Slife’s obituary of Phil Crane on The World and Everything in It: