page_title: William J. Fields
section_title: Later life and death
hierarchical_section_title: William J. Fields / Later life and death
context_page_description: William Jason Fields was an American politician from the U.S. state of Kentucky. Known as "Honest Bill from Olive Hill", he represented Kentucky's Ninth District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1911 to 1923, resigning to become the state's 41st governor.
  Discouraged by an early defeat for a seat in the state legislature, Fields took a job at a grocery store in Ashland, Kentucky that allowed him to travel the state and meet many people in his congressional district. In 1911, he became the first Democrat elected to Congress from the Ninth District in two decades. Elected to seven consecutive terms, he rose to become the ranking member of the House Committee on Military Affairs during World War I. When Democratic gubernatorial nominee J. Campbell Cantrill died unexpectedly two months before the general election, the Democratic Central Committee chose Fields to replace Cantrill as the nominee. In a campaign that featured more name-calling than substantial debate, Fields secured the backing of the powerful Jockey Club political alliance and won a landslide victory over Republican Attorney General Charles I. Dawson.
context_section_description: Following his service as governor, Fields returned to Olive Hill and was admitted to the bar in 1927. Sensing an opportunity for a political comeback in 1930, Fields launched a bid to regain his former seat in the U.S. House, which was now occupied by Republican Elva R. Kendall. Kendall had beaten Fields's successor, Fred M. Vinson in the 1928 Hoover landslide, which saw nine out of eleven (all but the two ancestrally Democratic western Kentucky) U.S. House seats go to the Republicans.
  Vinson instead chose not to stand aside for his former ally and decisively beat Fields in the August Democratic primary by a margin of 63% to 21% (with a third candidate, W.C. Hamilton taking the remaining 16%). Vinson successfully reclaimed his seat in the general election from Kendall.
  In 1932, Fields was elected Commonwealth's Attorney for Kentucky's thirty-seventh judicial district; he served until 1935. In 1934, Fields again challenged Congressman Vinson in the Democratic primary in the renumbered 8th district, but he lost again by a decisive margin of 68% to 32%. In 1936, Governor A. B. "Happy" Chandler appointed him to the State Workmen's Compensation Board. He served in this capacity until the election of Republican Simeon S. Willis.
  Fields retired from public service on August 8, 1944. From 1940 to 1945, he co-owned an insurance agency. He briefly moved to Florida before returning to Olive Hill, where he continued practicing law, and farming. He died in Grayson, Kentucky on October 21, 1954 and was buried in Olive Hill Cemetery in Olive Hill.
caption: Fred Vinson, Fields' one-time ally and successor in Congress and eventual opponent in 1930 and 1934. He would later become U.S. Treasury Secretary and Chief Justice of the United States.
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